Small Business Insights from the Other Side of the Table
Every leader sets a tone. You may not think of yourself as an “emotional broadcaster,” but psychologist Daniel Goleman and researcher Richard Boyatzis would tell you that’s exactly what you are — whether you’re running a 15-person branch network or a five-person landscaping crew.
In their book Primal Leadership, Goleman, Boyatzis, and Annie McKee introduced a framework that’s stuck with me since my MBA coursework: leaders create either resonance or dissonance in the people around them, and that emotional tone spreads through a team faster than almost anything else you do as a leader.
Most leadership content stops there and tells you to “be more resonant.” I think that’s incomplete advice — and potentially bad advice for a small business owner. Here’s why.
What Resonance Actually Looks Like
Resonant leadership is what it sounds like when a team is “in sync.” Goleman describes it almost musically — a leader who reads the emotional room and responds to it, creating alignment instead of forcing it. Four leadership styles tend to build resonance: Visionary, Coaching, Affiliative, and Democratic. When you use them well, people don’t just comply — they commit. They bring discretionary effort to the job because they feel understood, not managed.
If you’ve ever worked for someone who made you want to run through a wall for them, that’s resonance. If you’ve ever run a team meeting where people leaned in instead of checking their phones, that’s resonance too.
What Dissonance Actually Looks Like (and Why It’s Not Always the Enemy)
Dissonant leadership is what happens when a leader is out of sync with the emotional reality of their people — creating anxiety, pessimism, or quiet disengagement. Goleman and Boyatzis are clear that this is often unintentional. It’s not usually a tyrant behind the desk. It’s an owner so buried in payroll, inventory, and cash flow that they stop reading the room entirely.
But here’s the nuance that gets lost: not all dissonance is destructive. There’s a difference between chronic dissonance (a leader consistently disconnected from their team’s emotional state) and situational dissonance (direct, uncomfortable truth-telling in service of the business).
Small business owners who avoid all dissonance often avoid necessary conversations — the underperforming employee who needs direct feedback, the vendor relationship that needs to end, the pivot that will upset people in the short term but save the business in the long term. A leader who is resonant 100% of the time can drift into conflict avoidance, which is its own slow-moving failure mode.
The leaders who last aren’t the ones who eliminate dissonance. They’re the ones who can move between the two deliberately — resonance as the default operating mode, dissonance as a tool they’re willing to use when the moment calls for it.
The Real Risk: Chronic Dissonance Without Recovery
Boyatzis’s later work, particularly Resonant Leadership (with McKee), digs into something I think is more relevant to small business owners than any ratio or formula: what he calls “power stress” or the “sacrifice syndrome.”
Running a business is relentless. You’re the strategist, the operator, the HR department, and often the person unlocking the front door. That sustained pressure erodes your capacity for resonance over time — not because you stop caring, but because chronic stress physiologically narrows your ability to empathize and read others accurately. Dissonance creeps in not through a single bad decision, but through accumulated depletion.
Boyatzis’s answer isn’t “try harder to be positive.” It’s intentional renewal — mindfulness, hope, compassion, and yes, even play — as the mechanism that resets a leader’s capacity for resonance before burnout tips them permanently into dissonant patterns.
For small business owners, this shows up in very unglamorous ways:
- Taking an actual lunch break instead of eating over the keyboard
- Having one real conversation a day with an employee that isn’t about a task
- Stepping away from the business regularly enough that your nervous system gets to downshift
- Working with a coach or mentor who can see your blind spots when you’re too deep in the weeds to see them yourself
The Practical Takeaway
If you’re a small business owner, the question isn’t “how do I become a purely resonant leader?” It’s:
- Is my default state resonant? Are my people generally getting a version of me that’s present, attuned, and invested in them — or are they getting whatever’s left over after the day’s fires are out?
- When I use dissonance, is it intentional? Am I delivering hard truths because the business needs it, or am I leaking stress and frustration onto my team because I haven’t recovered from anything in weeks?
- Do I have a renewal practice? Not a vacation once a year — a regular mechanism that keeps you from running on fumes.
The businesses I watched struggle most during my years in banking weren’t usually run by bad people. They were run by good people who had quietly slid into chronic dissonance without realizing it, because nobody built in the recovery.
Resonance and dissonance aren’t opposites to choose between. They’re both instruments. The leaders — and the businesses — that last are the ones who know which one the moment calls for, and who’ve built in enough renewal to keep playing both well.
Curious where your own leadership tendencies sit on this spectrum? That’s exactly the kind of blind spot a coaching conversation is built to surface. Reach out if you want to talk it through.