Looking Up Looking In, Building emotionally intelligent leadership habits by Graham Andrewartha, Director of MCA Group, covers a broad range of leadership concepts. These include positive mindset shifts, empathic leadership, identifying your own influence style, overcoming limiting thoughts and building trustworthy communication.

Our leadership book club met in February 2024 to share our learnings and perspectives on this book. Our discussions are always vibrant and diverse. It was noted that there were lots of useful concepts explored in the text, aligning well to Adaptive Leadership theory. Supporting the variety of concepts and theories were summative real life case studies that provided an excellent opportunity to frame potential applications of the theory within a workplace setting.

A section of the book is dedicated to the Influence Dimensions which I am a big fan of as a qualified assessor and coach. It provides an overview of the six dimensions and provides advice for matching for influence and improved understanding.

We debated the concept of empathy as some members viewed empathy as potentially ethereal. Shortly after our meeting, I was listening to the audio book version of Brenee Brown’s, Atlas of the Heart, Chapter 8: Places we go with others, where she unpacks the sometimes subtle differences and misunderstandings between pity, compassion, sympathy and empathy providing excellent context for debate around empathy as an achievable emotional or cognitive response.

A concept covered later in the book, several members of the group found the Drama Triangle theory to be particularly useful as they were able to reflect on situations and dynamics in their own lives where this could apply and the roles we may revert to or swap between.

The piece on Active Listening also provided an excellent reminder for some members of the group who were striving to apply this technique more often. The members shared ideas on how this could be supported and options to generate capacity for active listening amongst unexpected interruptions.

We discussed our experiences with Reframing and applying this approach as a leader. This lead to genuine and vulnerable discussions about the feeling that leaders often need to adapt, reframe and match communication styles which can be exhausting at times and frustrating if the person you are working with is not also adapting and developing.

In summary, the book provided an excellent basis for sharing views and debating some deep leadership topics. Find out more about your own communication Influence Dimensions and how this can help you and your team, or join our Adelaide based Leadership Book Club.