We’re All OK
Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence
By Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee
Harvard Business School Press, 2002, $26.95

It’s like dŽjˆ vu all over again as Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence and Working with Emotional Intelligence, recycles his Emotional Intelligence theory, this time applying it to the principles of leadership. In Primal Leadership, Goleman and his fellow researchers argue that the most important role of leaders is to drive an organization’s collective emotions?rather than its earnings or strategy?in a positive direction.

Feelings are contagious. Even in the work environment, people’s feelings, both positive and negative, tend to rub off on each other. A leader’s mood is particularly infectious, say the authors: Employees take their emotional cues from the top, and even when the boss isn’t highly visible, there’s a trickle-down effect. The key, says Goleman, is to infect your workers with the right kinds of emotions. And that requires?you guessed it?emotional intelligence.

The authors link leadership successes and failures to what they have dubbed primal leadership, a.k.a. emotionally intelligent leadership: the ability to create a reservoir of positive feelings. A resonant (and thus effective) leader is in tune with employees’ emotions (and vice versa) and creates a positive tone, while a dissonant (and ineffective) leader is out of touch with the feelings within an organization and sets a negative tone.

For those who might say, "Well, duh," the authors add that being a successful leader goes beyond merely being a jolly good fellow, and they offer plenty of guidance for dissonant leaders seeking recovery. Although the book claims to transform leadership from art to science (and it is chock-full of interesting research with business case studies), it’s really more like a self-help book for leaders. But hey, that can’t be bad.
-Stephanie Overby

Avoid Collisions
When Generations Collide: Who They Are. Why They Clash. How to Solve the Generational Puzzle at Work.
By Lynne C. Lancaster and David Stillman
HarperCollins Publishers, 2002, $25.95

A lot has been written about gender and racial politics in the workplace, but another tension point has been lost in the shuffle: generational differences. Enter When Generations Collide, a useful book by Lancaster and Stillman, cofounders of a company that lectures and trains on that very subject.

Their premise is that we’re seeing a historically broad age range of employees working together?spanning the traditionalists of the World War II generation through the baby boomers and Gen X-ers to the latest arrivistes, the millennials. If employers don’t understand how each generation is unique, their recruiting, retention and conflict-management efforts will fail.