Neuroscience for Leaders

A Brain Adaptive Leadership Approach

Nikolaos Dimitriadis, Alexandros Psychogios

• Verlag: Kogan Page
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780749475529
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Business
• Thema: Leadership

To behave more productively in complex business situations, we need to understand and alter the inner workings of our brain. With insight from applied neuroscience, behavioural economics and psychology, the brain can be retrained and become our most valuable asset. Neuroscience for Leaders takes a practical approach and offers an easy-to-implement framework for making the behavioural changes to become a more effective leader. Drawing on research and practical experience, the authors present a flexible framework for fine-tuning the leadership brain. The Brain Adaptive Leadership approach is a step-by-step guide to enhancing the way you think, understanding and nurturing emotions, shaping automated brain responses, and developing dynamic relations. Neuroscience for Leaders explains both the underlying science and how to apply its findings in business, demonstrating why and how you can become a better leader through brain-based learning. With tools, managerial tips and clear actions to implement the method straight away, Neuroscience for Leaders is an invaluable companion to managers and leaders who want to gain the brain edge.

Pillar 1

Thinking

01

Powerful brain, powerful leader

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Friday’s business plan meeting

It is Friday afternoon and everyone has showed up for the meeting. The whole week has been extremely demanding as the team have been finalizing the business plan for the next year. Working until late at night has been the norm during this week. The last important details on key strategic issues are to be clarified in this meeting and the tension in the room is evident. Everybody is physically and mentally exhausted and can’t wait to get it over with. Although business planning has always been demanding, this year the pressure has been higher than ever due to new market challenges. This business plan could make a big difference for the company by creating real growth or it could perform below expectations, seriously damaging both the company’s and the team’s reputation. The team leader enters the room. She has always been a believer in leading by example so this week she was the first to enter the office early in the morning and the last to leave late at night. Her deep-rooted belief is that if they all work harder and longer they will succeed. She takes a look at the agenda then at the strained faces around the table. The meeting begins.

Implementation arguments quickly evolve into confrontational lock-ins. Disagreements on strategy turn into nasty personal comments. And the widespread dissatisfaction progresses by the end of the meeting into a few emotional breakdowns. Although the team ultimately manage to deliver a business plan that achieves its main goals, the team spirit that had been so carefully and expensively built over the last year has been irreversibly damaged. Relationships never recover and two key people leave the company within the next few months. Surprising as it may sound, the overall outcome of that Friday meeting had already been decided before it even started. Not by the people in that meeting. Not even by their leader. But by their brains.

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How many times do leaders and managers face situations like that? Formal meetings, important presentations, feedback sessions or simple decision making are frequently performed by strained and overworked people. Regardless of the cultural stereotype of the all-powerful leader who is constantly on top form and eternally in total control, science shows that brain strength has limits. If those limits are ignored, self-control can deteriorate fast, with dire consequences for all involved. Willpower is a key leadership characteristic and one that has to be carefully nurtured to produce desirable support for both clear thinking and better management of emotions. And it all starts in the brain.

The energy-devouring brain

The brain consumes more energy than any other organ in our bodies. According to a Scientific America article in 2008, the brain takes, in total, more than 20 per cent of the whole energy available to the body (Swaminathan, 2008). Although it represents only 2 per cent of our body mass it consumes one fifth of the oxygen and one quarter of the glucose (Foer, 2012). If it were an organization this could mean that the brain represents a department with just 2 per cent of the total workforce, but one that demands 20 per cent of the company’s financial resources. Naturally, every decision in this department would be taken with maximum efficiency and effectiveness in mind. Prioritization would be the name of the game and every action would be painstakingly weighed by its impact on the survival of the whole organization. The brain behaves in exactly the same manner. It prioritizes body functions that ensure its survival, redirecting energy to those strategic areas from more exotic and luxurious functions such as analysis and forecasting, if and when needed. Going back to the organizational analogy, it is not very different from the fact that many companies, when coping with diminishing sales, focus on and commit more resources to those areas believed to be essential for the survival of the business. At the same time they take resources away from more elaborate and risky future projects and from expensive advertising campaigns.

Going a step further, neuroscience reveals that the brain consumes most of its energy on automatic maintenance systems rather than on executive, higher cognition functions. The brain consumes almost 90 per cent of its energy in a calm state, when people are not asked to do much thinking. So, it actually has a small portion of its energy available to devote to complex and cognitively demanding tasks such as managing a year-end meeting, debating the last details of a business plan and navigating diplomatically through the team’s conflicting opinions. We go through our lives being confident that most of the brain’s processing happens in the area we are aware of, our consciousness. This could not be further from the truth. Most of the power is used elsewhere, deep into our brains. The part that we believe offers us our main competences and skills in developing ourselves and our careers, our analytical problem-solving part, receives just a fraction of the total energy. This means that we have to be extremely careful and strategic about managing this energy. Otherwise we will not have much to use in our demanding, challenging and exhausting daily management tasks.

The main question leaders need to answer then is how much power they will allow their brain to channel into its problem-solving section when they need to perform their best in such conditions. Are they going to create a situation where the brain will be starving for power and automatically will be reallocating it to more crucial and deeper structures for its survival? Or are they going to manage their working and living environments in such a way that will allow them to perform within maximum brain-power capacity when facing adversity? The first option represents the fast lane to bad decisions, angry responses and failed meetings. The second option represents the safe way for leaders to enhance their decision-making abilities and control over emotional reactions in an effective and meaningful way.

The willpower muscle for leaders

Willpower and self-control are not infinite. Walter Mischel, in his book The Marshmallow Test, analytically describes and explains the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment, conducted by him in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Walter has demonstrated graphically that when we are exposed to situations where we need to portray self-control we consume brain energy fast and thus perform much worse in the next task that needs willpower. Children that demonstrated higher willpower when asked to restrain themselves from eating a marshmallow put in front of them, performed worse in the next test on self-control that followed immediately after the marshmallow one. On the contrary, kids that showed less self-control and ate the marshmallow fast in the first test, performed much better in the second one. How can this happen? Isn’t willpower something we either have or do not have? Results of the marshmallow experiment look counterintuitive since we tend to believe that willpower is a key personality trait. Societies seem to separate people into strong and weak, whatever the situation, and people tend to distinguish leaders stereotypically as strong and weak based on specific prototypes that they have in their minds.

When we present the marshmallow experiment in the class and we ask our audiences, students or executives, about the outcome of the second test, almost unanimously they respond in a predictable way: the kids that showed higher willpower in the first test did better in the second test as well. When we reveal the actual results it usually takes them a few minutes to adjust to this new view on willpower. This is further proof that it is not easy to overcome long-held beliefs in human nature and behaviour even when scientific proof is so strong. When they do come around to the idea that willpower is like a muscle that you can strain, they are able to explain past experiences better and see the future in a more confident and clearer way. They tend to recognize specific cases in their professional lives during which they passed through an exhausting process of the brain that led them to think and act in a less effective way at a later stage.

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Action box

Sit down, relax and then mentally go back to the last time that you experienced a critical and demanding situation at work that needed effort and fast decisions. Think about the things that consumed your brain energy and then think about what happened afterwards. Consolidate your conclusions based on the arguments above and think what you need to be aware of next time. Do it. You will be amazed by the results.

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The brain will utilize the power it has to help the person perform the desired task appropriately. This task could be a negotiation, a pitch presentation or a one-to-one coaching session. But being an energy-saving organ, when it is asked to consume a lot of energy and the overall energy levels fall it will re-prioritize and make sure that energy flows primarily where it is needed the most. And this is always its survival and body maintenance centres. Thus, leaders need to be always aware of their brain’s ability to distribute enough power to its executive part when it is crucial for them to perform at their best. Otherwise, primal emotions, confusing thoughts and an inability to focus on the right things will take over and damage processes, relations and outcomes. Ego depletion settles in when your ego, as in your ability to direct your own actions, is so tired and depleted of power that it cannot function properly anymore. In essence, it is not in control any more. You are not in control anymore. Primal brain functions have completely taken over your body. No leader wants to be in a situation like that. Ever!

The good news is that the willpower muscle in leaders’ brains can be improved in the long term. The leading researcher of ego depletion, Roy Baumeister (2011), in his book Willpower: Rediscovering the greatest human strength, has long argued the benefits of strengthening our willpower muscle and the perils of not doing so. From all available recommendations from the science of self-control, our experience has shown that higher-level thinking, strong values and immediate feedback are three key strategies in companies for strengthening the leadership willpower muscle. Let us explain.

Higher-level thinking

Higher-level thinking is described as engaging in more abstract and creative thoughts or simply considering the big picture of a situation. This way of thinking, which is more conceptual, is related to ‘why’ questions and is the exact opposite of low-level thinking that asks more ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions. Experiments have found that higher thinking helps the brain perform better in willpower tests than low-level th...