Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (39 page)

For better or worse, I am hardly alone.
People are moved into managerial roles because they were the most skilled, intelligent, or productive team member in a nonmanagerial position.
If you have a dozen engineers working in a group and the manager leaves, creating a leadership vacuum, it is natural for the organization to promote the most successful of the dozen to become the new manager.

Catalyzing Leadership

I’ve given you my own anecdotal experience, but are social motivation and social skills actually important for a leader’s success?
If they are, then why don’t we see more bosses being selected and promoted for their social competence?

Answering the first question is straightforward.
The social ability of leaders can have huge consequences for the success of their teams.
John Zenger, a leadership expert, has
asked thousands of employees to score the leadership
effectiveness of their boss.
He found that when he divided the bosses into “great” (top 20 percent), “good” (middle 60 percent), and “bad” (bottom 20 percent), the result was
highly predictive of various outcomes including profit, employee satisfaction, turnover, and customer satisfaction.
He then described five leadership competencies that he hypothesized would be associated with being a better leader: personal competence (intelligence, problem solving, expert knowledge, and training), focus on results (being driven to move tasks forward and complete them), character (integrity and authenticity), leading organizational change, and finally, interpersonal skills.
His analysis then focused on pairing different competencies together to improve overall leadership.
Zenger found that combining interpersonal skills with other competencies allowed leaders to maximize their effectiveness.

Zenger found that if employees rated a manager as very high on “focus on results” (that is, one’s ability to get things done effectively), there was still only a small (14 percent) chance that the manager would be rated among the top 10 percent of leaders overall.
However, if in addition to “focus on results,” employees also rated the manager’s ability to “build relationships” very highly, then the likelihood of that person’s being rated as a great leader overall skyrocketed to 72 percent.

Essentially, social skills improve the value of the other competencies because they allow leaders to manage the social and emotional responses of their employees.
When employees are performing some aspect of their job incorrectly, there is a fine line between correcting them in a way that is supportive and correcting them in a manner that makes them feel rejected, undermining their willingness to internalize the feedback and to work hard in the future.
Social skills allow the boss to walk that tightrope without falling off.

Sometimes social skills are more important than personal competence.
In a laboratory study,
three-person teams were brought together
to perform a complex task for which it was natural for someone on the team to emerge as a leader.
At the end of the task, each team member rated the others on the extent to which they emerged as an effective leader.
A team member’s intelligence and
social skills were both associated with being singled out as an effective leader.
However, social skills were considered nearly twice as important.

If social skills exert such a strong influence on the success of leaders, they should be a major criterion in the hiring and promotion of managers and executive leaders within a company.
Unfortunately, they are all too often overlooked.
David Rock, who works with dozens of Fortune 500 companies, sees this all the time.
“One of the most common concerns I hear from organizations every week is that the more technical their people are, the worse their social skills seem to be, and that this can really become a problem when they become a manager or leader.”
In a recent survey conducted by the Management Research Group and the Neuroleadership Institute, the competencies of thousands of employees were examined.
Although more than 50 percent were rated by their bosses and peers as having a high degree of “goal focus,” less than 1 percent were rated as high on both goal focus and interpersonal skills.
We know from Zenger’s analyses that putting these two competencies together is essential to leadership success, but it is clear that businesses are neither identifying individuals with both nor cultivating leadership through their culture or training programs.

The Neural Seesaw

Why aren’t leaders always selected with social ability in mind?
One of the reasons for this is that our mental representation of what a leader looks like is at odds with what actually makes for a successful leader.
Robert Lord has studied perceptions of leaders for decades.
In one review of more than two dozen studies, he examined
the characteristics that people associated with leaders
, in order to identify which traits came to mind most frequently.
He found that “intelligence,” “dominance,” and “masculinity” were consistently
rated highly; social skills didn’t make the cut.
People think of leaders as smart and forceful, rather than as socially skilled.
This perception no doubt influences hiring decisions.

In addition to issues of perception, perhaps there is something about the fundamental relationships between analytical and social intelligence that makes it more difficult to identify leaders who show strengths in both.
One study examined this possibility by looking at the relationships
between intelligence, empathy, and leadership.
Intelligence and empathy were each associated with leadership; however, intelligence and empathy were negatively correlated with one another.

We have already seen this trade-off between social and non-social thinking in the moment-to-moment dynamics of the brain.
Recall the mentalizing network that allows us to think about what is going on in the mind of others (see
Figure 2.1
).
There is also a separate network for abstract reasoning about nonsocial phenomena that is associated with general intelligence (see
Figure 2.3
).
One of the defining features of these two networks is their relationship with each other.
When we are left to our own devices to think as we please, these two networks act
like two ends of a seesaw
; as either side increases (goes up) in activity, the other side decreases (goes down).

This relationship between thinking socially and thinking non-socially may make it hard to do both at the same time.
In many cases, mental processes facilitate one another rather than competing.
For instance, seeing and hearing complement one another.
Seeing someone’s lips move as they speak helps our auditory processes unpack what we hear that person saying.
Though there have been studies showing the social and nonsocial reasoning
systems operating in a complementary fashion, it is far more common to see them at odds with each other.

There are two ways to think about this antagonism between social and nonsocial intelligence as it relates to leadership.
First, some people might just have an enduring predisposition to activate the network for nonsocial reasoning, deactivating the social network as
an accidental by-product.
This could be a result of genetics or the result of a lifetime of practice, living in a society that values abstract thinking over social thinking.

Alternatively, other people might prioritize nonsocial thinking because of how they think about their job.
To the extent that someone frames a leadership task primarily in nonsocial terms, they are more likely to suppress the social mind, rendering them less sensitive to the social events around them and less likely to consider the social implications of their own behaviors and those of their employees.
Often when a team member says that she is having trouble making progress on a task, the subtext may be that she is having difficulty working well with one or more other people on the team.
A leader who is socially attuned may realize the group dynamics need work.
A leader who isn’t may focus on whether the employee needs more personal training in order to be able to complete the task—a poor solution to the actual problem.

There’s good news and less good news when it comes to dealing with the brain’s seesaw between thinking socially and thinking nonsocially.
For those who frame aspects of their work as fundamentally nonsocial, a shift in how the task is understood may lead to more balance.
The most effective leaders are able to bounce back and forth between these mental modes.
That’s the good news.
The less good news is that if a person is biologically disposed to favor the nonsocial network, a simple reframing of the job is unlikely to do the trick.
For someone who has spent a lifetime overlooking the social aspects of the workplace environment, becoming fluent in social understanding might be akin to learning a second language in adulthood.
It can be done, but it takes a lot more effort than it would have taken in childhood.

The best bosses understand and care about the social motivations of all the members of the team.
Bosses have to foster better
connections
between themselves and their team, among team members, and between the team and other outside groups and individuals critical to success.
Better communication will reduce the
mindreading
burden on everyone on the team, and it will allow social issues to be nipped in the bud, rather than festering from one project to the next.
Efforts to make the group actually feel like a group will be rewarded, as team members start to better identify with the team.
This will facilitate the kind of
harmonizing
that will promote individuals thinking about how they can best serve the team, rather than themselves.
As social animals, we are wired to do this, as long as we really identify with the team.
Creating this identification, this attachment to the group, is an essential component of successful leadership.

All of this is really just the start of a conversation about how the social brain influences the workplace, from work spaces to organizational structure.
But it is a conversation that hasn’t been had enough.
And done well, it can transform an organization.

CHAPTER 12
Educating the Social Brain

I
n the United States, we spend more on public education (kindergarten through twelfth grade)
than nearly any other country (more than $800 billion per year).
And yet international comparisons suggest that our students are lagging behind most industrialized nations in math, science, and reading.
Out of 34 comparison countries
, U.S.
students rank twenty-fifth in math, seventeenth in science, and fourteenth in reading.
This means that as a country,
we are getting a lousy return
on our investment in education.

My belief is that junior high holds the key to our educational woes.
Junior high is made up of seventh and eighth graders who are between the ages of twelve and fourteen.
There is a drop on several key educational indicators that occurs between fourth and eighth grade, and if we can stem the tide of disinterest and disengagement that occurs during these years, I think
the societal payoff would be immeasurable
.
There are few problems that, if solved, would have more widespread benefits than keeping our children interested and excited about their own education.

The primary pathway to solving this problem over the last decade has been the accountability approach embedded in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act passed by Congress in 2001.
This plan focused on annual testing of students and the creation of report cards to assess each school (thus, if the children fail, so does their school).
There are various criticisms of NCLB, and the general consensus is that while it has increased performance on the specific
tests associated with NCLB, it has not increased real learning or improved our international standings.
For my purposes, it represents a strong contrast to approaches that incorporate what we have learned about the social brain.
I would like to consider what our knowledge of the social brain tells us about how to improve education, particularly in junior high.

The Need to Belong

I began seventh grade as the prototypical “new kid,” having just moved from one part of New Jersey to another.
On the first day of class, I was lucky to make friends with a kid who liked the same sports I did, played videogames, and was really smart.
In fact, he was so smart that I found it hard to believe he had done poorly on the placement tests we took the following week.
When I asked him about it, he told me he had tanked the tests on purpose so that other kids wouldn’t know he was smart and tease him.
Although the geographical distance between my sixth and seventh grades was not that great, the universe seemed to have turned on its head such that it was suddenly very uncool to be smart and try hard.
My friend was more concerned with being liked than with doing well.
Thankfully, my friend didn’t tell me any of this
before
the placement tests.

There are myriad reasons why academic performance
and interest drop in junior high, but one nonobvious reason may be that the need to belong, our most basic social motivation, is not being met.
Changing schools, from elementary to junior high, right around the same time that we reach puberty creates an uncertain and unstable social environment.
This switch also brings with it a change
from having a single teacher for most of the day, a teacher who knows each student well, to the high school model with different teachers for each subject.

Do junior high students feel like they don’t belong?
According to work by my UCLA colleague Jaana Juvonen, junior high students in the United States feel strongly that they don’t belong.
Juvonen and her team analyzed data from more than 32,000 junior high students across a dozen countries.
On multiple measures, U.S.
students reported feeling less socially connected to their schools, teachers, and peers than students in most other countries in the survey.
Our students rated the overall school climate in junior high worse than did students in any of the other countries, and our ratings were twice as negative as the country ranking second to last.