Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman’s international bestseller Emotional Intelligence changed our concept of “being smart,” proving that emotional intelligence—how we handle ourselves and our relationships—matters more than IQ or technical skill in educational success. His next bestseller, Working with Emotional Intelligence, proved that career success also depends primarily on emotional intelligence.

Now, Goleman teams with Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee, experts on emotional intelligence research, to explore the consequences of emotional intelligence for leaders and organizations. The authors argue that a leader’s emotions are contagious, and must resonate energy and enthusiasm if an organization is to thrive.

Through analyses and examples, the authors show that resonant leaders excel not just through industry savvy but by leveraging emotional intelligence competencies like empathy and self-awareness. They also adopt varying leadership styles—from visionary to coaching to commanding—as the situation demands.

Identifying the ways in which resonant leadership can be learned, the authors show how leaders can groom personal and organizational emotional intelligence to ignite outstanding performance. This audiobook transforms the art of leadership into the science of results.


Business leaders who maintain that emotions are best kept out of the work environment do so at their organization's peril. Bestselling author Daniel Goleman's theories on emotional intelligence (EI) have radically altered common understanding of what "being smart" entails, and in Primal Leadership, he and his coauthors present the case for cultivating emotionally intelligent leaders. Since the actions of the leader apparently account for up to 70 percent of employees' perception of the climate of their organization, Goleman and his team emphasize the importance of developing what they term "resonant leadership." Focusing on the four domains of emotional intelligence--self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management--they explore what contributes to and detracts from resonant leadership, and how the development of these four EI competencies spawns different leadership styles. The best leaders maintain a style repertoire, switching easily between "visionary," "coaching," "affiliative," and "democratic," and making rare use of less effective "pace-setting" and "commanding" styles. The authors' discussion of these methods is informed by research on the workplace climates engendered by the leadership styles of more than 3,870 executives. Indeed, the experiences of leaders in a wide range of work environments lend real-life examples to much of the advice Goleman et al. offer, from developing the motivation to change and creating an improvement plan based on learning rather than performance outcomes, to experimenting with new behaviors and nurturing supportive relationships that encourage change and growth. The book's final section takes the personal process of developing resonant leadership and applies it to the entire organizational culture. --S. Ketchum