This is a summary of the book titled “The Psychology of Leadership” written by Sebastien Page and published by Harriman House in 2025. The author is a business executive who brings his experience and aspects of sports psychology, positive psychology and personality psychology to discover and frame tenets of universal leadership that promotes high-end performance. These tenets include being aware of unintended consequences, organizing your work around your goals, and not obsessing over winning. This also implies developing a personal sense of success, assessing those beliefs, giving a sense of purpose to everyone and developing patience.

By borrowing ideas from different perspectives and disciplines besides his own experience, he rounds up his framework with the specific mental skills that are critical to high performance. For example, sports psychology doesn’t define success as winning but learning to develop mental resilience to keep going when you lose. The PERMA model which stands for “positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment” offers the advantage of setting realistic goals and preparing for unforeseen consequences. This is especially helpful to long-term roadmaps.

Developing an innate sense of success also differentiate success and happiness. Success must lead to happiness. Real, enduring happiness centers more on “ERMA” in the PERMA. Good relationships with your colleagues, a sense that your work is meaningful and a feeling of genuine accomplishment can lead to personal happiness. A good leader knows that this leads to increased productivity and motivation in the team. To promote engagement and flow, optimize “Return on Time Spent”. Start by reviewing the job’s activities for everyone, the time and effort involved and how it aligns with goals. A sense of meaning benefits everyone. The R and the M in the PERMA stand for relationships and meaning. Relationships is how people trust one another, and Meaning is what binds them. An articulated purpose should come through in goal setting. Although A stands for accomplishments, success should not be the only priority. Success does boost well-being but in isolation, it is just a heady rush or short-lived emotion. Similarly, mastery isn’t a one-off experience, it is a sustainable character trait. When assessing your own beliefs on success, start with how you and your team relate to the world. Re-evaluating trivial mission statements, refining core beliefs and writing them down help. Engineering taught us about dynamic feedback loops to narrow down the discrepancies between expectations and reality. Working backwards from the goal helps us do that.

Finally, most leadership, charters, roadmap, goals, relationships, success and motivation must be accommodating to unknown and unforeseen circumstances as they develop. So, developing strategic patience may not be comfortable but it is needed.