Editorial Reviews:
Synopsis
DIVThe blockbuster best seller Primal Leadership introduced us to "resonant" leaders--individuals who manage their own and others' emotions in ways that drive success. Leaders everywhere recognized the validity of resonant leadership, but struggled with how to achieve and sustain resonance amid the relentless demands of work and life. Now, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee provide an indispensable guide to overcoming the vicious cycle of stress, sacrifice, and dissonance that afflicts many leaders. Drawing from extensive multidisciplinary research and real-life stories, Resonant Leadership offers a field-tested framework for creating the resonance that fuels great leadership. Rather than constantly sacrificing themselves to workplace demands, leaders can manage the cycle using specific techniques to combat stress, avoid burnout, and renew themselves physically, mentally, and emotionally. The book reveals that the path to resonance is through mindfulness, hope, and compassion and shows how intentionally employing these qualities creates effective and enduring leadership. Great leaders are resonant leaders. Resonant Leadership offers the inspiration--and tools--to spark and sustain resonance in ourselves and in those we lead./DIV
Amazon.com Review
Unlike most other books, IResonant Leadership/I undersells itself. With easy justification, the authors or their editors at Harvard Business School Press could have applied a more expansive moniker like "Secrets of Enduring Leaders", or "How to Deal with Burnout," or perhaps even "Being Happy at Work." The work's modest title, though, takes nothing away from its grand ambition: to explain what makes leaders effective amid unrelentingly stressful situations.p The authors, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee, will be familiar to many businesspeople and management theorists. They collaborated with Daniel Goleman on the bestselling IPrimal Leadership/I, which extended Goleman's seminal work on emotional intelligence, and explained how "EQ", not just IQ, underpins success in guiding and directing organizations. With this latest book, Boyatzis and McKee have continued developing their holistic view of management. It's an attractive one. IResonant Leadership/I begins with recognition of leaders' essential humanity and analyzes the physical, mental, and emotional triggers that make men and women strong or weak as leaders. As readers might expect from an HBS Press offering, Boyatzis and McKee's methodology is appropriately academic, with extensive footnotes and research citations, but it also uses a nice blend of anecdotes from their field work as consultants, and is expressed through decidedly touchy-feely language. What emerges is a highly engaging, readable work that takes business audiences into somewhat unusual psychological territory, far beyond the usual bar charts and spreadsheets.p The book's organization is simple. Boyatzis and McKee start by describing the highly stressful conditions in which leaders operate today, and explain sympathetically how many well-intentioned people fall into what they call "dissonance" due to burnout. Whereas the authors' earlier book focused on the initial ingredients for leadership effectiveness, their interest now is in ongoing, enduring resonance--leaders who can be effective today, but also maintain their edge into tomorrow, as well. IResonant Leadership/I thus moves from this initial exposition of problems--management ineffectiveness, and/or burnout--to solutions. The authors anchor their prescription around three core qualities which they believe resonant leaders must continually cultivate: mindfulness, hope, and compassion. These may sound like ephemeral concepts, but they form the touchstone of IResonant Leadership/I and are cited again and again. Readers of Boyatzis and McKee's latest--whether already-strong leaders looking to maintain their effectiveness, or burned-out ones aiming to get back in the proverbial saddle--will find this is a thought-provoking read. I--Peter Han/I
