Latest book from Weatherhead Professor Richard Boyatzis is guide
for attaining and sustaining effective leadership
Resonant Leadership encourages leaders to work
towards mindfulness, hope and compassion in relations
with others
December 1, 2005
| For more information: Jeff Bendix 216-368-6070
Anyone who has worked under a good leader knows how satisfying the experience
can be. Effective leaders can make even the most demanding jobs enjoyable,
and inspire those under them to do their best work. Conversely a bad leader
can quickly drain the enthusiasm of a team or organization, drive morale into
the ground, and make everyone around them miserable. But what are the specific
qualities that separate the good or effective leaders from the ineffective.
And are good leaders simply born with leadership skills, or can they be learned?
Richard Boyatzis, professor of organizational behavior in Case’s Weatherhead
School of Management, has spent much of his career studying leadership and
coaching leaders. In his latest book, Resonant Leadership, Boyatzis and co-author
Annie McKee delve into the attributes of effective leadership, and explore
why these attributes are difficult to maintain over time.
Boyatzis will be discussing Resonant Leadership in a breakfast lecture on
Monday, December 5 at 7:30 a.m. in the Weatherhead School’s George S.
Dively Building. Registration information is available at http://weatherhead.case.edu/wsomCalendar/eventDetail.cfm?coID=8663&month=12&year=2005&date=5
According to Boyatzis and McKee, good leaders attain resonance with those
around them. They accomplish this by using the skills of emotional intelligence – self-awareness,
self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. However, the
unrelenting demands of leadership all too often leave even the best leaders
physically and emotionally drained—what the authors term the “sacrifice
syndrome.” When that happens resonance turns into dissonance, in which
the leader shuts down emotionally and loses touch with others in the organization,
not to mention clients or customers. In fact, it occurs so often that for most
leaders dissonance is the “default” mode, their most frequent state
of mind.
The good news, say the authors, is that leaders can maintain resonance by
engaging in an active process of renewal. That process consists of three key
elements: Mindfulness, or living in a state of full awareness of one’s
self and other people; hope, or the belief in an attainable future; and compassion,
the understanding of people’s needs and desires and the motivation to
act on our feelings. The interaction among these qualities sparks positive
emotions and enables leaders to maintain resonant relationships even in times
of great stress.
The idea for Resonant Leadership grew out of the authors’ 2002 best-selling
book Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence. That
book, co-authored with Daniel Goleman, emphasized the key but often-overlooked
role emotional intelligence plays in effective leadership.
“As soon as Primal Leadership came out we started getting calls and
e-mails from readers,” Boyatzis recalls. “They were overwhelmingly
positive, saying the book had given them hope they could improve their leadership
skills. Then would come the ‘but,’ which was, ‘I don’t
know what to do next’.”
Harvard Business School press, the book’s publisher, urged Boyatzis
and McKee, co-chair of the Telos Leadership Institute in Philadelphia, to write
a follow-up book. They resisted at first, but reconsidered after more than
a year of continued requests from Primal Leadership readers for more information. “It
dawned on Annie and me from our own experiences in leading organizations that
leadership is a sacrifice, and unbelievably stressful and exhausting. And the
only way it can be done well over a long time is to have these periodic moments
of renewal. Those ideas formed the basis for Resonant Leadership.
“The logic of Resonant Leadership can be summed up in four statements,” he
added. “First, great leaders are those who move us through forming resonant
relationships with the people around them. Second, people who establish resonant
relationships do it through the experiences of mindfulness, hope and compassion.
“Third, leadership is stressful, with all the negative effects of stress
of diminishing learning ability and lowering your immune system, and threatening
the effectiveness of everyone around you. Fourth, the way leaders renew themselves
through the same three things that enable them to form resonant relationships,
namely, the experiences of mindfulness, hope and compassion.”
Each chapter in the book ends with a series of mental exercises readers can
undertake to make use of the ideas in the chapter. For example, the chapter
on “Hope” asks the reader to imagine his or her ideal life in 15
years, to list things they would like to do before dieing, and what they would
do if they were to suddenly receive a large inheritance. Common themes among
the answers are a clue to what is really important in the reader’s life.
While Resonant Leadership has only been out since late October, it has already
garnered good reviews and positive responses from readers. “We’ve
had a number of people telling us this is a more moving book than Primal Leadership,” Boyatzis
says. “I had the chairman of a major nonprofit organization tell me he
thought it was a much higher impact book because it spoke more to the heart.” The
book has already been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Chinese,
Italian, Russian and Norwegian.
Asked whether dissonance is more common today than in the past, Boyatzis
said, “I think the concern about dissonance is on the rise, but it’s
hard to say that dissonance itself is because I can’t conceive of managers
being any more dissonant than they were 30 or 40 years ago. But I do think
that the pressures to pull managers into dissonance are increasing. That’s
fed by a number of issues. One is time compression. Everyone’s moving
faster than before. Another is multitasking. Look at the number of people who’ll
go to a personal event, like a dinner, and are checking their e-mail or their
phone messages. There’s also the feeling that the world is unsafe, with
so many acts of random terrorism. You add all that together and you can’t
help but be pulled toward dissonant experiences.”
Boyatzis hopes that after finishing the book readers will see that “to
be effective with other people, you need to intentionally work towards resonant
relationships. That means working towards having mindfulness, hope and compassion
as part of those relationships. If you do that, you’ll find emotionally
and physiologically a degree of self-renewal that will lead you to greater
effectiveness and satisfaction.”
About Case Western Reserve University
Case is among the nation's leading research institutions. Founded in 1826
and shaped by the unique merger of the Case Institute of Technology and Western
Reserve University, Case is distinguished by its strengths in education, research,
service, and experiential learning. Located in Cleveland, Case offers nationally
recognized programs in the Arts and Sciences, Dental Medicine, Engineering,
Law, Management, Medicine, Nursing, and Social Work. http://www.case.edu.
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