Primal Leadership, With a New Preface by the Authors: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman & Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee

Author:Daniel Goleman & Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781591391845
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2013-07-22T18:30:00+00:00

Which of these goals will work for a given person depends on the realities of his life. To work on a development goal, it must be squeezed into an already crowded schedule. And since action steps do often take additional time in our lives, the question becomes, What will you say “no” to in order to create the time you need for working on the goal? The alternative is to design your steps so that they’re integral to what you do already.

For instance, instead of joining a group in which to practice giving presentations, one midlevel manager we know made a daily staff meeting her microplatform. She gave herself more ways to practice by taking on assignments that arose which offered the opportunity to present reports to the rest of the group. She thereby integrated her learning into each day, using her work setting as a laboratory for strengthening her leadership skills.

KNOW YOUR LEARNING STYLE

Most leaders have a preferred way to learn, a mode that feels most natural. Rather than fighting that learning style, or trying to conform to an imposed style, it makes sense to leverage your preferred style.

Take, for example, two friends—both of whom became CEOs within a few years—who decided to learn to sail one summer. One went out and bought a twelve-foot dinghy, with which he planned to practice during a month on the coast of Maine. At the same time, his friend enrolled in a sailing course in Boston harbor.

On the first day, as the new owner of the dinghy was pushing off the beach in Maine, his friend was sitting in a classroom, learning the principles of sailing. But once he developed a theoretical comfort with sailing, he was able to start sailing large boats right from the beginning. Meanwhile, off the coast of Maine, his friend was out in the water from day one, albeit in a small boat, and discovering on his own things like why a centerboard is useful. In the ensuing years, he practiced his newfound skills in larger and larger boats.

In the end, each friend learned the skill he desired—but in radically different ways from one another. The dinghy owner preferred learning through concrete experience, while his friend learned better by first building his own mental model of sailing. Fortunately for both of these novice sailors, each of them had the ability to also learn, when they had to, from active experimentation.

Research has shown that people actually learn best when they use modes that suit them. 21 The Learning Style Inventory, developed by David Kolb when he was at MIT, has been used for more than thirty years to understand learning in management as well as in fields ranging from medicine to law. Kolb found that people learn most often through one of the following modes:

• Concrete experience: Having an experience that allows them to see and feel what it is like

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