Links

There are some great leadership websites around.  I’ll be listing many of them here.

www.danielgoleman.info/blog is an excellent resource for information about Emotional Intelligence (EI).   Daniel Goleman popularised the notion of EI in 1995 with the release of Emotional Intelligence – Why It Can Matter More than IQ. While the notion of emotional intelligence remains considerably short of perfection as a theoretical construct, it has considerable intuitive appeal.  After all, who among us has not damaged relationships because of an inability to “emotionally read” particular situations, or failed to adapt our own emotions to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.  The pressures to perform that confront us, the information loads that can easily overwhelm us, and the self-imposed demands we may struggle under can all lead to emotional “moments” we later regret or, more formally, to the kinds of “amygdala hijacks” that Goleman identifies.  With so much of our lives spent at work, toiling away with people we may like or may not, the capacity to manage our emotional responses is a critical input for any leader.  The very best appear to possess, or have developed during their careers, tremendous emotional management capabilities.  Regularly evaluating our own EI is thus critical.

www.ketsdevries.com is the home of Professor Manfred Kets de Vries, one of the greats of contemporary leadership thinking.  Based at INSEAD, one of the world’s leading business schools, Kets de Vries brings the field of clinical psychology to leadership.  In doing so, his approach compliments Daniel Goleman’s earlier contributions to our understanding of emotional leadership at work.  I particularly like the ways in which Kets de Vries encourages us to consider how the shaping of our personalities and temperaments during our years of childhood contribute enormously to our subsequent styles of leadership.  If we are to exercise truly authentic leadership, Kets de Vries suggests that we should first reflect on these formative pathways and undertake the hard work of making peace with the very self (our self-image) to which they have so strongly contributed.