Leading With Feeling

For many decades, the conventional wisdom was that emotion has no place in the work world, and the ideal leader is one who approaches problems rationally and unemotionally. However, the reality is that emotion is inevitable when a group of people come together for an extended period of time to work on challenging tasks, and if used effectively, a leader's moods and emotions can be a plus rather than a minus. This book describes how 25 outstanding leaders used emotional intelligence to deal with critical challenges and opportunities. Featuring commentary from the leaders themselves describing how they handled each situation, it helps managers better understand not just what emotional intelligence is, or how to measure it, or how it is linked to bottom-line results: it also shows how real leaders used their emotional intelligence to deal with real situations. The book distills the leaders' experiences into nine strategies that can help any leader or potential leader to be more effective. Each chapter concludes with activities that help readers to apply immediately each of those strategies.

The mental well-being of children and adults is shockingly poor. Marc Brackett, author of Permission to Feel, knows why. And he knows what we can do. "We have a crisis on our hands, and its victims are our children." Marc Brackett is a professor in Yale University’s Child Study Center and founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. In his 25 years as an emotion scientist, he has developed a remarkably effective plan to improve the lives of children and adults – a blueprint for understanding our emotions and using them wisely so that they help, rather than hinder, our success and well-being. The core of his approach is a legacy from his childhood, from an astute uncle who gave him permission to feel. He was the first adult who managed to see Marc, listen to him, and recognize the suffering, bullying, and abuse he’d endured. And that was the beginning of Marc’s awareness that what he was going through was temporary. He wasn’t alone, he wasn’t stuck on a timeline, and he wasn’t “wrong” to feel scared, isolated, and angry. Now, best of all, he could do something about it. In the decades since, Marc has led large research teams and raised tens of millions of dollars to investigate the roots of emotional well-being. His prescription for healthy children (and their parents, teachers, and schools) is a system called RULER, a high-impact and fast-effect approach to understanding and mastering emotions that has already transformed the thousands of schools that have adopted it. RULER has been proven to reduce stress and burnout, improve school climate, and enhance academic achievement. This book is the culmination of Marc’s development of RULER and his way to share the strategies and skills with readers around the world. It is tested, and it works. This book combines rigor, science, passion and inspiration in equal parts. Too many children and adults are suffering; they are ashamed of their feelings and emotionally unskilled, but they don’t have to be. Marc Brackett’s life mission is to reverse this course, and this book can show you how.

"Tom was a young engineer employed at one of the country's largest steel companies. He had been an outstanding individual performer, and now he was a new manager, leading a team responsible for producing steel for a major automobile company. After just one week on the job, Tom and his team met with over 20 engineers from that other company. It was a rude awakening. I sat in a room with maybe 20 or 25 of their engineers for the annual quality evaluation of suppliers. And I learned for the first time that we were in the bottom of the bottom quartile as a supplier. We had lousy quality, we had lousy invoicing, we had lousy on-time delivery. And this was my first general manager role! I had grown up as an engineer. And how did Tom respond to this unexpected shock? I had a holy shit moment! I had been in the job literally a week. So part of it was, 'Oh my God, what the hell am I going to do?' Also I thought about how my guys had been in the business for a while, and I thought, 'What the hell have you been doing?' And I was thinking, 'I'm going to clean house!' But then... I've learned that you just can't react viscerally every time something comes up because it just scares people away. So Tom listened attentively as the engineers from the auto company presented their litany of complaints. When they finally finished, he stood up and said, "I wouldn't blame you if you fired us as a supplier. But if you give us a chance to fix these problems, I guarantee you that that we will not have this kind of meeting next year." When Tom met with his team the next morning to discuss the situation, he started by just listening to them. They went on for some time complaining about how the company and their previous boss had made it impossible for them to provide good products and service. Rather than disagree with them or join in pointing fingers at others, Tom listened. "I didn't think about it at the time, but that first couple of hours was very cathartic for them. My focus was not on beating anyone up but rather, what can we do to fix this?" The team responded positively to Tom's approach. The next year when they met, the auto company told Tom that they "never saw any business turn around that quickly in one year." As a result, they began giving Tom's company more business, and Tom went on to a distinguished career, eventually becoming one of his company's top executives"--

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Brené Brown has taught us what it means to dare greatly, rise strong, and brave the wilderness. Now, based on new research conducted with leaders, change makers, and culture shifters, she’s showing us how to put those ideas into practice so we can step up and lead. Don’t miss the five-part HBO Max docuseries Brené Brown: Atlas of the Heart! NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BLOOMBERG Leadership is not about titles, status, and wielding power. A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for recognizing the potential in people and ideas, and has the courage to develop that potential. When we dare to lead, we don’t pretend to have the right answers; we stay curious and ask the right questions. We don’t see power as finite and hoard it; we know that power becomes infinite when we share it with others. We don’t avoid difficult conversations and situations; we lean into vulnerability when it’s necessary to do good work. But daring leadership in a culture defined by scarcity, fear, and uncertainty requires skill-building around traits that are deeply and uniquely human. The irony is that we’re choosing not to invest in developing the hearts and minds of leaders at the exact same time as we’re scrambling to figure out what we have to offer that machines and AI can’t do better and faster. What can we do better? Empathy, connection, and courage, to start. Four-time #1 New York Times bestselling author Brené Brown has spent the past two decades studying the emotions and experiences that give meaning to our lives, and the past seven years working with transformative leaders and teams spanning the globe. She found that leaders in organizations ranging from small entrepreneurial startups and family-owned businesses to nonprofits, civic organizations, and Fortune 50 companies all ask the same question: How do you cultivate braver, more daring leaders, and how do you embed the value of courage in your culture? In this new book, Brown uses research, stories, and examples to answer these questions in the no-BS style that millions of readers have come to expect and love. Brown writes, “One of the most important findings of my career is that daring leadership is a collection of four skill sets that are 100 percent teachable, observable, and measurable. It’s learning and unlearning that requires brave work, tough conversations, and showing up with your whole heart. Easy? No. Because choosing courage over comfort is not always our default. Worth it? Always. We want to be brave with our lives and our work. It’s why we’re here.” Whether you’ve read Daring Greatly and Rising Strong or you’re new to Brené Brown’s work, this book is for anyone who wants to step up and into brave leadership.

'This book makes an important contribution to the literature on educational leadership and should help to shift the emphasis from rational and accountability-related models to an explicit recognition of the importance of emotions to effective leadership' - Educational Management Administration and Leadership '[This book] contains a wealth of case studies and vignettes to help leaders be more aware of the ways in which emotion impacts on their practice, and to develop a productive and sustainable set of emotional responses, experiences and leadership tools' - Headteacher Update 'This is a highly readable and engaging introduction to both the importance and power of emotions in the life and work of headteachers. While leaders' emotions have been badly neglected in the literature, the rich body of evidence the author shares with readers indicates how central such emotions are to sustaining improvement efforts in schools.' - Professor Ken Leithwood, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, Canada 'The affective side of leadership is often forgotten as school heads and leaders strive for excellence and accountability. This extremely important book brings to the forefront the emotional attachments of leadership, the interpersonal relationships, and self-awareness that are at the core of leadership action and decision making. The case stories and reviews of multiple perspectives and theories provide the reader with a rich and essential resource' - Ellen B. Goldring, Professor of Education Policy and Leadership, Vanderbilt University '...The book is framed to illuminate how headteachers experience, and talk about, emotion and meaning in their daily interactions, and sets out to understand how emotion impacts on their leadership.' (author's introduction) Understanding the close relationship between leadership and emotion is essential for school leaders in creating, modifying and sustaining the emotional coherence of the whole school. Megan Crawford aims to help school leaders understand why emotion is such a powerful component of leadership. The author examines how school leaders experience emotion and meaning in their daily interactions, and presents a reflective journey, concentrating on the personal side of school leadership. The author shows how school climate depends on the personal emotional quality of the leader and his/her interface with other social relationships in the school, covering areas such as difficult people and situations, shame, loss and drawing on primary and secondary case studies, school leaders' reflections and the influence of their life history, school context and emotional epiphanies. This book is for practising educational leaders and managers, tutors and students on Masters courses, EdD courses, and on programmes such as the National Professional Qualification for Headship, its equivalent for Children's centres, and other national programmes in educational leadership and management

#1 Wall Street Journal Best Seller USA Today Best Seller Amazon Best Book of the Year TED Talk sensation - over 3 million views! The counterintuitive approach to achieving your true potential, heralded by the Harvard Business Review as a groundbreaking idea of the year. The path to personal and professional fulfillment is rarely straight. Ask anyone who has achieved his or her biggest goals or whose relationships thrive and you’ll hear stories of many unexpected detours along the way. What separates those who master these challenges and those who get derailed? The answer is agility—emotional agility. Emotional agility is a revolutionary, science-based approach that allows us to navigate life’s twists and turns with self-acceptance, clear-sightedness, and an open mind. Renowned psychologist Susan David developed this concept after studying emotions, happiness, and achievement for more than twenty years. She found that no matter how intelligent or creative people are, or what type of personality they have, it is how they navigate their inner world—their thoughts, feelings, and self-talk—that ultimately determines how successful they will become. The way we respond to these internal experiences drives our actions, careers, relationships, happiness, health—everything that matters in our lives. As humans, we are all prone to common hooks—things like self-doubt, shame, sadness, fear, or anger—that can too easily steer us in the wrong direction. Emotionally agile people are not immune to stresses and setbacks. The key difference is that they know how to adapt, aligning their actions with their values and making small but powerful changes that lead to a lifetime of growth. Emotional agility is not about ignoring difficult emotions and thoughts; it’s about holding them loosely, facing them courageously and compassionately, and then moving past them to bring the best of yourself forward. Drawing on her deep research, decades of international consulting, and her own experience overcoming adversity after losing her father at a young age, David shows how anyone can thrive in an uncertain world by becoming more emotionally agile. To guide us, she shares four key concepts that allow us to acknowledge uncomfortable experiences while simultaneously detaching from them, thereby allowing us to embrace our core values and adjust our actions so they can move us where we truly want to go. Written with authority, wit, and empathy, Emotional Agility serves as a road map for real behavioral change—a new way of acting that will help you reach your full potential, whoever you are and whatever you face.

Leadership is hard. How can you balance compassion for your people with effectiveness in getting the job done? A global pandemic, economic volatility, natural disasters, civil and political unrest. From New York to Barcelona to Hong Kong, it can feel as if the world as we know it is coming apart. Through it all, our human spirit is being tested. Now more than ever, it's imperative for leaders to demonstrate compassion. But in hard times like these, leaders need to make hard decisions—deliver negative feedback, make difficult choices that disappoint people, and in some cases lay people off. How do you do the hard things that come with the responsibility of leadership while remaining a good human being and bringing out the best in others? Most people think we have to make a binary choice between being a good human being and being a tough, effective leader. But this is a false dichotomy. Being human and doing what needs to be done are not mutually exclusive. In truth, doing hard things and making difficult decisions is often the most compassionate thing to do. As founder and CEO of Potential Project, Rasmus Hougaard and his longtime coauthor, Jacqueline Carter, show in this powerful, practical book, you must always balance caring for your people with leadership wisdom and effectiveness. Using data from thousands of leaders, employees, and companies in nearly a hundred countries, the authors find that when leaders bring the right balance of compassion and wisdom to the job, they foster much higher levels of employee engagement, performance, loyalty, and well-being in their people. With rich examples from Netflix, IKEA, Unilever, and many other global companies, as well as practical tools and advice for leaders and managers at any level, Compassionate Leadership is your indispensable guide to doing the hard work of leadership in a human way.

Do you have what it takes to succeed in your career? The secret of success is not what they taught you in school. What matters most is not IQ, not a business school degree, not even technical know-how or years of expertise. The single most important factor in job performance and advancement is emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is actually a set of skills that anyone can acquire, and in this practical guide, Daniel Goleman identifies them, explains their importance, and shows how they can be fostered. For leaders, emotional intelligence is almost 90 percent of what sets stars apart from the mediocre. As Goleman documents, it's the essential ingredient for reaching and staying at the top in any field, even in high-tech careers. And organizations that learn to operate in emotionally intelligent ways are the companies that will remain vital and dynamic in the competitive marketplace of today—and the future.