"Primal Leadership" attempts to gain the readers focus by illustrating a new leadership model, a leadership model centered on emotional perception where increased trust is transferred to the leader through iterative improvement. Elements to the model are ideal self, realistic self, planning agenda, and behavior modification. The authors authors original emotional competencies remain: Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, and Relationship Management with these competencies helped us measure the quality of leader, but does not necessary describe how to improve a leader. "Primal Leadership" goes to the next step by providing an leadership model designed to strengthen an leader by empowering for greater impact through greater levels of trust. The organization improves as the result of leadership improvement.

The leader looks first at the ideal condition. "Describe what you want to be doing in fifteen years". The ideal condition describes the future and drops the barriers of reject and fear. The interesting observation is that 80 percent of the ideal has nothing to do with work. The ideal condition feeds into planned agenda. The planned agenda conceptualizes a course of action to achieve the ideal.
The ideal self plans for and builds the future of the company. Without an vision new product lines and service centers would not likely be created. The ideal self has the potential to energize the company.

The realistic self narrows the focus to the leaders strengths. Diversity is the enemy with increased product and service not leading to increased profits. Diversity is often viewed as method to improve profit, but more often a long term drain on the company. The key is to narrow the range of products and services to those where the strongest core competencies exist. The realistic self helps center the leader back to the areas where clients are willing to pay the most money. The realistic self keeps the company from engaging in activities that lose money.

Faith, hard work, and practice facilitate behavior modification. The paradim "You can't teaching a old dog new tricks" is not true. Leaders are expected to improve behavior. The authors go to great lengths to explain when command , coaching, and democratic styles of leadership work; but fall back to the visionary leader as having the greatest long term impact on an organization. Behavior modification can dramatically change the organization culture.

The model works to gain the trust of all members in the organization. It works to gain an deeper understanding of "how well the leader is doing" and "how to improve behavior". I think "Primal Leadership" is an excellent book.

EI capabilities are classified into four main domains- Self Awareness, Self Control, Social Awareness and Relationship Management which are further broken down into eighteen competencies. The leadership styles that emerge are either Resonant or Dissonant. Visionary, Coaching, Affiliative and Democratic styles are Resonant while Pace Setting and Commanding are Dissonant. Primal leadership relies on the understanding of these distinct styles and the ability to identify and build those styles that are in lacking and consciously eliminating the dysfunctional.

The authors, in addition to listing and describing all the above factors in detail, constantly touch upon the anatomy of the human brain and link its functioning to explain the results. By understanding the pattern of information flows and its processing, it is argued that it one can identify and practice favorable patterns that are responsible for resonance. These concepts are then extended to maximizing emotional intelligence of teams.

As clearly brought out in the book, acquiring primal leadership skills needs lots of practice and it may take even months. Reading the book is just the beginning to that wonderful resonant journey.

I've assigned this book and related exercises to a number of my executive coaching clients. Even if they only breeze through emotional intelligence domains and associated competencies (page 39) and the styles of leadership (summarized on page 55), we have plenty to work with. Clients come back amazed at how often they employ non-resonant styles (and begin to notice the consequences), at how transparent their moods are to others, etc.

One client, hugely successful in prior businesses, wondered aloud if he should "go back" to his former hard-driving (Pace-Setting) style, given his lackluster experience in his current tech start-up using a softer approach.

It helped him to distinguish between his former endeavors (where his teams were highly self-motivated, competent, and connected to one another) and his current endeavor (where there was less intrinsic trust and some questions about competencies on the team). Rather than the often dissonant Pace-Setting style, he realized the need to emphasize more resonant styles, especially some very specific Coaching style interventions to address competency issues. After working together, it wasn't just about "hard" or "soft" styles in business, but about appropriate styles for different situations.

If you're interested in "integral theory" then this is one of of the ones that counts. Here's a quick mapping of models that Primal Leadership explores and how they relate to the the domains of integral theory:

* Self-awareness and self-management map to the subjective world, my world, the world of "I." While "mood" is covered, I would have liked to see more of a distinction between mood (a person's ongoing "climate") and emotions (a person's current reactions or "weather").

* Social awareness and relationship management map to the intersubjective world; the world of business, culture, and relationships, where many rules are unwritten and must be sensed. Social competence is the world of "We."

* The "neuroanatomy of leadership," with its focus on how the brain works and learns, maps to the objective world, the world of physical phenomena and measurements, the world of "It."

Primal Leadership is an easy read, but it's also a great reference, with models that people "get." Highly recommended!