Tune Up To The Pitch

Resonant leadership entails a strong bond with the employees—empowering them, making them feel valued, and thereby bringing out the best in them.

- Richard E Boyatzis

 

When my co-authors Dan Goleman, Annie McKee, and I coined the expression ‘resonant leadership’, in our 2002 book, Primal Leadership, we touched a nerve. In subsequent months, we each received hundreds of emails with literally more than a thousand people telling us after speeches that they want to know more about resonant leadership. It felt right to them but they could not articulate why. People know that alignment did not work to inspire people—they complied but that was all.

We were inspired by the concept from music and physics of being in tune with others. At the time, some recent neuroscience findings documented limbic resonance among human mothers and infants. We defined resonant leadership quite simply as ‘the leader being in tune with others around him or her. They feel in sync with each other’. We proposed that the quality of the relationship became the context for how people decide to use their talent, how engaged they might be, and therefore affects their performance effectiveness, innovation, and organisational citizenship.

An exercise

For all but the most analytic of you, this may sound fine but is not convincing. Let me allow you to convince yourself. Think of the name of a leader you have worked with or who brought out the best in you. Write their name on the top of the left-hand column on a sheet of paper (or on your computer). This should be someone who was exciting to work with so much so that if they started a project in the community, you would volunteer to work on it just to work with this person again. If they were head of another division of your organisation, you would seek a transfer to be able to work with them.

On the top of the right-hand column, write the name of a leader with whom you worked that you try to avoid, someone who you thought was a lump.