Emotional Impact: Passionate Leaders and Corporate Transformation

Citation

Jones, R.G. (2002), "Emotional Impact: Passionate Leaders and Corporate Transformation", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 23 No. 3, pp. 167-168. https://doi.org/10.1108/lodj.2002.23.3.167.2

Some readers will be familiar with the “mirror for magistrates” literary form of the middle ages. Works of this form were addressed to rulers, with the stated purpose of providing advice, often from biblical sources. I’m told this sort of early executive coaching often consisted of flattery thinly disguised as advice and had the actual purpose of asking for favours from the magistrate to whom the mirror was addressed. At the very least, there was plenty of flattery before the admonishments, and the admonishments were based on myth rather than research. If today’s executive coaches followed this guide, they would be begging boons from the modern commercial aristocracy, whilst doling out unscientific advice. Certainly, Emotional Impact has this fiavour.

Written by two management consultants, the book “is not intended as a piece of research”, though it has at its core lengthy stories based on interviews with prominent UK executives. Nor is the book intended “as the basis for a new theory” or “to provide some sort of foolproof set of recipes for success”. By the way, these non‐purposes do not stop the authors from making bold causal inferences about leader effectiveness, or from providing broad prescriptions, particularly in the last three chapters. No, the book’s stated purpose is “to strengthen the argument that we should be more emotionally literate in business”. Still, one gets the idea pretty quickly that its purpose is not solely to expose the reader to insights about emotional experience.

Instead, in the prologue, the authors state an implicit theme that threads its way through the book: “… leaders have used … mastery of their own feelings to drive organizational transformation”. This “mastery of emotion” theme runs throughout the book. “Mastery” is associated (by these authors) with self awareness, “channeling” of negative emotions into positive motives, and managing others’ emotions through empathy and openness. If this sounds something like the definition of emotional intelligence, it is because it borrows loosely from Goleman (1995) and Weisinger (1998). Unfortunately, the word “emotion” is never defined in the book, much less elaborated.

One of the better parts of the book comes in the short first chapter, in which a series of myths about leadership are described. These seem well‐considered, until one realizes that the biggest myth – that leadership is an individual characteristic and not a group phenomenon – is not mentioned, but is perpetuated through most of the cases. A myth that is briefly described – that leaders are “great men” defined by their personal characteristics – is actually subscribed to in later chapters through statements about personal qualities of leaders. Among the qualities ascribed to leaders interviewed are some amorphous concepts (“bravery”, “courage” and “emotional control” are some of the authors’ favourites), as well as concepts with some scientific meaning, such as emotional stability and tolerance for ambiguity. The final chapters even indulge in some psychoanalysis, suggesting that stable early childhoods are common across the people interviewed.

Chapters two and three give very abbreviated versions of some leadership and change theories, while Chapters four and five deal more specifically with transformational leadership and emotional intelligence. Given the book’s purpose is to call our attention to the role of emotion in leadership, charismatic and transformational leadership theories, which rely heavily on emotional “inspiration”, are not relied upon for later insights, despite Chapter four’s treatment. Similarly, Chapter three is spent describing Kurt Lewin’s change theory, with no reference provided. Considering that his change and leadership models grew up together, it is surprising that they are not linked. In any case, with the exception of emotional intelligence, these models are never again mentioned, and the case for understanding emotions in leadership is not made, so it’s unclear why the authors bother with these chapters.

Chapters six through ten describe the cases and comprise Part II of the book. All cases were screened and approved by the interviewees. Some of the cases, particularly Tim Waterstone (Chapter eight) and Ashok Ganguly (Chapter nine) are lively and engaging, partly because they are less flattering than some of the other cases. Also, even in the cases least relevant to the issue of emotion, there are a few insights worth noting. For example, Richard Ide (Chapter seven) describes his role as leader changing from a “decision maker” into a “questioner and ambition‐creator”. Likewise, the final chapter in the Section provides some descriptions of consulting that are worth reading. Still, descriptions of why and how leaders experienced the emotions they experienced lacked a common framework or focus.

Instead of defining emotion at the beginning of the book and examining emotional experience using some analytical (or at least definitional) web, the authors rely on the repeated conclusion that “leaders are like everyone else” in terms of experiencing emotions. At least for me, this is no revelation: people are emotional, as any introductory psychology course teaches. The authors’ assumption that people believe leaders are dispassionate, and that this belief will be altered by this book seems quite naive.

In the final chapters, the authors attempt to fold emotional intelligence in with executive effectiveness. It became clear to this reader that this was the conclusion the authors set out to prove, cases or no: that emotionally intelligent executives are more effective. More than cases are needed to make this point, of course, and it would have been nice if the authors would simply have confessed this forgone conclusion at the start of the book and saved others from reading much of the rest. After reading the rest, people with little background in leadership research might imagine that the leadership literature still has not dealt with the emotional side of leadership. They would only be partly correct, but this book would not help much, even if they were right.