The Emotionally Healthy Leader

Great leaders know that great leadership takes more than just skills. And they know that good emotional health is at the heart of it all. 'Leadership' has become a holy grail of the last decade or two. Scores of books and journal articles contain countless 'shopping lists' of essential leadership characteristics. The promise seems to be that all you need to do is learn these skills and you can be a great leader. Yet when we look at outstanding leaders in the real world, we see that there is no single 'ideal' of leadership. There is no 'mould' for leadership. Great leaders just 'are' ... or so it sometimes seems. But of course it is not as simple as that. The Emotionally Healthy Leader challenges current thinking about leadership development and introduces a unique way of achieving this. In the book, Gayle Hardie and Malcolm Lazenby talk at length with three leaders they have worked with and recognise as being exceptional at what they do. The three are quite different, yet there are some powerful aspects of their leadership styles that bind them together. They have what the authors call 'high emotional health'. They achieve what seems to be a paradoxical balancing act: they manage to be both compassionate and caring, as well as decisive and courageous. Emotionally healthy leaders drive positive emotions in their workplace. They display very low levels of ego driven behaviour; it's not about them, it's about others and the organisation. In doing so they have a positive affect on themselves, their organisations and on the wider community. However, building emotional health is not like learning a skill. It's not something that can be achieved through 'thinking' or 'knowing'. It requires presence and self-awareness in one's own experiences; it needs deeper awareness of one's responses and reactions, and the impact they have on others. The Emotionally Healthy Leader explores how this can be done. It provides the reader not with a secret of instant success, but with a practical understanding of what emotional health is and why it matters, along with an easy-to-follow pathway for improving emotional health over time. This book will change how you see, respond to and interact with the world, and the way you engage and work with others, through better understanding of yourself and the impact you have. It will strengthen your value as a leader, simplifying the pathway you create for others through the work you do on yourself.