Business Case Studies, Executive Interviews, Richard Boyatzis on The Making of a CEO

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Executive Interviews: Interview with Richard Boyatzis on The Making of a CEO
January 2009 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary


Dr. Richard Boyatzis
Professor in the Department of Organizational Behavior, Psychology and Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University and Human Resources at ESADE


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  • What is the connection between emotional intelligence and primal leadership?
    EI enables people to use their emotions effectively. In that way, resonant leaders are primal—they deal with primary processes and they deal with the most basic of people’s emotions.

  • What is mood contagion and how prevalent is it in organizations? What are your research’s key implications? What is the science of moods all about? Can it really be called a science?

    Have you ever been to a party, a wedding in which everyone was having fun and you wanted it to last forever? Have you ever been to a debriefing at a company where things went wrong and everyone is blaming everyone else? In each case, you can see, hear, and feel the contagion of emotions. It happens through the mirror neurons and spindle cells. It happens unconsciously and very, very fast—in milliseconds.

  • It’s true that everyone (every leader/CEO) wants to be an inspirational, inclusive leader rather than being a depressed, ruthless boss. But is it not inevitable that off-the-job events do affect on-the-job behavior? After all no one is immune from such biases. However, are there any suggestions for CEOs to delineate themselves from off-the-job events and other lowm orale inducing behavior? Are there any best practices to emulate?
    Yes. Yes, Build moremindfulness (see our 2005 book Resonant Leadership).

  • One of HBR’s best selling articles is “Reawakening Your Passion for Work” (HBR, April 2002) authored by you (alongwith AnnieMcKee and Daniel Goleman). Can you tell us the background of that wonderful work?
    David Kolb and I began worrying about life and career stage theories as not reflective of how people really emerge in today’s society. As we worked on these ideas and started some research in the late 1980’s, I began to inclued life and career stage, cycle, sequence work in all of our workshops. People need to be aware of their mid-life crisis, if not, they act inappropriately—spend too much money, divorce loved ones, change jobs the wrong way, etc.

  • The article primarily sought answers for a simple, yet powerful question, “Am I really living the way I want to live?” What are the different signals that it’s time to take stock? Can you tell us the strategies to listen to those signals and take proactive steps to address this simple question?
    Yes, we have an entire book devoted to it, called Becoming a Resonant Leader. It came out from HBSP in March.

  • Who according to you are the 10 greatest business leaders that the world has ever seen and what qualities distinguish them from the rest? Of these qualities how many can be inculcated through a steady stream of coaching, mentoring, handholding, etc.?
    Among the best leaders in business in the world, I would include: Meg Whitman (E Bay), John Chambers (Cisco Systems), Ken Chennault (AMEX), Oprah Winfrey (Harpo Productions), Belmiro Azevado (SONAE), John Brown (formerly of BP), Herb Kelleher and Colleen Barrett (Southwest Airlines), and the others who we featured in the 2002, 2005 and 2008 books and related HBR articles. All of them developed with substantial coaching and mentoring from others. It is imperative. In my Intentional Change Theory, you can see why.

1. CEO as Change Agent Case Study
2. ICMR Case Collection
3. Case Study Volumes


The interview was conducted by Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary, Consulting Editor, Effective Executive and Dean, IBSCDC, Hyderabad.

This interview was originally published in Effective Executive, IUP, January 2009.

Copyright © January 2009, IBSCDC No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced or distributed, stored in a retrieval system, used in a spreadsheet, or transmitted in any form or medium – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – without the permission of IBSCDC.

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