Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders (36 page)

• Engage the CP’s brain’s accountant by framing trade-offs in adopting new methods versus old methods as risks and benefits.

• Do not overload short-term memory with data.

• Respect the CP’s long-term memories of the old ways.

• Emphasize rewards.

• Benchmark desired action and timelines together.

The senior managers practiced using the table and found it very helpful in keeping them focused on the desired brain goal. That goal was to have a collaboration and mutually beneficial outcome with trade-offs that were realistic and fair so that the amygdala would not go into a hyperactivated and mistrustful phase.

An Approach to Increasing Innovation

Innovation requires moving beyond linear and rational ways of problem solving to more novel ways of dealing with business needs. Innovation may range from thinking of a new product or product line
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to improving business models,
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managing customer complaints,
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and opening up new markets.

Innovation involves the creative use of rational and emotional faculties, and when managers, leaders, or coaches are trying to stimulate innovative thought processes, thinking of brain regions involved in creativity may help to develop strategies.

From
Chapter 4
, “Of Innovation, Intuition, and Impostors: Intangible Vulnerabilities in the Brains of Great Leaders,” we know that the following four major brain regions are involved in creative and innovative thinking:

•
The lingual gyrus—
Implicated in dreaming

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The left lateral orbital cortex—
Implicated in disinhibition

•
The posterior parietal cortex—
Implicated in disorientation in time and space

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The angular gyrus—
Implicated in metaphor comprehensions and cross-modal abstraction

Although going into detail on each step is well beyond the scope of this chapter, the following strategy (questions and exercises to give the manager, leader, or employee) will target these regions. Because a U-shaped curve most likely operates here (crossover when stimulation leads to overshooting the mark), it is important to monitor the anxiety level of the innovative person so that he or she does not overactivate these regions. After all, you do not want a dizzy, disinhibited, overly abstract person on your hands either.

The following approach outlines a basic structure for coaching innovation, whether you are a manager, coach, or leader:

•
Introductory statement—
The brain regions that give rise to innovative thinking, when lesioned, may result in problematic behaviors. It is a little like learning how to ski but taking the risk that you could fall. Innovation involves being able to decrease anxiety sufficiently to tolerate risk. The innovative mentality always has to be under some form of self-control. As you work together, you might want to measure the other person’s baseline anxiety and state anxiety
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as you go through steps related to each function.

•
Functions to enhance—
The functions that we want to enhance are the ability to dream, the ability to take risks while controlling anxiety, the ability to think outside of time and space, and the ability to enhance metaphors and cross modal abstractions.

Here are some questions to ask concerning the ability to dream:

• If reality were no obstruction, how would you want this to turn out?

• If reality were no obstruction, what steps would need to be taken?

• In the same way that the Wright brothers invented the airplane, what would you want to invent to solve this problem?

Here are some questions to ask concerning the ability to take risks while controlling anxiety:

• What is the most frightening risk you could take in this situation?

• Can you imagine doing that? (First from the third-person perspective, then from the first-person perspective.)

• What would make you stop?

• You question your ability to recover if you ever fully started down this road. What do you think may happen?

• Did you know that you could train your brain’s attentional centers so that when you get out there “in the flow,” you can always come back? (Use the ACC check in
Table 8.2
.)

Here are some questions to ask concerning the ability to think outside of time and space:

• If time were no problem, how and what would you do?

• What if it did not matter where you were?

• What if you had unlimited space to do what you wanted to do?

Finally, here are some questions to ask concerning the ability to enhance metaphors and cross-modal abstractions:

• What would this move be like for you? What can you compare it to?

• If this move caused an earthquake, what would your thinking strategy be?

• Do the “kikki”/“bouba” test. Explain what this is.

• If you had to describe this move as a smell or a taste, what would that be?

Often, a separate innovative space needs to be created to sanction “out-of-the-box” thinking. If you are in charge of promoting an innovative mindset, ask yourself what you can do to ensure that the work environment is filled with innovation. Each of the factors mentioned can be used as the basis for further exploration. For example, when exploring the “dreaming” section, you may say, “I want you to think of a product that has five characteristics that are not reality-based.” If, for example, the product is a phone, the answer may be: (1) The phone walks to you when you want it. (2) The phone puts itself on speaker when you say a codeword that is programmed into it. (3) The phone has a built-in voice message that fluently syncs with your answering voice so that if you pick up by mistake, you can press a button to activate the voice message. (4) The phone can be used as a deodorant. (5) The phone can detect where your caller is physically located (useful for children).

This kind of dreaming strategy forces thinking outside the box and gets the creative juices flowing in the lingual gyrus. Similarly, you can base similar exercises on other brain regions.

An Approach to Working with the Impostor Syndrome

In the Impostor Syndrome, an accomplished leader or employee feels like a fake because all facts do not account for how he or she got to his or her current position.

The Impostor Syndrome is relevant when a new leader appears to be insecure about his or her qualifications. This does not usually reveal itself as insecurity. Observing how a company appears to be struggling when a new and talented addition to the company has been added may be a clue to seeing whether this syndrome is present.

To deal with this rupture in self-confidence, the following brain-based approach may be helpful.

•
Learn to tolerate the unknowns of the unconscious.
Teach the relevant person that success is both a conscious and unconscious process. In fact, the unconscious is much of what drives outcome despite our tendency to want to believe that we are in conscious control of our success entirely. That means that doubt can be left out of the equation in trying to understand success. Retrospective analyses of success are limited. Understanding and accepting the unconscious brain is critical.

•
Identify background emotions.
Oftentimes, multiple emotions exist at the same time because they are processed by different brain systems. The emotions we can identify are not the only ones that exist. “Mixed” emotions are common, and they may impact the path toward business goals significantly. Help people with the Impostor Syndrome by helping them identify mixed emotions or priorities. For example, a high-achieving “star performer” may have many ideas but may be disinclined to execute on them. By helping this person identify and isolate the value of his or her ideas, you can chart a course toward recruiting someone interested in executing on the ideas. Otherwise, the star performer will feel like an impostor, knowing that he or she is not interested in acting on those the great ideas.

•
Calm down the impostor anxiety.
Here, you can use the amygdala or ACC interventions outlined in the prior chapter. You can decrease disruptive amygdala activation by encouraging the leader or manager to develop strategies to let go of the past. This requires future orientation and fresh perspectives. One way of doing this would be to remind the person that being afraid of maintaining success can disrupt the brain’s anxiety pathways and thereby disrupt thinking as well. The person may not be aware of this impact, but options for solutions may elude him or her. “Leaders on a roll” are what we might call “limbic music.” They involve a well-coordinated unconscious. For the manager, leader, or coach, the question is, How can you get the brain to orchestrate its limbic parts again? Another way would be to reframe the leadership challenges and set the bar higher for leaders. This takes the stress off of having to repeat a previous performance and engages the attentional center of the brain over and above the rumblings of the amygdala.

A useful way to encourage leaders to think differently is to ask them to look at “intersections.” The intersections of various fields can help them think differently and in new ways. Neuroscience is a useful place to get leaders to reflect.

For example, an investor who has produced stunning results over the past five years may suddenly wonder if he or she is going to fail. Rather than focusing only on describing the amygdala Impostor Syndrome, you can also introduce a new variable: social reward. In one setting, an investor I worked with started to contemplate spending one day a month teaching inner-city children about basic investment skills. This offset his guilt and fear and created a new sense of reward for himself.

Because stress can turn off the conscious brain and expose unconscious fears, you should attend to how to help leaders deal with stress. One author describes the helpfulness of identifying walls and fences: Walls cannot be easily moved but fences can.
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Problems can be put into these categories to reduce the stress of perceiving all challenges as “fences.”

Also, ACC interventions can be used to calm down the person. Here is an example of how you can apply the ACC interventions through using some of the SAFE-Frame interventions:

•
Resolve—
Help the person who suffers from the Impostor Syndrome understand that this syndrome exists and is well known. Help him or her understand that this usually occurs in high-achieving individuals who have lost their bearing and that you will help him or her regain this.

•
Reframe—
This person might not feel as though he or she is supposed to be in the new position because the position requires learning and not knowledge already gained, or because this person already has the necessary skills but needs some additional facts, or because this person has had prior success involving a powerful unconscious intelligence that the new position needs. By explaining this to a person, you reframe the prior assumption of: “I have no knowledge to handle the new position” to “I am not being hired for knowledge I am supposed to have but for the unconscious skills that have made me successful in the past.”

Also, being unable to internalize accomplishments raises several questions and comments:

• If the person is afraid, attention will be biased toward threat and the ACC will be in conflict mode, thus preventing the registration of reward.

• If the person is lonely, reward may not be adequately registered because the reward center activates less to positive things in lonely people.

These are some of the myriad ways you can use brain biology to support a person who appears to have the Impostor Syndrome.

An Approach to Managing Emotions

I am often asked how to think about managing emotions. It is often easier to manage situations requiring thinking; managing emotions can be quite challenging. Merely asking someone to “calm down” or “not to be upset” is not useful. Also, it is difficult to access emotions immediately because they are processed largely outside of conscious awareness. However, because emotional centers in the brain are connected to thinking centers, you can use the model outlined in this section to organize a program to modify emotions in the person being supervised.

Higher emotional intelligence has been associated with transformational leadership. Leaders are in a much better position to transform their companies if they have emotional savvy—both about themselves and others.
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Understanding emotions and how to modulate them is essential to effective project management.
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Being trained in the “soft factors” of leadership is in fact essential for effective project management. However, the training in itself may not be sufficient to enhance performance on emotional intelligence variables.
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Having emotional competence (as distinct from emotional intelligence) may improve business performance and may be especially helpful at times of stress or social interaction.
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High emotional intelligence may improve job performance for high emotional labor jobs and negatively predicts performance for low emotional labor jobs.
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Having a higher emotional intelligence generally means that people (for example, IT specialists) will have a more integrative rather than avoidant style of conflict resolution.
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