Read Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders Online
Authors: Srinivasan S. Pillay
Concept 4
A recent study showed that when people defect from a situation versus reciprocating trust, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is activated.
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In fact, damage to the vmPFC impairs concern for other people.
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In this study, when the trustor took greater risks trusting or the trustee had greater benefits from being trusted, the vmPFC activation did not change. To reciprocate trust requires that a person values this socially. This same experiment showed that this orientation to social value was registered in the temporoparietal junction, bilateral anterior insula, and ACC. In addition, these regions increase in activation when a trustor takes more risk and decrease in the opposite condition. When the trustee derived more benefit, the ACC and right DLPFC were both activated. The critical
thing to remember here is that when the brain’s accountant (the vmPFC) turns off, it stops thinking of risks and benefits, and concern for other people and trust is diminished.
Summary of Concepts
When there is a breach of trust, the brain’s conflict detector (ACC) turns on the brain’s alarm (the amygdala), which then informs the reward centers (VTA, ventral striatum, and septal nuclei) and insula, which in turn send this information to the dorsal striatum and back to the amygdala. The information is that there is no reward forthcoming. The dorsal striatum then sends this information to motor-planning regions in the brain, thereby affecting resulting actions. The greater the amygdala activation with a breach in trust, the more the other regions will keep this amygdala activation going by “telling it” that no reward is forthcoming. This limits activation of the action center, which then stalls.
The application:
Trust and fear are inversely related and affect the brain in opposite ways. Fear increases amygdala activation whereas trust decreases it. Developing a trusting work environment is important in similar ways to creating a non-fear-based motivational space. It frees up the thinking brain to focus on relevant issue rather than using up thinking resources to resolve trust conflicts.
Trust is also rewarding because it affects several components of the reward system. These components feed back to the action centers in the brain, preparing the brain to act. Without trust, action is inhibited or infused with fear. This means that every instruction that is met, is met with suspicion and is draining. Also, when people lack trust but have to stay at a job because they need a job, they have to dissociate themselves from their emotions. Emotions are a vital part of intelligence. By ignoring them and throwing the baby out with the bathwater, leaders will be left with sterile decisions that do not make sense.
The anterior insula is important in registering the gut feelings of trust and translating this into conscious awareness. When mistrust
overactivates the insula, the insula cannot do its job either. Thus, mistrust fundamentally upsets the balance between the thinking and feeling brain and gets leaders to compromise the fullness of their potential and actions. The eyes of their followers are always darting around looking for something to happen—and so are their brains (see
Chapter 8
).
Thus, trust and fear work inversely in the brain. Whereas fear activates the fear center and eats up thinking resources, trust does the opposite; it deactivates the fear center and preserves thinking resources.
The Neuroscience of Vicarious Reward
The concept:
Humans feel rewarded when other people are rewarded under certain circumstances. In game shows, for example, when a person wins, people may share a sense of happiness for that person. It is remarkable that this sense of shared or vicarious happiness is thought to occur due to a similarity effect. A brain-imaging study has shown that the interactions between the ventral striatum (the reward center) and anterior cingulate cortex (the conflict detector) subserve the modulation of vicarious reward by similarity.
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That is, the brain feels rewarded by attention to similarity.
The application:
This is why “being on the same page” is critical for managers, leaders, and their followers in organizations. Leaders can recognize that because vicarious reward happiness is represented in the ACC and the reward system through shared perceptions of the self and other, communicative efforts should be directed at highlighting similar perspectives so as to activate the reward system in followers. When leaders want to distinguish themselves, even when they have expert power, they still have to “level with” their followers if they expect their followers to feel motivated by their shared similarity.
Simply put, managers, leaders, and followers may have different levels of investment in the company. If leaders are enthusiastic about winning, managers and followers will only delight in the leader’s
victories if they can relate to the leader. Their motivation to help the leader win will be determined by how rewarded they feel in their perceived similarities with the leader.
The Neuroscience of Community and Citizenship
The concept:
Experiments in neuroscience have examined how the brains of socially included people differ from those who are not. Recall from earlier that social exclusion may increase ACC activation
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(and that the ACC is the brain’s conflict detector, so it takes the brain out of rest). In animals, social isolation after stroke has been shown to decrease post-stroke survival rate and exacerbates infarct size and development of fluid in the brain.
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In fact, recent discoveries suggest that social pain is as real and intense as physical pain, and that the social-pain system may have piggybacked on the brain structure that had evolved earlier for physical pain.
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Also, feeling socially isolated is stressful and there is accumulating evidence that stress promotes habits at the expense of goal-directed performance in humans.
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Furthermore, lonely people notice distress much more.
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They tend to be less rewarded by positive social stimuli, as was indicated by a study that showed that the brain’s reward system (the ventral striatum) activated weakly to social stimuli in lonely people. Also, the social isolation findings of increased ACC activation described earlier have also been found in situations of rejection of adolescents.
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This study found that the reward center (the ventral striatum) appeared to correlate negatively with distress. In another study, right ventral PFC activity was active during exclusion and correlated negatively with self-reported distress.
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This study implied that the PFC tries to reverse the ACC-induced brain disruption and distress.
The application:
When Gary Hamel led a team composed of academics (such as C.K. Prahalad, Peter Senge, and Jeffrey Pfeffer), New Age thinkers (such as James Surowiecki), and progressive CEOs (such as Whole Foods’ John Mackey, W.L. Gore’s Terri Kelly, and IDEO’s Tim Brown) to compile a list of priorities for management innovators around the world (“Management 2.0”), the foremost priority was to create more than just shareholder value.
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They emphasized that work should serve a higher purpose and that leaders should embed “the ideas of community and citizenship into organizations....”
Why is this important? Recall earlier that social exclusion may increase ACC activation.
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Therefore, on a practical level, we decrease the potential for attention and productive thinking, and the brain goes into a state of conflict detection and threat mode. Also, because feeling socially excluded may promote habits at the expense of goal-directed performance in humans,
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as a leader, when you inhibit goal-directed performance, you are inhibiting the productivity in your company significantly. It is much better to prevent this, because lonely people tend to be less rewarded by positive social stimuli, as was indicated by a study that showed that the brain’s reward system (the ventral striatum) activated weakly to social stimuli, and by the time you concoct that company party, if you already have lonely and alienated people, your party dollars will not be worth it. (You can relate this to those “social days” at work, when nobody really wants to be there.) Also, lonely people notice distress much more, and a crisis is not the time when you want people to feel socially excluded.
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It is worth noting, however, that the ventral striatum (the reward center) can decrease ACC activation, and that if we find ways to increase striatal activations, we may decrease ACC activation.
Thus, stimulating a sense of community has an impact on productivity by improving attention and goal-directed performance. Novel ideas are more likely to be expressed in communities (less habit due to less loneliness), and when leaders promote communities over isolation, their followers are appropriately sensitive to reward as opposed to being socially isolated, which, in general, will activate the brain’s reward center less, thereby diminishing the impact of incentives that the leader may be offering.
The Neuroscience of Persuasion
The concept:
Leaders are often charged with the tasks of having to persuade people of a particular view or course of action.
Concept 1
In an experiment that used participants from two different cultures with different languages, it was found that feelings of persuasion via text-based messages were associated with increased activity in the posterior superior temporal sulcus bilaterally (recall that the pSTS is part of the mirror neuron system, so persuasion may have something to do with sharing a view), the temporal pole bilaterally, and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.
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Additionally, neural activity in this network was also associated with persuasion with regard to video-based messages. The construct that underlies persuasion has also been referred to as “facilitated consensus.”
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This more clearly highlights the fact that an important part of the mirror neuron system (shared emotion) is implicated in the art of persuasion. This justifies the use of mirroring mechanisms to enhance the possibility of persuasion.
Concept 2
High expertise can also create persuasive power. This has been called “expert power.” One study found that a single exposure to a combination of an expert and an object leads to a long-lasting positive effect on memory for and attitude toward the object.
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That is, the expert makes it easier to remember things. In the brain, these expert power effects have been shown to be due to enhancing memory formation in the temporal lobes (hippocampus and parahippocampus) as well as enhancing trustful behavior, reward processing, and learning by stimulating the caudate nucleus. Thus, the dorsal striatum (caudate) is involved in reward processing of expert information.
The application
: To improve persuasive power, managers and leaders have to activate mirror neurons in the network of the listener’s brain. This activation depends highly on the ability to share emotions (as opposed to impose or demand), and requires authentically giving up one’s own emotional identity about an issue and taking on an identity that represents the needs of all the people in the company. (See
Chapter 8
for more details.)
Coaches can also advise leaders who hire people to coach their employees or influence their employees in a particular area, that experts are likely to activate the relevant areas related to persuasion more effectively than nonexperts. That is, it matters whether or not a person who has been hired to persuade has expertise.
The Neuroscience of Attachment
The concept:
Attachment style has a profound effect on a leader’s ability to lead. Past attachments have been identified as one of the three major reasons that good leaders make bad decisions—the other two being conflicts of interest and misleading memories.
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There are two types of attachment: secure and insecure. Insecure attachment may be either of the anxious or avoidant variety. Attachment in business may be relevant in a variety of settings, including forming successful strategic cross-sector partnerships,
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sharing intellectual property rights,
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and in managing the relationship between a sales manager and sales person, for example.
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Understanding the brain basis for attachment may be helpful to these and other relationships.
Concept 1
A recent study on leadership demonstrated that secure attachment was essential for leadership to be successful. People who have anxious and avoidant attachments to their companies cannot lead them effectively.
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Concept 2
Another study found several other significant findings: Leaders’ attachment anxiety was associated with more self-serving leadership motives, poorer leadership qualities in task-oriented situations, and poorer instrumental functioning in followers. Leaders’ attachment-related avoidance led to leaders failing to act as a security provider, and with followers’ poorer socioemotional functioning and poorer long-range mental health. Thus, the attachment styles of leaders are critical to the well-being of followers and the company as a whole. This is just some of the much more extensive research describing how attachment styles are relevant to leadership.
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