Primal Leadership.

Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee (Harvard Business School Press) has the potential to be extremely valuable to managers feeling pressure to improve performance. To determine if this book will be useful for you, ask yourself this question: "Is my metalcasting or supplier business facing challenges related to globalization, changing customer demands, intensifying competition, stagnant sales, shrinking profits, slow productivity growth or all of the above?"

If your answer is "no," congratulations, your organization undoubtedly has effective leadership. If your answer is "yes," consider buying this book and making it your personal business bible for the next few years.

If you lack solid evidence that your current management style provides adequate leadership for your organization or department, this book will give you a foolproof way to acquire that evidence. It also details a host of reasons not to delay assessing your leadership skills.

The early sections of Primal Leadership communicate two vital pieces of information. The first is that the most effective managers transform themselves into leaders by connecting with their employees at a primal level--meaning in terms of employees' individual emotions and personal dreams. Primal leadership is fundamentally about creating "resonance" between a leader and the individuals he or she leads. Creating a work environment characterized by resonance allows leaders to guide emotions positively and achieve results. These ideas are presented powerfully and persuasively and merit careful reading and reflection.

The second piece of information explains why organizations characterized by resonance compete much more effectively. The greater successfulness of an organization with resonance is all the reason to pay close attention to this concept. The authors' documentation is overwhelmingly convincing.

If you accept the idea that one of the most powerful assets a metalcasting or supplier organization can have is a motivated team that can execute at world-class levels, Primal Leadership offers a precise mechanism for gauging the resonance that enables and sustains this condition.

The mechanism, a "360-degree evaluation," asks you to rate yourself on a variety of criteria related to leadership. Then, your direct reports, bosses and selected peers outside the company provide feedback by rating you on these same criteria.

The next step is to compare your evaluation to that of the others. If your associates rate you about the same as you rate yourself, you are already in a position to move forward, acquiring and honing your primal leadership skills.

If your associates rate you differently than you rate yourself, you have some issues you need to address. However, the fact that you have pinpointed a gap is the essential first step in closing it. Primal Leadership provides numerous case histories of managers who have developed significantly more effective leadership skills by identifying and closing gaps.

The authors do an outstanding job selling their ideas. They convinced this reader that using the 360-degree evaluation exposes the constraints on leadership potential that prevent optimal performance. They show clearly how any manager can participate in the correlation between a resonant leadership style and the positive business performance that results from it.

In the last analysis, it is your vision and leadership that will determine how much your organization accomplishes. Primal Leadership can give you many of the insights and concepts you'll need to make progress. However, the first steps will be the hardest. They are:

* identifying the degree of resonance that currently exists in your organization, which involves mustering the courage, humility and self discipline to undergo a 360-degree evaluation;

* designing a program to improve your leadership effectiveness by changing counterproductive behaviors;

* making a commitment to work your personal program for as long as it takes to achieve resonance.

If what you thought was going to be a non-personal review of a book by some business consultants has uncomfortably morphed into a personal invitation to submit yourself to a self-inflicted performance review by your most knowledgeable potential critics, I have done my job.