Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders (31 page)

As a manager, leader, or coach, your first task would be to learn the functions of the different regions and then apply this creatively to your dialogues and thinking. In the next section, we will explore in greater detail how to do this.

Why Should You Care about These Connections?

For managers and leaders to make effective decisions and train themselves to improve, they rely heavily on the principle of neuroplasticity: the ability of the brain to change its connections. In an article titled “CEOs and Cognitive Dissonance,” Jeff Stibel noted that “...the list of companies that have ousted CEOs in 2008 just keeps growing: Home Depot, Citi, AIG, Merrill, Wachovia, VMWare, Ruth’s Chris, Starbucks, AMD, Fortis, H&R Block—Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that over 125 CEOs lost their jobs last month alone. The average tenure of a public company CEO is now approaching 30 months, with many lasting little more than a year....” (
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/stibel/2008/07/ceos-and-cognitive-dissonance.html
.)

Leaders are not immune to losing their jobs and must adapt to the demands of their work if they are to maintain their roles. Brain science offers us an avenue into understanding how these changes can be made.

Furthermore, managers are in the position of having to manage their employees, but this “management” is actually a management of their brains. If you understand the brains of the people you manage, you are able to manage their behaviors. In many situations, managing behavior without managing the brain forces the brain to rebel. Hence, understanding how the brain works will help you think of novel interventions.

Regional Brain Interventions: Targeting Mechanisms for Coaches

In this section, we review specific strategies managers, leaders or coaches can use to target brain regions when they become aware that these regions may not be functioning optimally in the leader.

Thinking Brain

1. Short-Term Memory Center (DLPFC)

Short-term memory is critical in the business environment for the simple reason that one needs to remember what to do. Oftentimes, managers will find themselves in the position of having to repeat themselves endlessly to no avail. By understanding how to improve short-term memory and the functions of the DLPFC, managers can improve the performance of the people they are managing.

Sometimes, long-term perspectives are threatening, and managers or leaders may be overwhelmed by everything that they have to accomplish in a small amount of time. In this case, sharpening short-term memory can help bring the focus toward the present, thereby reducing anxiety about long-term goals.

Oftentimes, leaders and managers are unable to bear looking at recent patterns in declining profits and performance. Instead, they will focus on the history of the company to make themselves feel better, hoping that the company will recover to its once revered position. By enhancing short-term memory, we can help bring the focus to what just happened rather than leaving the manager or leader stuck in the distant past. Classically, experienced workers may be stuck in thinking in terms of “in my time...” or “when I was doing this....” Short-term memory interventions help bring them back to recent events.

When things seem out of control, managers and leaders may need to exercise more control against forces that create havoc. Short-term memory interventions help them focus on recent events, and this focus helps to stabilize the chaos in their minds.

Here’s a list of short-term memory interventions you can try:

•
Noise reduction—
As discussed in
Chapter 5
, “The Challenge Prior to Change: How Brain Science Can Bring Managers and Leaders from Idea to Action Orientation,” reducing noise can help DLPFC function.
³
This noise may be external or internal. External noise interrupts new information coming into the brain by causing it not to be registered properly. If it is not registered properly, it will not be remembered. For example, if a manager in a sales force meeting describes a new sales strategy while someone is drilling outside the room, the brains of the people who are listening will not be able to register this new information. This is especially relevant wherever the nature of the work environment is noisy, such as construction sites and factories. Managers and leaders may want to have meetings away from the noise to help their employees remember what is said.

•
Short-term memory training—
To help people remember recent events better, questions must focus on recent events and recalling the details of these events.
⁴
The simple use of time intervals within a question will help bring the focus of the listener to the present. Instead of asking, “What do your customers want?”, managers may instead ask, “In the last six months, what have you noticed are the things your customers want?” or “If you think of your interactions today, what did your customers want?” Although seemingly trite, this will help focus people you are talking to and give them a timeframe within which they can search for answers. This can also be used by managers or salespeople thinking about how to deal with customers who want to make a purchase but have had a bad experience in the past. A customer may say, “I was thinking of getting another Mac, but I have had so much trouble with mine in the past.” In this case, the salesperson may bring the customer out of his long-term experience and into his short-term memories by replying, “I think there were problems then, but we’ve fixed this matter with a brand-new solution that....” This
engages short-term memory and takes attention away from longer-term perspectives.

•
Diet and eating habit changes—
Soy protein has been found to improve working memory
^5
,
6
in humans, and wild blueberries have been found to improve short-term memory in animals.
⁷
In fact, dessert bars containing soy and wild blueberries are currently being investigated.
⁸
Furthermore, a study has shown that chewing gum (odorless and tasteless) may improve short-term memory by activating the DLPFC and other relevant networks during and after short-term memory tasks.
⁹
Although it is not usually the role of the manager or coach to prescribe diet changes, I include these because they make for lighter points in the discussion. For example, a manager may playfully say to Jack, who has been forgetful, “You know Jack, you might want to chew some gum.”

2. Accountant (vmPFC)

This is one of the most important brain regions because it collects information from many other regions and provides a “balance sheet” to the action center of the brain. This information comes in the form of risk or rewards. If either is not fully registered, a decision may be significantly impacted. In everyday life, a striking example is when women who want to have children spend too long in a relationship with a reluctant partner only to realize that they are 40 when a decision has to be forced. In this case, the accountant was registering the benefits of the relationship but not the risks of not having a child.

Similarly, people sometimes stay too long in a work situation that is fundamentally untenable because they focus on the necessity of having to have a job rather than the reality that it is creating too much stress and affecting their physical and mental health. Here, risks are not being registered.

When people are very anxious, they also focus too much on risk and not enough on reward. This can be a problem because the risk is “true” but “over-considered.”

Lonely people register rewards less in their brains. As a result, someone who is feeling isolated may not be able to respond to what may seem like an obvious reward. If you give someone who feels like this a raise, she may not actually feel the reward. Also, many leaders are very lonely, so that even when they win, they never feel like they have or the feeling does not last.

People assume that they are actively considering risks all the time, but the brains of high-risk takers tend to be less responsive to risk. Therefore, when counseling people about their risk-taking ability, it may be more helpful to understand what kind of brain they have so that they can learn new skills or hire people to handle situations that they cannot handle themselves. An impulsive leader may benefit from having a sobering senior manager once he understands the way his brain works.

Here’s a list of interventions you can try when dealing with the accountant region of the brain:

•
Change the timeframe.
An important study has shown that when threat is imminent, brain activation spills over from the vmPFC (the accountant) to the PAG (the periaqueductal gray, a brain region responsible for acute anxiety symptoms). As soon as the PAG is activated (which you can assume is happening in the acute phases of a crisis), shifting the timeframe and slowing down the time expectancies can help people feel less anxious. If, for example, a leader is sensing that a crisis is causing followers to become too anxious, he can prevent PAG spillover by making the time to crisis longer. This can be done by introducing longer-term perspectives to take the heat off of the moment.
¹⁰

For example, a manager or leader may recognize that the remaining employees are very anxious because of the several rounds of layoffs they have survived. This may impact their productivity because the PAG will be hyperactivated, even when they have been notified that there will be no further layoffs. Managers can help shift the focus from the present to the future (the opposite of DLPFC interventions). That is, they
can perhaps create a vision statement for the next year and help the people they are managing feel more focused on the future. As soon as you take attention off the imminent threat, the PAG stops exerting its throttling influence.

•
Be deliberate about assessing potential losses.
Because the vmPFC may be functioning less optimally in crises, risk-reward assessment may be compromised.
¹¹
When the vmPFC becomes activated, leaders may need their colleagues to provide insights about the potential losses of certain actions. Robust decision making has been associated with neural sensitivity to rewards.

When people are on a path of action, they often become “addicted” to this path, and losses they are incurring may not be obvious to them. For example, a business that focuses on the number of appearances it makes in the media as opposed to reaching the appropriate market segment may continue on a relentless path of quantity rather than quality. The fact that the PR department is spending money on getting appearances anywhere is a risk that is not being considered, possibly because of the frenetic pace of the reach-out to the media. A manager may recognize that the reward center (media appearances) is being activated, but the risk or the return on investment (ROI) is not being considered. When targeting the vmPFC, the manager may need to specifically ask about ROI or risk so that the PR department can overtly register this.

•
Collate opinions about risk taking.
Because the vmPFC may be suboptimal in assessing risk, leaders may institute surveys on crucial issues to obtain feedback about risk that may otherwise be missed.
^12
–
14

This is a delicate issue, because one does not want to be inundated with risks. Managers can help leaders delegate a task to a risk manager who synthesizes this information and conveys only the relevant information to the CEO. This model of behavior mimics the way in which the brain would function optimally. That is, because the brain of the leader or manager is considering rewards but not risks, an external brain is set up to evaluate risks and not just do a core dump on the leader or manager but rather intelligently convey the relevant risks that need to be considered.

3. ACC (Conflict Detector and Attention)

The ACC is involved in a remarkable number of situations in business. Where there is a business, there is always some kind of conflict, and where there is conflict, there is ACC activation. The ACC exists so as to make things right. When it detects conflict, it tells the rest of the brain to act in accordance with this. Many experts believe that the ACC is the link between the conscious and unconscious brains. It can pick up signals from the unconscious and convey them to the conscious brain. Its functions are not limited to conflict detection, however. In order to pick up conflict, it scans the environment (external and internal) and, in so doing, is a critical part of the attentional system of the brain.

The ACC is relevant in the business environment when two or more ideas create an internal conflict within a manager, leader, or employee. When the ACC activates, it prevents focusing on a problem. This is very difficult, because there are almost always conflicts that come up within one’s self. A simple conflict such as, “Should I stay an extra half-hour at work or go home and get this task completed tomorrow, even though the deadline is today...technically,” can have a person spending an extra three hours at work because the ACC conflict will make finishing the task more difficult. The ACC will activate to this because there has been no internal resolution of the conflict. In this situation, an ACC intervention may be helpful in bringing the person to a more resolved internal position so that he or she can focus on what is necessary.