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Leading with Depth: The Impact of Emotions and Relationships on Leadership

Author(s) : Claudia Nagel

Reviews and Endorsements

Claudia Nagel takes you on a vivid journey into the inner world of people, companies, and how organisations really work. By exploring what drives us and examining different leadership traits, she shines a spotlight on what really happens at the heart of companies. An interesting and enlightening read that every leader should have close to hand.
Stefan Behr, CEO of J.P.Morgan SE

Claudia Nagel’s inspiring book analyses leadership from a psychological perspective: leaders’ emotions, ambivalences, doubt, uncertainty, and the pressure they feel. By introducing handy analogies – such as “the leader as container”, that is, creating a trusted, safe space in which a team can grow – she invites her readers on a journey into the age of hybrid work, Zoom fatigue, love, loneliness, and work friendship. A wise and thought-provoking book.
Prof. Gerd Gigerenzer, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin

I loved reading this book. It confirms what is, of course, not something new: management and leadership are much more than technical skills. But it is thrilling the way it illustrates how personal and individual behaviour influences leadership. It is striking to learn how these factors contribute to performance. It offers insights into what might trigger patterns and, consequently, allows us to derive solutions from a team and personal perspective. It’s all about people.
Dr Ulrich Hüllman, CFO, Viessmann Group Holding

This book presents a unique knowledge collection on leadership and leaders and their emotional set up. It offers theoretical perspectives and practical solutions enriched with varied case studies. Prof. Nagel has produced a masterful piece of clear scholarship and practical insights in a very approachable way. I highly appreciate her excellent knowledge of how leaders today must deal with the demands from changing economics and societies.
Issy Drori, Emeritus Professor, VU Amsterdam

You believe you’re leading in a purely rational way? No, that’s impossible.” Claudia Nagel had coined this term earlier. And it’s the perfect launchpad for this book. Allow yourself the benefit of doubt behind your firm belief. Start observing your own emotions, get suspicious and curious about yourself. Look deeper, emotions are your constant companion. They affect how you arrive at decisions and how you guide and motivate the humans around you. Leadership is deeply embedded in the human factor, i.e. the subtle, yet immensely powerful, emotional interaction between people. Study and understand what’s going on in you. Reflect on your impact on the people around you and what drives them: hope as much as anxiety, conflict as much as uncertainty and change. Nagel’s book delivers on the provocation. It provides an exhaustive compendium of real-life insights and great food for thought. The set-up combines conceptual and illustrative parts with great added value from case studies. Think Leadership with Depth.
Dr. Robert Bente, entrepreneur and multiple supervisory board member

Prof. Nagel provides a crystal-clear overview of what has been learned about leadership and about what is needed to strengthen it. Complementing her framework, the succeeding chapters each explore related issues, experiences, and dilemmas that beautifully illustrate the book’s main focus. While addressing complex issues, the writing is accessible and direct. In one stunning insight after another, this book clearly shows how effective leadership helps us transform experience into meaning, and how it supports our ability to think rather than act impulsively. It is an important advance in our understanding of how emotional life and relationships affect leaders’ success. One that I highly recommend to leaders, consultants, and academics.
James Krantz, Principal, WorkLab

Nagel summarises theory and explains it using examples from her work. There is a sense of her voice, as she interweaves her own opinions and remarks – which I enjoyed. [...] Nagel helps us understand how emotions and relationships impact a leader's successes and failures.
Mel Kinross, MBACP (Accred), counsellor and supervisor, BACP, Therapy Today, April 2024, 35:3

Although Nagel foregrounds the individual in the organisation, she also gives attention to the organisation in its environment. She mostly avoids the politics of consumer capitalism and the challenges to public service in the face of neoliberal individualism but she does not miss opportunities to remind leaders of the opportunities and advantages in having an experienced consultant or coach by their side. She invites questioning of Milton Friedman’s assertion that the only social responsibility of a business is making profit and invokes the authority of Immanuel Kant in saying that leaders as agents of a system are autonomous and can act individually. We get insights from her own consultancy practice, as she recognises the importance of understanding organisations as complex adaptive systems, social network systems, and ecosystems. She describes challenges to the integration of different organisational cultures in the tussle between cooperation and collaboration in what she calls hybrid organisations working for both private profit and public good, whilst ecological leadership emphasises long-term perspectives, sustainability orientation, and responsible decision-making.
Tim Dartington, Organisational and Social Dynamics: Volume 24 Number 1

Claudia Nagel has, therefore, accomplished a meritorious work in organizing and presenting, today, a text that can be also considered symbolically representative of the point at which the psychodynamic perspective has reached in applying its own knowledge and experience in the world of work.
Hogrefe Italy e-magazine, No. 109, March 2024