Chapter Six – Becoming a Resonant Leader: The Five Discoveries

Though I enjoyed this book overall and found it to be a very useful tool for leaders looking to improve their effectiveness, I found a number of places where it felt like it was stretching an important topic beyond necessity, just to fill space. This entire chapter felt that way. The title refers to the five discoveries a leader needs to go through to become resonant. However, these discoveries are not mentioned until the last page. This chapter is a pre-amble to the actual content discussed in next few chapters. Having said that, I will mention a few nuggets in this pre-amble that jumped out at me.

They discuss the importance of a leader being in tune with their leadership effectiveness. Those who know their actual strengths and weaknesses, can address and work on the gaps. Those who don’t, have little chance of improving their deficiencies. One barrier to such accurate self-assessment is what the authors refer to as “CEO disease.” The hierarchy that exists in most companies actively insulates them from true information about their own performance. In most cases, no one approaches the CEO or executives to offer up constructive criticism. Even when the executive asks for feedback, it is often sugar-coated or people simply leave out anything that might sound negative for fear of falling out of favor with the higher ups. They could have gotten right to the point here and said that this challenge is reduced when a leader is emotionally intelligent and creates open lines of communication with their team, presents themselves as more accessible, works over time to build relationships with people at all levels of the organization, etc. But they didn’t.

The chapter then goes on to talk about nature vs nurture. Are great leaders born or made? They discuss reasons that leaders don’t change (they don’t believe they need to, they don’t believe they can, they come from a command or pace-setting background that has been firmly ingrained in their behavior). After a case study of a CEO who did make a dramatic shift, they claim it can be done and the discussion progresses through ways of changing. Classroom training on leadership, they say, is ineffective. Months after the training, their research says that only 10% of the material is retained and/or embedded into their behaviors. A lot of this, they say, has to do with motivation. When someone has a leadership class thrust upon them as part of a corporate learning and development strategy, they are not motivated internally to change, so they won’t. Or, if they do, this change extinguishes quickly…as they say, “once the brow-beating ends.” I related this concept to animal training (of course). Negative reinforcement works quickly to affect behavior change, but the results disappear soon after you stop following them around to administer the punishment. Positive reinforcement takes longer to succeed, but the results remain in tact much longer after the reward is removed.

Next they talk about the way the brain affects all of this. They refer back to the earlier discussion of our decisions and behavior being the result of a dialogue between the rational and emotional centers of the brain. When training only engages the rational part, the learning moves quickly but doesn’t stick. When it also engages the emotional centers, it takes a bit longer, but the results stay with a person much longer, but they are emotionally plugged into the learning. They go on to talk about neuro-plasticity. It had been believed that once neurons were completely developed in adulthood, they could not change or grow. New research shows that this is false. Though the change happens more quickly and easily up through your early 20s, a sustained effort to change ways of thinking can, and does, work quite well into adulthood.

The chapter ends with the notion of self-directed learning. They explain that this slower, more challenging task of changing fixed behavior patterns in adults is most effective when it is self-directed. If a person recognizes a need to change and is motivated to do so, they take initiative on their own and put in the time and work needed to make it stick. This leads into the introduction (on the last page) of the process they suggest for a leader to engage in the change process: The Five Discoveries. These are actually discussed in the next chapter.