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Effective Leadership and Strategic Storytelling

Leadership A Master Class Training Guide

Good storytelling is a hallmark of effective leadership. It’s a medium that allows leaders to move others. It also lets people know how the leader thinks and feels. Psychologist Howard Gardner examined how a leader can create an effective storytelling framework to move people in the right direction.

Levers of Storytelling

Innovative stories are crucial when:

That begs the question: What kinds of strategic storytelling levers does a leader use to motivate people in a desired direction?

First, it depends on your audience. If you are working with people who are highly sophisticated in what you’re doing – let’s say you’re running a hedge fund and you’re dealing with your partners who understand finance as well as you do – then the more academic levers of research and of reason are very important.

If you’re running for political office, chances are voters are not going to look at your syllogisms, and they’re not going to know enough to evaluate your data. That’s when things like resonance come into play. Whether you feel on the same wave length with the leader, and he or she manages to convey that “I’m one of you.”

If you are dealing with people who aren’t familiar with a subject, you would go for the redescription lever. Redescription is presenting the same ideas in many different ways. Some people aren’t going to be convinced by a linguistic narrative. Then a cartoon, a comic, wit, dramatization, games – those are other vehicles where you can bring about a different way of doing things.

Another lever is real world events. These are events you have no control over, but the effective leader uses them to change the conversation. Say for example the stock market tanked. A leader knows his team wants to understand how the event effects their job or industry.

Dealing with resistances is a common approach. When you tell a story, everybody has many other stories in their mind. Those stories are often quite resistant to the story you want to tell. Leaders often spend too much time convincing, and not enough time thinking of all the reasons why someone might be embracing a very different kind of story. The shrewdest mind-changers spend a lot of time trying to understand what the resistances are and how to deal with them.

Ultimately, a leader needs multiple strategies to employ during a crisis. They must understand their audience, and know which levers worked in the past and which ones ought to be pulled out for the occasion.

For a quick review, go to the SlideShare deck.

Strategic Storytelling

Watch a conversation between Daniel Goleman and Howard Gardner about ways to employ levers of storytelling.

Theory into Practice

Leadership A Master Class Training Guide

Apply these concepts into your training program with our Leadership: A Master Class Training Guide. The collection offers more than nine hours of research findings, case studies and valuable industry expertise through in-depth interviews with respected leaders in executive management, leadership development, organizational research, workplace psychology, innovation, negotiation and senior hiring. We developed an extensive, detailed training guide around the video content for human resources professionals, senior managers and executive coaches. Each module offers individual and group exercises, self-assessments, discussion guides, review of major points, and key actionable takeaway plans. The materials allow for instructor-led or self-study opportunities.

Email mike@morethansound.net for a sample guide and limited-time discount code.

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Online Learning Just for You

Praxis You

This Spring, More Than Sound will launch Praxis You, our new online learning platform for personal and professional development.

To help us develop useful, practical courses for you, please take a few moments to take a very short survey.

As a thank you, we’ll give you free access to module one of our first course, Thriving on Change.

Be sure to provide your email address when you’re done with the survey.

How Praxis You Works

Our one-of-a-kind learning sessions are designed to help you harness the knowledge necessary to achieve your full potential. The content includes the latest research, real-life experiences, relevant guidance, and proven-effective tools.

Praxis You is designed to enlist all of your learning faculties. Each course offers a balance of:

  • video
  • audio
  • animation
  • self-assessments
  • discussion forums
  • downloadable practices
  • reading on your own time.

Praxis You also encourages relationship building with your peers and instructor through interactive dialogue during the course, and post-course follow-ups and evaluations.

Thought Leaders

Daniel Goleman, internationally renowned psychologist and author of What Makes a Leader: Why Emotional Intelligence Matters

Joseph Grenny, bestselling author of Crucial Conversations

Elad Levinson, leadership coach and business adviser. Read Elad’s LinkedIn series, Learn to Dance on Jell-O: Part 1 and Part 2.

Mirabai Bush, co-founder of The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society and author of Working with Mindfulness: Research and Practice of Mindful Techniques in Organizations

Sylvia Boorstein, founding teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center

Monica Worline, co-founder and President of organizational development firm Vervago

Theresa Glomb, Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of Minnesota

Jane Dutton, Professor of Business Administration and Psychology at the University of Michigan

Jutta Tobias, lecturer on Business Performance Management

Juliet Adams, Director of A Head for Work, a firm specializing in leadership and workplace productivity

Learn More

Sign up for our free email newsletter to find out when and how to register for future courses. Email mike@morethansound.net.

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Our 14 Favorite Podcasts in 2014

2014 podcasts

This year we reached a record number of downloads of our podcasts. Thank you! We’re glad you find the content useful. We went back to re-listen to some of our most popular posts. It looks like the concept of focus and attention training were of most interest to listeners. Here’s a recap of the 14 Favorite More Than Sound Podcasts of 2014.

#14 Daniel Goleman talks about Focus on Bloomberg.edu

Dr. Goleman spoke with Jane Williams about the importance of teaching kids cognitive control, the pros and cons of mind wandering, and how to effectively manage distractions.

Listen to the podcast or the complete interview here.

#13 George Kohlrieser’s TedTalk on Negotiation

In this episode, we heard an excerpt from a TEDx talk given by hostage negotiator and IMD professor of leadership George Kohlrieser. As he tells it, successful negotiation, no matter how high the stakes, comes down to bonding. And it’s not only others who have the ability to take us hostage – sometimes we can do that to ourselves.

Listen to the podcast or the complete presentation here.

#12 Common Hiring Mistakes

Claudio Fernández-Aráoz spoke with Daniel Goleman for the video series Leadership: A Master Class. This excerpt of the conversation focuses on some common mistakes employers make while searching for the right candidate.

Listen to the podcast or watch the full discussion here.

#11 The Teenaged Brain

This is an excerpt from Dr. Daniel Siegel’s appearance on Iowa Public Radio’s River to River. He spoke with host Ben Kieffer about the misinformation around “bizarre teenage behavior.”

Listen to the podcast or the complete interview here.

#10 Why The Rich Care Less

Daniel Goleman spoke with Michael Brooks from the Majority Report on why inequality hurts empathy, the emotional impact of wealth and poverty and what we can do to create a more attentive and empathic society.

Listen to the podcast or the full discussion here.

#9 Teach Systems Awareness in Schools

Daniel Goleman spoke with Peter Senge, who pioneered bringing systems thinking into organizations, about its introduction to schools. You can read more about this concept in their book The Triple Focus: A New Approach to Education.

Listen to the podcast.

#8 Failure is Essential for Success

Many of these episodes explore concepts and tools that are important ingredients of success. So you might be surprised to hear that this one is devoted almost entirely to failure. But to Bill George, failure is an essential ingredient itself, as you’ll hear in this excerpt from Daniel Goleman’s series Leadership: A Master Class.

Listen to the podcast or watch the full discussion here.

#7 Master the Leadership Styles

Daniel Goleman has introduced 6 different leadership styles that can be used to get results. In this episode, he talks about how leaders can’t rely on just one or even two, but must become proficient in as many as they can. Together, the styles become a set of tools the most effective leaders can use in any situation.

Listen to the podcast.

#6 Creativity in the Workplace

Daniel Goleman and Teresa Amabile discuss some aspects of work life that are necessities for a company that depends on creativity.

Listen to the podcast or watch their entire discussion here.

#5 High Performance Leadership

Daniel Goleman spoke with George Kohlrieser for IMD’s Wednesday Webcast. The two discussed the role of attention in high performance leadership.

Listen to the excerpt or the complete discussion here.

#4 Don’t Write Off the Coaching Leadership Style

The coaching leadership style is the least used out of the six approaches. Yet it’s a style that can have a very positive impact on employee performance and bottom-line results.

Listen to the podcast.

#3 The Triple Focus: A New Approach to Education

Daniel Goleman and Peter Senge discuss the three types of focus that should be included in classrooms: self awareness, empathy, and an understanding of our relationship with the world around us.

Listen to the podcast.

#2 Daniel Goleman Talks about Focus with Diane Rehm

Dr. Goleman spoke with Diane Rehm on what the latest science tells us and how we can sharpen our focus and thrive.

Listen to an excerpt or the full interview.

#1 Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence

Daniel Goleman spoke in-depth with KQED about why the ability to focus is the key factor in achieving success – more than IQ or social background. He also discussed how we can cultivate different types of attentiveness, from a narrow focus that shuts out the world to the “open awareness” that is receptive to seemingly unrelated ideas.

Listen to an excerpt or the full interview.

What is Mindfulness?

Stay tuned for details about our new podcast series launching in 2015: What is Mindfulness? More Than Sound’s Hanuman Goleman talks with a variety of mindfulness practitioners, teachers and scholars about the definition of mindfulness.

 

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All Atwitter About Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman TedTalk

Daniel Goleman discussed emotional intelligence in the workplace at yesterday’s The Art of Leadership conference in Toronto. We followed attendee’s enthusiastic commentary about Dr. Goleman’s presentation on Twitter. Below are some highlights from #TheArtOf feed, with excerpts from a few of Daniel’s articles for supplemental reading.

From @LoKyriacou

Quote from @DanielGolemanEI: “When we leave an interaction with someone we have the opportunity to leave them in a better place” #TheArtOf

Key takeaway from Be Mindful of the Emotions You Leave Behind:

“While a boss’s artfully couched displeasure can be an effective goad, fuming is self-defeating as a leadership tactic. When leaders habitually use displays of bad moods to motivate, more work may seem to get done – but it will not necessarily be better work. And relentlessly foul moods corrode the emotional climate, sabotaging the brain’s ability to work at its best.”

Read the full article

From @KarenJurjevich

@DanielGolemanEI #artofleadership IQ15% & EI 85% = star leadership performance

 Key takeaway from What Predicts Your Success? It’s Not Your IQ:

“To further understand what attributes actually predict success, a more satisfying answer lies in another kind of data altogether: competence models. These are studies done by companies themselves to identify the abilities of their star performers. Competence models pinpoint a constellation of abilities that include grit and cognitive control, but go beyond. The abilities that set stars apart from average at work cover the emotional intelligence spectrum: self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and social effectiveness.”

Read the full article

From @TrevorCarrier

#TheArtOf every time you turn to the digital screen, you let someone else take over your inner agenda ~ @DanielGolemanEI yes!!

Key takeaway from Focus on How You Connect:

“Spreading ourselves too thin across an ever-growing number of platforms of interaction can weaken our personal bonds. We shouldn’t confuse all of our social media connections with the rich personal world of real-time relationships.

But getting lost in a world of too many digital connections can be very unfulfilling and isolating. That’s why when it comes to close personal connections, try to prioritize your communication methods. When possible, make the interaction face to face – especially if you need to discuss something important.”

Read the full article

From @caweenet

The higher you go in the organization, the more emotional intelligence you need.@DanielGolemanEI.@TheArtOf #leadership #communications

Key takeaway from IQ or EQ? You Need Both:

“Claudio Fernandez-Aroaz, former head of research at Egon Zehnder International, spent decades hiring C-level executives for global companies. When he studied why some of those executives ended up being fired, he found that while they had been hired for their intelligence and business expertise – they were fired for a lack of emotional intelligence. Though they were smart, they were bullies or otherwise inept at people management.”

Read the full article

From @CaseP

IQ is a threshold ability ”” it’ll help you GET the job. Emotional intelligence will help you SUCCEED at it. — @DanielGolemanEI #TheArtOf

Key takeaway from Let’s Not Underrate Emotional Intelligence:

“A century of IQ research shows intelligence predicts what job you can get. But once you’re in that position, everyone else you work with will have passed the same IQ requirement. Other abilities actually determine outstanding performance – especially emotional intelligence.”

Read the full article

From @TrevorCarrier

#TheArtOf best boss: made me feel like I could do anything. Worst boss: made me feel like I couldn’t do anything @TheArtOf

Key takeaway from How to Overcome a Survival Mode Culture:

“Having a secure base at work is crucial for high performance. Feeling secure allows a person to focus better on her work, achieve goals, and perceive impending obstacles as challenges, not threats.

When you offer a secure base, you begin to manifest trust and safety. When a person feels safe in her environment, she can transition from basic survival mode thinking to a more complex outlook, looking for opportunities and chances to thrive.”

Read the full article

Leading with Emotional Intelligence

Learn to become a more emotionally intelligent leader. Register for American Management Association’s course Leading With Emotional Intelligence. Dr. Goleman shared his decades of practical research to develop this seminar with AMA that explores the EI competencies. Attendees will be shown how to use them to go from being a good to a great emotionally intelligent leader. You’ll get tools and techniques to help you deepen your ability to lead and become more effective in helping your organization deliver the results it needs.

The courses are available onsite or online.

Image: TED

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Why a Fluid Leadership Style Gets Results

Leaders who have mastered four or more leadership styles – especially the authoritative, democratic, affiliative, and coaching – have the very best climate and business performance. And the most effective leaders switch flexibly among the leadership styles as needed.Such leaders don’t mechanically match their style to fit a checklist of situations – they are far more fluid. They are exquisitely sensitive to the impact they are having on others and seamlessly adjust their style to get the best results.

Fluid Leadership In Action

Consider Joan, the general manager of a major division at a global food and beverage company. Joan was appointed to her job while the division was in a deep crisis. It had not made its profit targets for six years; in the most recent year, it had missed by $50 million. Morale among the top management team was miserable; mistrust and resentments were rampant.

Joan’s directive from above was clear: turn the division around. Joan did so with a nimbleness in switching among leadership styles that is rare. From the start, she realized she had a short window to demonstrate effective leadership and to establish rapport and trust. She also knew that she urgently needed to be informed about what was not working, so her first task was to listen to key people.

During her first week on the job she had lunch and dinner meetings with each member of the management team. Joan sought to get each person’s understanding of the current situation. But her focus was not so much on learning how each person diagnosed the problem as on getting to know each manager as a person. Here Joan employed the affiliative style: she explored their lives, dreams, and aspirations.

She also stepped into the coaching role, looking for ways she could help the team members achieve what they wanted in their careers. She followed the one-on-one conversations with a three-day off-site meeting. Her goal here was team building, so that everyone would own whatever solution for the business problems emerged. Her initial stance at the offsite meeting was that of a democratic leader. She encouraged everyone to express freely their frustrations and complaints.

The next day, Joan had the group focus on solutions: each person made three specific proposals about what needed to be done. As Joan clustered the suggestions, a natural consensus emerged about priorities for the business, such as cutting costs. As the group came up with specific action plans, Joan got the commitment and buy-in she sought.

With that vision in place, Joan shifted into the authoritative style, assigning accountability for each follow-up step to specific executives and holding them responsible for their accomplishment.

Over the following months, Joan’s main stance was authoritative. She continually articulated the group’s new vision in a way that reminded each member of how his or her role was crucial to achieving these goals. And, especially during the first few weeks of the plan’s implementation, Joan felt that the urgency of the business crisis justified an occasional shift into the coercive style should someone fail to meet his or her responsibility. As she put it, “I had to be brutal about this follow-up and make sure this stuff happened. It was going to take discipline and focus.”

The results? Every aspect of climate improved. People were innovating. They were talking about the division’s vision and crowing about their commitment to new, clear goals. The ultimate proof of Joan’s fluid leadership style is written in black ink: after only seven months, her division exceeded its yearly profit target by $5 million.

Expand Your Repertory

Few leaders, of course, have all six styles in their repertory, and even fewer know when and how to use them. In fact, as these findings have been shown to leaders in many organizations, the most common responses have been, “But I have only two of those!” and, “I can’t use all those styles. It wouldn’t be natural.”

Such feelings are understandable, and in some cases, the antidote is relatively simple. The leader can build a team with members who employ styles she lacks.

Take the case of a VP for manufacturing. She successfully ran a global factory system largely by using the affiliative style. She was on the road constantly, meeting with plant managers, attending to their pressing concerns, and letting them know how much she cared about them personally.”¨ She left the division’s strategy – extreme efficiency – to a trusted lieutenant with a keen understanding of technology, and she delegated its performance standards to a colleague who was adept at the authoritative approach. She also had a pacesetter on her team who always visited the plants with her.

An alternative approach is for leaders to expand their own style repertories. To do so, leaders must first understand which emotional intelligence competencies underlie the leadership styles they are lacking. They can then work assiduously to increase their quotient of them.

For instance, an affiliative leader has strengths in three emotional intelligence competencies: in empathy, in building relationships, and in communication. Empathy – sensing how people are feeling in the moment – allows the affiliative leader to respond to employees in a way that is highly congruent with that person’s emotions, thus building rapport. The affiliative leader also displays a natural ease in forming new relationships, getting to know someone as a person, and cultivating a bond.

Finally, the outstanding affiliative leader has mastered the art of interpersonal communication, particularly in saying just the right thing or making the apt symbolic gesture at just the right moment. So if you are primarily a pacesetting leader who wants to be able to use the affiliative style more often, you would need to improve your level of empathy and, perhaps, your skills at building relationships or communicating effectively.

As another example, an authoritative leader who wants to add the democratic style to his repertory might need to work on the capabilities of collaboration and communication.

Hour to hour, day to day, week to week, executives must play their leadership styles like golf clubs, the right one at just the right time and in the right measure. The payoff is in the results.

Excerpt from Daniel Goleman’s book, What Makes a Leader: Why Emotional Intelligence Matters.

 

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Admitting failure: the first step to success

Daniel Goleman spoke with Bill George in the video series Leadership: A Master Class about how to recognize and groom authentic leaders. One of the traits George looks for in leadership candidates is their capacity to own their failures and move on. Below is an excerpt from their conversation.

Q&A: Daniel Goleman and Bill George discuss Authentic Leadership

Daniel Goleman: There’s a kind of norm that you’re valued for telling a story of success about yourself, and yet you’re saying you would value, say, in an interview situation, someone who was candid about their failures.

Bill George: Right. In fact, I say, don’t promote someone to a high-level position until they’ve actually confronted themselves and said, “I failed.”

DG: What’s the lesson there?

BG: Because I now know, that when tested by limits, I know that it’s not the end of the world. I can come back. I started a company that failed. I took the lessons from that and started another company. I became successful only because I knew what caused me to fail before.

DG: Failure is an ideal opportunity to learn resilience.

BG: Absolutely. What if you don’t have resilience? What if you’re not adaptable? What if you’re just going to stay the course, and you hit a detour? You hit a block in the road? You have to adapt, but you have to have the resilience to come back and fight another day.

DG: How do you train resilience? How do you encourage that?

BG: By getting people to talk honestly and openly about the challenges they face and how they’re going to deal with them. People need to know they have the support from their family, friends or colleagues – especially their supervisor. I also encourage investigating introspection tools. When I feel pressure, I go off and meditate. I process. Over time and with practice it’s become a valuable cleansing experience. After quiet contemplation, I notice that I start to say things such as, “Well, it’s not that big a deal. We’ll just go figure out how to deal with it. It’s not the end of the world.”

DG: You get a larger picture of what’s going on, instead of that narrow, hyper focus on what’s wrong, or what you perceive to be wrong.

BG: Yes, you’re not so caught up in the moment that you’re worried about all those little things. We’ll deal with it. I won’t say it’ll pass, but we’ll deal with it. That mindset then allows you to think more clearly. You’re less reactionary. You make better decisions, such as ask for help. That’s the wave of the future, by the way. Collaboration. Teamwork. It’s not, “I can do it myself. I’ll come back with a solution by tomorrow.” It rarely works. Not in business at least.

Admitting Failure

Develop sought-after leadership traits

Leadership A Master Class Training Guide

Leadership: A Master Class video series is now offered with comprehensive, customizable training materials to cultivate superior management skills.

Publishers HRD Press and More Than Sound have partnered to develop a comprehensive trainers guide based on Daniel Goleman’s video series, Leadership: A Master Class, which examines the best practices of top-performing executives.

The collection offers more than nine hours of research findings, case studies and valuable industry expertise through in-depth interviews with respected leaders in executive management, leadership development, organizational research, workplace psychology, innovation, negotiation and senior hiring.

HRD Press crafted an extensive, detailed training guide around the video content for human resources professionals, senior managers and executive coaches. Each module offers individual and group exercises, self-assessments, discussion guides, review of major points, and key actionable takeaway plans. The materials allow for instructor-led, self-study or online learning opportunities. Order your program here.

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IQ or EQ? You Need Both

IQ versus EQ

The CEO of one of the world’s largest financial companies told me, “I hire the best and brightest – but I still get a Bell Curve for performance.” Why, he wanted to know, aren’t the smartest MBAs from top schools like Stanford, Harvard, and Wharton all highly successful on the job?

The answer lies in the interplay between IQ and emotional intelligence – and explains why you need both for high performance.

More than a century of research shows IQ is the best predictor of the job you can get and hold. It takes a high ability level in handling cognitive complexity to be in a profession like medicine, a C-suite executive, or a professor at one of those prestigious business schools.

The more your job revolves around cognitive tasks, the more strongly IQ will predict success. A computer programmer, accountant, and academic will all need strong cognitive skills to do well.

Then why the dismay of that CEO?

The more your success on the job depends on relating to people – whether in sales, as a team member, or as a leader – the more emotional intelligence matters. A high-enough IQ is necessary, but not sufficient, for success.

Just as is true for IQ, there are many models of emotional intelligence. In mine there are two main parts: self-mastery and social intelligence. The purely cognitive jobs require self-mastery – e.g., cognitive control, the ability to focus on the task at hand and ignore distractions.

But the second half of emotional intelligence, social adeptness, holds the key to that CEO’s question. As long as those super-smart MBAs are working by themselves, their IQ and self-mastery makes them high performers. But the minute they have to mesh on a team, meet clients, or lead, that skill set falls short. They also need social intelligence.

Claudio Fernandez-Aroaz, former head of research at Egon Zehnder International, spent decades hiring C-level executives for global companies. When he studied why some of those executives ended up being fired, he found that while they had been hired for their intelligence and business expertise – they were fired for a lack of emotional intelligence. Though they were smart, they were bullies or otherwise inept at people management.

Along the same lines, my colleague Richard Boyatzis, a professor at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western University, has found that the vast majority of leadership competencies that predict the performance of sales leaders are based on emotional and social intelligence – not cognitive intelligence (like IQ).

Then there’s a brand new meta-analysis of 132 different research studies involving more than 27,000 people, which I heard reported on by a co-author, Ronald Humphreys, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. That yet-to-be published analysis concluded that emotionally intelligent leaders have the most satisfied employees – if you like your boss, you’re more likely to like your job (just contemplate the opposite, morbid reality).

And reviewing all peer-reviewed research to date, the same study says emotional intelligence has been found to boost:

And then there’s general life satisfaction and the quality of your relationships.

So even though some academic studies seem to show emotional intelligence matters little for success in a job like sales, I’m skeptical.

 

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

LMC-TG-300x

Put theory into practice with the Leadership: A Master Class Training Guide. Each module offers individual and group exercises, self-assessments, discussion guides, review of major points, and key actionable takeaway plans. The materials allow for instructor-led, self-study or online learning opportunities. Includes over 8 hours of video footage with George Kohlrieser, Bill George, Teresa Amabile and more.

What Makes a Leader

What Makes a Leader: Why Emotional Intelligence Matters presents Daniel Goleman’s groundbreaking, highly-sought Harvard Business Review and Egon Zehnder International articles compiled in one volume. This often-cited, proven-effective material has become essential reading for leaders, coaches and educators committed to fostering stellar management, increasing performance, and driving innovation.

FURTHER READING

Let’s not underrate emotional intelligence

It’s not IQ part 2

Leader spotting: 4 essential talents