I read many books about leadership and this book is one of my favorites. It’s The Psychology of Leadership by Sebastien Page. It offers a fresh take on leadership through the lens of groundbreaking research in positive, sports, and personality psychology.
“Like exercise strengthens your body, practicing positive, sports, and personality psychology will make you a better leader,” says Page.
The book blends research, fascinating true stories, humor, and self-improvement advice to deliver simple yet powerful principles to master the mental game of leadership.
Page reveals timeless strategies for achieving lasting impact, fostering growth, and promoting well-being. He demonstrates how leaders and individuals can balance measurable goals with practical approaches to maximize performance and fulfillment.
“Effective leadership is not merely about achieving measurable outcomes. It requires aligning goals with intrinsic motivations and psychological insights,” explains Page. “Plus, the psychology of leadership requires you to understand yourself so you can understand others. It’s about empathy, leading by example, and personal resilience. You put on your oxygen mask before helping others.”
The book’s three parts are:
- Setting Long-Term Goals
- Executing Your Goals
- Unleashing the Power of Personality Psychology
Within those three parts, Page discusses 18 core principles including:
- Don’t Die on Everest – Beware of the side effects of measurable goals.
- Don’t Fake It – When you talk about meaning, mean it!
- Think About Death – Always work backwards from your goals. Work backwards through a wide range of scenarios and decisions and solve for the optimal course of action.
- Sit On It – Learn strategic patience.
- Read The Room – Call on introverts. Giving everyone a chance to share the spotlight makes your meetings more productive and keeps everyone mentally alert.
- Learn to Love to Worry – Harness the positive side of neuroticism.
- Be Disagreeable, Sometimes – Don’t run your business like a democracy.
- Eat Your Vegetables – Unleash the power of good habits.
Some of my favorite takeaways from the book include:
- High-performing organizations diligently use goals.
- Set goals that balance challenge and capability.
- As a leader, you must create an environment where people can disagree because there’s enough trust and mutual respect to maintain positive relationships.
- Winning at all costs is for losers.
- Rally your team against a worthy competitor. Make internal competitive friendly and enjoyable.
- Don’t assume all stress is bad. For optimal performance, you shouldn’t eliminate stress.
- When things get tough, people look to you as a leader to remind the organization of a brighter long-term outlook.
- When it comes to group decision making, let your team speak first. Don’t bias the discussion by stating your opinion too early.
Whether you’re a seasoned executive, an aspiring leader, or someone passionate about human psychology, The Psychology of Leadership is an invaluable guide that challenges conventional wisdom, encourages self-reflection, and provides practical insights to transform leadership from a transactional process into a deeply human endeavor.
Leaders will develop what feels like mind-reading abilities for interpreting workplace personalities, hidden motivations, and group dynamics. They will learn how to inspire their organization to move mountains, improve their ability to listen, communicate and, when necessary, persuade. Along the way they will dramatically improve their own mindset and resilience.
Sebastien Page
Page shares these additional insights with us:
Question: What inspired you to write The Psychology of Leadership?
Page: I wanted to become a better leader and build resilience. I met a sports psychologist, and the story he told me during our first discussion was the spark that started this project. It put me on a path of discovery.
What I learned has been life-changing and worth sharing with the world. I became a better leader at work, acquired wisdom, and developed resilience in all aspects of my life.
Question: Which of the 18 principles from the book do you think people most often overlook?
Page: Most people overlook the pitfalls of measurable goals. In the psychology literature, Mt. Everest deaths are a common case study.
The spring 2023 Everest season was the deadliest in history. If we include five missing climbers presumed dead, the death toll stands at 17. Yet, there were no massive earthquakes or extreme weather events. Experts and Nepali officials blame many factors, including climber errors, inexperienced guides, crowdedness, and climate change. Most Everest deaths aren’t predictable or preventable.
The reality is that climbing Everest is a deadly idea to begin with. If you’ve reached the summit of Everest, I admire and respect you. At the same time, let me ask you: why?
Question: “Leadership” is at once a broad concept and one that’s often siloed in business to refer to management. How do you define it?
Page: Management refers to the formal relationship between and boss and an employee, or a boss and her team.
Leadership is the ability to inspire others, to help them perform at their highest level. It’s the job of the leader to set goals. Leadership requires humility. It requires making tough decisions. Always remember why your company exists in the first place. It doesn’t exist to boost your ego.
Question: What is one of the most common pitfalls that people encounter when setting goals?
Page: Goal-induced blindness happens when you’re so obsessed with reaching a goal that you don’t see the negative consequences of your actions. You lose sight of the big picture. Mt. Everest deaths are an example of goal-induced blindness cited in the psychology literature. Climbers obsess over the measurable goal of reaching the summit; they sacrifice safety and sometimes die in the process.
There are many other ways in which the focus on outcomes leads to undesirable side effects. Some people decide to bend the rules. Others sacrifice their work-life balance, even their health.
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Page is Chief Investment Officer and Head of Global Multi-Asset at T. Rowe Price.
He has written two finance books: Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know, and the co-authored Factor Investing and Asset Allocation, and he has won six annual research-paper awards: two from The Financial Analysts Journal and four from The Journal of Portfolio Management. He appears regularly on CNBC and Bloomberg TV, and in 2022 was named a Top Voice in Finance by LinkedIn. He has been quoted extensively in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Barron’s.
Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.
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