Book Review: Anna-Lucia Mackay,The Four Mindsets: How to Influence,Motivate and Lead High Performance Team

Once your mindset changes, everything on the outside will change along with it.

—Steve Maraboli, Behavioral Scientist

The practical implementation of this quote is the book by Anna-Lucia Mackay, The Four Mindsets: How to Influence, Motivate and Lead High Performance Team. With ‘perform or perish’ situations, high performance is a dream or demand for managers. Anna-Lucia Mackay, consultant and coach with expertize on Emotional Intelligence brings this book connecting mindsets of a manager and high performance of his/her team.

Manager’s job is complex and needs to wear different hats in different situations. He or she can be a motivator, trainer, coach, mentor, evaluator and ultimately a leader who is a role model for the team. This book provides guidance on performing these roles with the right mindset.

The crux of the book is four mindsets: the emotional intelligence mindset, the connection mindset, the growth mindset and the performance mindset.

The emotional intelligence mindset (Chapters 1–4) helps to inspire the team, earn respect and build trust. Self-awareness (clarity on own personality, habits, thoughts, motivations, behaviours, emotions and responses) and self-management (control and resilience) will develop emotional intelligence. Trust on personal front is based on character traits and trust on professional front is based on reliable work performance. The manager can become a role model for the team with his/her caring nature, desire to help and develop others, positive attitude, consistency, authenticity, sincerity and genuineness. The four chapters in this section are a quick lesson on Emotional Intelligence with reference to self-awareness and self-management.

For making high performance team, team members must be committed. Book does not bring in any discussion on commitment as a result of inspiration. Secondly, the role of intrinsic motivation in Emotional Intelligence or passion leading to high performance is not touched.

The connection mindset (Chapters 5–8) explores understanding the teammates and staying connected with them. Empathy, a critical management competency, drives connection between people by having a clue on people’s need, want and values and predicting the actions and reactions. Empathy is also an attribute of emotional intelligence. In case of personal and professional connection, the first level is ‘how’ work is performed. This requires communication on product and processes and communication among team members and also communication with the stakeholders. The second level is ‘why’. This requires a clear understanding why something is important. The ‘why’ gives the emotional connection to the business and the ‘how’ gives the confidence to act. The non-verbal communication and social presence matters in establishing a personal connection. The manager can develop a skill to communicate during challenging situations without breaking connection. The second section provides a lesson on two more aspects of emotional intelligence: empathy and connecting socially.

The connection of manager with team members is very well discussed. The connection among members and collaboration level are equally important. The participation and contribution of team members with collaborative efforts lead to performing team. However, team building or team dynamics or team collaboration is not covered.

The growth mindset (Chapters 9–12) takes care of learning and growth to build confidence in performing the job. A manager is an informal or formal trainer as well as a coach. For training, the manager must take care of learning style as well as preferences of team members. The manager needs to know the distinction between coaching and mentoring and their appropriate application. The confidence curve discussed in this section gives how to reach peak performance zone and what leads to confidence erosion. This section gives an application of emotional intelligence skills learned in first two sections while training, coaching, mentoring and story-telling.

The missing piece in this section is organization culture or developing work culture. Culture is often considered as the way we do the things. It would have been better if cultural aspects would have been discussed.

The performance mindset (Chapters 13–16) focuses on accountability and achievements. For performance, the first step is to recruit a right person. The second step is to generate attachment to the team and to have alignment with the team within a critical period of 90 days. For focus and accountability, the book suggests SMART goal setting and also gives tips on focused meetings and focused emails. The last chapter is on Performance management and performance review.

The performance management system has been under scrutiny by academics as well as practitioners. This book has not taken care of recent developments in performance management system.

There is no discussion on any conflicts among the four mindsets or difficulties in switching mindsets. For example, can connection mindset and performance mindset have different priorities? When a manager has a dominant mindset of one or two types of mindsets, how can a he or she switch from one mindset to other?

Important aspect is that chapters (except last) have reflective questions and points on where to start. The questions give an assessment of your own current position and ‘points where to start’ helps you to decide a plan of actions.

Several concepts and instruments related to Human Resource Management, such as psychological contract, emotional intelligence, Learned Intuition, personal connection, TALKING, The Confidence Curve, Adult learning, Sperry’s left brain right brain theory, the four colour four quadrant graphic and whole brain, GROW coaching model, SMART goal setting and many more things, have been interwoven smoothly and systematically into different chapters. There is a lot to learn and understand how each one is linked to mindset and contributes to the high-performance team.

Overall good flow in the book presentation and simple language make it easy for reading. Numerous concepts and instruments make reader knowledgeable. Pragmatic aspects make knowledgeable reader a performing manager. With emotional intelligence, the performing manager turns into a leader of high performance team.