Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders (33 page)

Here’s a list of interventions for dealing with the amygdala:

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Plan for the crisis.
Because the amygdala will process the most significant emotion, leaders should have a crisis plan in place ahead of time. A crisis-anticipation group may put together “escape plans” that will reassure all those concerned should a crisis occur. Although this is rarely sufficient to diminish the anxiety, when people know that there is an escape plan for dangerous situations, they can feel significantly calmer, thereby decreasing their own amygdala activation and the leader’s as well.

A business leader I worked with got his staff to agree to examine the progress of the business during the recession, and when the profits for a particular month fell below a certain mark, they would make adjustments to their pay. This alleviated the worry that the first step would be firing someone.

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Share the action plan through the company.
By sharing action plans throughout a company, leaders can prevent ripple amygdala effects that will eventually creep into all those who are calm. In other words, emotions are contagious, and when fear and anxiety spread, the company’s collective amygdala may overactivate, thereby crippling any action. Sharing the action plan throughout the company helps to diminish the ripple effects, because then the feeling that is being shared is “calmness” (and decreased amygdala activation).

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Approach the situation with optimism.
Brain-imaging studies have shown that optimism, when authentic, can replace fear as the emotion that the amygdala processes,
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and this can influence ACC activation as well.
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Optimism does not imply denial. It is merely an executive attempt to focus on solutions rather than problems. Building a culture that focuses on solutions rather than problems can also create a community where people calm one another down.

In the current financial environment, you can get a lot of furrowed brows when you prescribe optimism. People think you are losing your mind because nothing good is happening. It is important to be clear that when you prescribe optimism, you are recognizing that immense problems exist, but you are choosing to be solution focused. If you stay in problem mode, the amygdala activation may make the problems worse. However, if you are optimistic (solution focused), this may replace the paralyzing fear that has possessed the amygdala prior to that time.

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Change perspective.
Typically, a crisis captures the immediate attention of the leaders and their followers. It is the task of leaders to quickly change perspective, taking the emergency and panic out of the crisis so as to calm down themselves and their followers. Leaders can imagine the pain of their followers
in one of two ways: (1) They can imagine the feelings of the followers, or (2) they can imagine themselves to be in the followers’ position. These are critical decisions. When leaders overempathize with the pain of others, they have increased amygdala activation.
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They can address this by separating out themselves from others and have empathy for a distinct other not related to the leaders themselves. Sometimes, sympathizing is more effective than empathizing, because the latter can overactivate the amygdala. Choosing when to empathize is very important in the business situation. Misery loves company, and if you spend all your time empathizing with people who think that the sky is falling down, you may begin to feel the same as well.

2. Hippocampus

When the hippocampus is targeted, you are essentially asking a person to understand the problem in context. That is, when you add history to a problem, it may enhance one’s perspective.

New workers, managers, and leaders in general often forget that when they start a new position, that position has a history. Knowing this history involves looking into long-term memory. Remembering that the hippocampus is part of any corporate brain will help you remember that for any given situation, knowing the history is important. A very accomplished CEO took over a company, and upon arrival, she made some very dramatic changes without much consultation with her colleagues. Within a very short time, many long-established people started to leave. The CEO, thinking that her impressive “action-oriented” style would be a relief to the long-stuck company, found out the hard way that the company really thrived on motivation, being driven by an empathic understanding with their leader. The former leader had been empathic but ineffective. The empathic part was effective, but he had lacked the skills to execute on very effective strategies that were already in place. The new CEO
had made assumptions because she did not examine the hippocampus of the company. If she had, she might have identified what needed to change.

Here’s a list of interventions for dealing with the hippocampus:

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Review the history.
Ask the leader to put the current issue in the context of the history of the company. This will activate long-term memories. The preceding example explains how this can be relevant.

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Review prior techniques.
Ask the leader, manager, or coworker what has been done before. This will create a comparison of what worked and what did not.

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Identify the emotional stake.
Determine what is at stake emotionally for the leader, manager, or coworker. How does the personal and professional history inform what long-term evidence is selected and what is not? Remember that long-term memory is more than facts; it is also emotion.

Emotional memory can have a powerful influence on the present. Managers and leaders should understand that factual memory and recollection do not necessarily mean that the emotions are being remembered. “Remember what we did the last time this happened?” may not motivate coworkers if they are not inclined to remember the stressful emotions of that time.

A person may have a negative memory of change, so inquiring into the history of that person’s experience with change may be helpful in reframing the current situation. A very talented business leader unconsciously identified himself as a self-starter but not as a finisher. As a result, he always found disasters in the middle of a job venture. He did not realize that his emotional memories had set up an expectation in his brain that whenever he got to a mid-point, he had to act in a way that would invite disaster. For example, he consistently applied himself less to his marketing efforts and, as a result, the sales of his workshops would drop after initially being very successful. His emotional memory had sketched out plans for failure. It was only when he understood the context (how his experience had shaped his expectations) that he was able to focus on his new job with renewed vigor.

The Reward Brain (Ventral Striatum)

In a sense, reward is the reason people stay in their jobs and the reason that companies can grow. The reward brain registers rewards, and by stimulating this brain region, we can enhance performance in the business environment.

When people cannot register rewards because they are anxious or lonely, it may be important to address this situation so that the reward brain can become engaged again. Also, when the people at a company do not appear to be motivated to work, the reward brain may need to be stimulated. Here, building new rewards into the plan may help motivate people to work.

Reward can also increase the speed of execution of strategies. If the reward brain is stimulated, work may become more efficient. Whenever you want a behavior to change, stimulate the reward brain when that behavior occurs. For example, if you want people to take risks, you may reward risk-taking or mistakes. If you want people to be more innovative or if you want them to be self-starters, you may reward these behaviors as well.

Here’s a list of interventions for dealing with the reward brain:

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Use monetary rewards.
Build in explicit monetary rewards that correlate with hard work and reward extra work as well. This will likely increase ventral striatal activation, which can modify ACC activation, too.

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Use social rewards.
Build in social rewards as well. Some companies have a “vision of excellence” award. This can increase social reward, which in turn will decrease amygdala activation. This kind of process often becomes stale, though. Leaders should look more authentically to include people in the community and be more specific about their contributions so that the reward is felt more deeply. Leaders may also want to consider rewarding people who are in that follower’s community. For example, a sponsored dinner for an employee and his or her family extends the reward setting (and the striatal activation), thereby calming down the ACC.

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Break goals up into their component parts.
This way, at each step, there is a sense of greater reward. Sometimes it is difficult for people to feel motivated about completing a task whose end result is too far in the future. Breaking the task into smaller components will help stimulate a sense of accomplishment at each stage and increase stimulation of the reward brain, thereby stimulating motivation.

The Action Brain (Motor and Premotor Cortex)

Having a good strategy is only part of a business solution. Executing on this strategy in a timely manner is critical. The action brain needs to get the resultant instruction from the rest of the brain to act. Otherwise, it will stall. Even an excellent strategy will make no difference to the business if it is not acted upon.

When a strategy is in place but not being executed, it may be prudent to turn one’s attention to the action brain to see how to get it jump-started. Many businesses fail because they simply do not act in accordance with their ideas.

When procrastination thwarts efforts to act, the action brain should be brought into focus in order to see if small actions can loosen up the tight grip of procrastination. For example, the manager of a local store recognized the need to sell local produce but did not act on this because of the imagined task of having to find the right farmer. However, when he did start the task, his ability to sell fresh produce increased significantly and he competed effectively with a larger chain because people did not want to wait in those long lines.

When people are emotionally stuck, action can help dislodge emotions. Rather than waiting for the perfect emotional state to act on a business strategy, action toward the accomplishment of a goal sometimes creates that better state of feeling. People assume that they always have to feel good before they act on a strategy, but action itself may create that “feel-good” feeling.

Here’s a list of interventions for dealing with the action brain:

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Act with hypotheses.
Actually act on the decided goals and “test out” the results where appropriate. In the earlier case of the entrepreneur, he was waiting for the definitive signs of success rather than acting on hypotheses that he had constructed. When people require “knowing” in order to act, it can be helpful to explain how acting may increase the chances of knowing. Managers, leaders, and coaches should remember this when working with people who are uncomfortable acting in uncertain situations. How do you know your shirts will sell? You may have done all the market analysis you can. It may be time to act to inform your analyses further.

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Act in small steps.
If action occurs in small steps, it is less overwhelming. Also, each small action increases commitment.

Our brains do not respond well to the thoughts of an arduous task. Managers and leaders may need to break down goals into smaller goals so as to activate the action center of the brain, which may be paralyzed by a task that is too large or overwhelming. Even a small task may be broken down into subtasks when productivity is suffering.

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Revisit the accountant’s reasons.
Do all other steps to test out whether the inaction is justified. The action center may be getting a “don’t move” instruction from the accountant, which is fed by other brain regions. To get the accountant to move, a manager, leader, or coach may benefit from reexamining all the inputs to the action center, including the amygdala (emotion, including fear), the ACC (too much conflict), and the reward brain (which has not been registering rewards).

The Insula

When managers or leaders have a gut feeling about something but don’t know what to do about it, activating the insula is an important task because it will convey the gut feelings to the thinking brain and make action more likely.

Sometimes, all the conscious decision making in the world does not help a business situation. You may be getting a full day of work out of an employee, but your gut feeling may be that they are capable of more. Stimulating your own insula will help you draw out a plan to bring you toward action.

You may have a hunch that a particular business strategy will work, but you may not be able to justify this. Understanding your own intuition instead of discarding it may be critical to the success of your business.

An entrepreneur I was working with was invited to a CEO event. He had no interest in the event itself, or in the people he imagined would be there. However, he had a hunch that something important was going to happen there. By recognizing that he needed to pay attention to his gut feeling, he decided to go to the event. At that event, he met some of the most important contacts he had ever made and his business grew exponentially as a result of this.

The decision to hire and fire people may be a gut decision that is processed deep down in your unconscious. Rather than ignoring this, you may benefit from paying attention to your gut feeling so that you can explore whether this is something upon which to act.