Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders (18 page)

The Neuroscience of the Summit Syndrome

Leaders are often chosen for their background of distinguished excellence. Many people, in fact, proceed through life experiencing increasing growth until they suddenly get “stuck.” What is happening when this occurs? Have they suddenly realized their limits? Is the pressure too much? Have they been faking success all along? Is this the final reckoning?

These are the thoughts that go through the minds of successful leaders when they are at their peak. Two references in the
Harvard Business Review
summarize these constructs well. In one, the authors
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describe how leaders with a background of outstanding problem-solving abilities can lose their bearings and question their purpose once a job has been mastered. They initially experience a sense of vague dissatisfaction that leads to confusion and then to inner absolute turmoil and chaos. Three phases of the summit syndrome have been identified:

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The approach phase—
Here, leaders have gained mastery of their current jobs. Things come automatically to them. They miss the adrenalin rush of finding solutions because things come so easily. As a result, they push harder to recapture this adrenaline rush of the climb, but are unsuccessful.

•
The plateau phase—
Here, leaders have conquered virtually all the challenges of the current job. Nothing requires too much effort. At first fun, these individuals, who start to get bored with just “coasting,” give one final push to try to produce even more stellar results, but to less effect and greater dissatisfaction.

•
The terminal descending phase—
In this phase, the performance of leaders slips noticeably. They are no longer on the “climb,” and the plateau has bored them considerably. Instead, they mourn the loss of their superstar status and either jump ship, accept a demotion, or take a lateral transfer. Essentially, they have peaked with no vision for the future and are “rotting” in their current position.

Here are some of the neural constructs involved in this syndrome:

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Anxiety is experienced due to deceleration and “stopping.”
This anxiety increases amygdala activation, which in turn disrupts thinking.

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Leaders get bored easily because their brains get “numb.”
Leaders who are particularly vulnerable to the summit syndrome may be have a susceptibility to boredom. A recent study has shown that if you repeatedly present a visual stimulus to high- versus low-sensation seekers, the ventral PFC shows lower involvement among high-sensation seekers. This area of the brain is the accountant, which integrates factual and emotional risks and benefits prior to action. If it does not receive the necessary information, it conveys no information to the action center. Essentially, it may have become “numb.” Brain wave analysis in the frontal lobe confirmed that boredom susceptibility correlated with regional abnormalities in the frontal lobe.
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Bored leaders have less cross-talk in their brains.
Monotony may result in poorer left-right brain synchronization as well as an increase in brain slow waves that lack a self-regulatory ability.
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Boredom kills brain cells.
Boredom results in decreased mental stimulation, which could result in neuronal atrophy and shrinkage and thereby decrease performance.
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Novelty-seeking leaders must be dealt with differently than harm-avoidant leaders.
An extensive neurobiology of novelty-seeking (NS) has been outlined in the literature. Recent studies have shown that hippocampi (long-term memory centers) of high novelty seekers respond more to novel stimuli, whereas those of harm-avoidant (HA) people respond more to familiar stimuli.
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Furthermore, NS people have smaller orbitofrontal, parietal, and occipital brain structures, whereas reward-dependent (RD) people have a smaller caudate nucleus and rectal frontal gyrus.
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Just remember that they each activate different brain regions.

The application:
When leaders are bored or are finding their work monotonous, they should suspect and prevent a summit
syndrome. The brains of novelty-seeking personality types respond differently than most other people to everyday happenings. For one, their accountant underactivates to repeated information, and nothing familiar may stimulate their long-term memories. As a result, the usual motivations for action are missing. Furthermore, their creativity is probably being affected because brain regions implicated in creativity (OFC and parietal cortex) appear to be smaller, indicating that the level of excitement and creativity that they might need may be higher. On account of their brain “numbness,” they have to always be actively in pursuit of something novel. Without this novelty, their neurons may atrophy and their performance may decline. We will examine specific brain-based interventions later on in the book.

The take-home here is that it is important for a coach, leader, or manager to determine whether the person in question is easily bored and help increase his or her insight about this. Converting leaders into being less novelty-seeking kills their spirit and also their performance. A coaching plan with a novelty-seeking leader should recognize the brain stimulation needed and perhaps involve greater talk about innovation, for example. Leaders who are novelty seekers are only dangerous to their organizations when they pretend not to be. Coaches can help them recognize this. Knowing that their brains get more easily numb, that they have less cross-talk with boredom, and that decelerating is a disadvantage to their brains can be helpful to them.

The Neuroscience of Resilience

The concept:
What makes some leaders resilient while others are not? Brain concepts that relate to resilience include the following:

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Resilient brains have network redundancy or backup.
In certain people, multiple networks that subserve the same function may serve as backups in case one of the primary networks is hurt by some outcome.

•
Stress kills brain cells.
Stress can cause atrophy and loss of neurons and glia (a type of brain cell) in specific limbic regions
and circuits, but certain behavioral and therapeutic interventions can reverse these structural alterations by stimulating neuroprotective and neurotrophic pathways and by blocking the damaging effects of stress.
⁵¹
Animal studies show that resilience to stress may in fact be related to cortisol levels as a newborn, indicating that the HPA axis (which registers stress and modulates mood) plays a role in resilience to stress.
^52
,
53
Cellular resiliency is defined as the ability of a cell to adapt to an insult or stressor. Such resiliency at the cellular level could lead to resiliency of the leader.
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Teaching leaders to respond less to negative emotions helps the integrity of frontal neurons.
Studies have shown that one aspect of this resiliency involves downregulating responses to negative emotions reflected in reduced PFC activity.
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That is, the emotional register in the brain turns the volume of the emotion down. In animals, by coping with early life stress, prefrontal myelination and resilience are increased in concert.
⁵⁶

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Emotional flexibility is key.
Resilience is also conceptualized as the flexible use of emotional resources. One study has shown that when low-resilience people are being threatened, they show prolonged activation of the anterior insula to negative and neutral pictures, whereas high-resilience people only activate the insula to aversive pictures. Thus, they are able to conserve their emotional responses appropriately.
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Social support helps the brain.
Social support, in acting through the oxytocin pathways in the brain, may also diminish the stress-response burden on the amygdala and enhance resilience to stress.
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The application:
Here’s a summary of some of the brain-based resilience factors that coaches could use in their conversations with leaders, or that leaders and managers could reflect on: (1) The former experience you have had handling stressors should give you the confidence that your brain has developed “redundancy networks” to help you cope in case one of the usual ways of dealing fails. (2) Coaching may activate neuroprotective pathways that conserve energy and minimize cellular destruction at the level of the brain. (3) A systematic approach to help control emotional responses to practically everything by
practicing selective emotional responses can be helpful (details can be found in
Chapters 7
, “Coaching Brain Regions,” and
8
, “Coaching Brain Processes”). (4) One of the brain regions we need to target is the region involved in flexible responses to stresses; we need to train the brain to decrease the stress response. (5) For example, it is helpful to meet with other people you trust in the C-Suite because the oxytocin in your brain is increased when you can rely on them, and this will help increase your resilience to stress by improving how your amygdala or stress center responds to stress. It helps you to conserve energy resources.
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The Neuroscience of Expert Performance

The concept:
Several studies have been done on experts in a variety of fields to examine how their brains differ from novices. This brief review will help to develop coaching targets (self-coaching or executive coaching) to consider when focusing on developing expertise in the leader:

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Voice training can improve function in both the conscious and unconscious brain over time; training makes a difference to the whole brain.
One study examined highly accomplished opera singers, conservatory-level vocal students, and laymen during overt singing of an Italian aria in a neuroimaging experiment.
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This study found that training of vocal skills is accompanied by increased functional activation of conscious and unconscious brain regions. Conscious brain regions activated include laryngeal-related bilateral primary somatosensory cortex as well as additional activation in the right primary sensorimotor cortex. Further training-related activation comprised the inferior parietal lobe (improving the brain’s navigational ability) and bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (improving short-term memory). At the subcortical level, expert singers showed increased activation in the basal ganglia, the thalamus, and the cerebellum.

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Even math can be intuitive and not stage dependent.
In studies looking at the brain changes when subjects become experts at arithmetic, the changes seen are shifts from the frontal to the parietal lobe, as well as shifts toward the left
angular gyrus, the latter being particularly prominent.
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Recall that this brain region is also involved in innovation and creativity and in forming abstractions. This implies that even numerical expertise is performed better when the information is processed more creatively. A recent review explains that arithmetic can be processed intuitively.
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Expert brains show greater focus and efficiency.
In general, expert performance has been associated with greater neural efficiency.
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In a study done on expert versus novice archers, when the experts were aiming, the occipital gyrus and temporal gyrus (side and back of the brain) were activated, but when the novices were aiming, the frontal area was mainly activated. In addition, the ACC was activated in the expert group and the posterior cingulate gyrus was activated in the novice group.
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Once again, the take-home point is that the brains of experts differ from people who have not yet developed that expertise. In fact, “aha!” solutions (verbal insight solutions) have been shown to result in bilateral activation in the insula, the right prefrontal cortex, and the anterior cingulate.
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Here, we see a combination of actions at work: gut-instinct, thinking and decision-making, and conflict monitoring and attention. These skills are superior in experts and should therefore be targeted in developing experts.

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Expert brains that attend more and just before performance are devoid of emotional interruptions.
Plasticity in the brain regions involved in sustained attention have also been found in expert meditators.
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The fronto-parietal cortex (attentional brain) has been shown to be instrumental in the development of expertise.
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This fronto-parietal mechanism has been shown in expert golfers.
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Furthermore, during the pre-shot routine, novice golfers activated the posterior cingulate, the amygdala-forebrain complex, and the basal ganglia, whereas experts had activation primarily in the superior parietal lobule, the dorsal lateral premotor area, and the occipital area.
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In novice golfers the emotion registers and filters are still active pre-shot, whereas experts learn to keep these areas quieter as they are about to perform.