Meet Your Brain
For my final post in the series on the books that have made the biggest impact on my coaching practice, I choose Your Brain at Work by David Rock. It outlines the implications of all the recent research in neuroscience to the way we function at work – as employees, as bosses. There are several terrific takeaways from it, notably, that the pre-frontal cortex – the front of the brain where complex calculations take place, decisions get made and self regulation gets handled – is easily exhausted. It needs a great deal of rest and glucose. Our ability to think clearly, make good decisions and manage ourselves erodes steadily over the course of the work day.
David Rock also shares his model expressing what people need for their brain to be at its best, known as the SCARF Model:
Status – a clear sense of our own self worth and the acknowledgement of this perception in our environment is critical to our brains feeling good.
Certainty – we crave certainty the way we crave sugar or any other reward. We will avoid uncertainty at all costs.
Autonomy – it is critical that we feel as much control over our environment as we are capable of managing; loss of control is interpreted by the brain as a serious threat.
Relatedness – we will naturally find what we have in common to increase relatedness, we will move toward people with whom we can relate believing them to be like ourselves, and away from those to whom we cannot relate making them “other”.
Fairness – is as rewarding as food or sex, and when things are perceived as “unfair” it causes us to feel an intense sense of threat.
For more on The SCARF Model check out some of David’s YouTube videos. The book is also a really fun read, and there is a lot more that what I can share here!
The E-Myth Revisited
As a fledgling coach with a private practice, back in the day when if you said you were a coach the inevitable question was “oh, what sport?” a book that made an earth shaking difference was the E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. If you are in business, thinking of starting a business or have a friend or loved one who is suffering in a business, this book is a must. There are several brilliant ideas in this book including:
- If you have started a business, you are either a technician (that’s what I was as a coach, so is your friend who loved to knit and started a knitting shop), a manager (the guy who understands the processes and systems that a business must have to succeed – people who buy franchises are usually managers) or a visionary (the person who sees a gap in the market place – Don Fisher started The Gap because he couldn’t find a pair of jeans, Steve Jobs wanted computers to be friendly). You might have a little of the other two but you are primarily one of these and if you are going to succeed you need to partner with others who have the other two or find a way to grow yourself enough to get the other two covered. It is stunningly simple and true. The crazy thing is that as I have moved out of the small business world into the corporate world, I find that the same holds true for leaders inside organizations who need to be “intrapraneurs”.
- As a business owner, you need to find a way to spend as much time working on your business as you spend working in your business. Obvious? Maybe, but in 1995 I didn’t know it. Again, totally applicable to people in organizations.
- Anything that works in the business must be systemized and if possible automated. You have to do this so if you get the flu and can’t make it in, the whole house of cards doesn’t fall down. You also have to do it so you can grow. It was the compelling evidence for how important this is that made me start my own coaching company with coaches using my system to coach the audience I had mastered. And finally, I have used this maxim again and again as a manager in a much larger machine and it has served me well.
Michael Gerber has many other books out and has an institute and all that, but for sheer straightforward simplicity for people who maybe don’t think of themselves as “business” people, this book is a bible.
Going With the Flow
Flow : The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced mee-high chick-sent-mee-high, my friend David Rock told me that, and he is important because he wrote one of my top books The Brain at Work) is another book that stopped me in my tracks. Published in 1990, my copy is old, much dog eared and underlined. The author is more recently widely known as a pioneer in the Positive Psychology arena, and his early work outlined in Flow was required reading for coaches because it was solid research about what makes people feel good. Absent real problems like psychological damage, war or pestilence, people were coming to coaches with the objective of optimizing their existence and more specifically, their time at work. Csikszentmihalyi says that in his studies, when people reflected on their most positive experiences they seemed to share one if not all of these characteristics:
- “ the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing.”
- we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing.”
- The task has “clear goals and
- Provide immediate feedback
- There is deep but effortless involvement that shuts out the noise of everyday life
- We are able to exercise a sense of control over our actions
- Self consciousness disappears, but sense of self emerges more strongly after the experience is over
- The sense of time passing is altered; minutes can seem like hours, or hours can feel like minutes.” (Harper, 1991, pg. 49)
Csikszentmihalyi’s theory was that to achieve flow we needed to maintain the balance between the level of challenge of the activity, and our skill level – if the challenge is too low, we become bored, if it is too high we become overly anxious. Each individual needs to monitor their own challenge level to keep it optimal to stay engaged. 
This rang so true for me, and it was extremely useful in work with clients who were clearly bored, but judging themselves for it, thinking they had perfectly jobs and should be happy. Not so! To stay in Flow, it is critical to constantly be raising the bar. This is not totally true for everyone all the time, but for some people, some of the time, the model is extremely useful.
Habits Make All the Difference
The promise was books that rocked my coaching practice that are off the beaten path. OK, so maybe this one isn’t that original, and I must have stumbled on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey in Barnes and Noble because I can’t remember who recommended it. But I have to say that from the day I read this book, I changed some habits that utterly altered the trajectory of my life. I don’t think it is a coincidence that when I started doing what Covey said (and let’s be clear, not everything, just a few things made a huge difference) my business took off, my household became more orderly and calm and my quality of life shot up. I developed a reputation for being freakishly productive. I feel that almost every other “self-help” book that came after this one simply fleshed out some of the good ideas that were here in the first place.
In the section called Put First Things First, the 4 box quadrant probably made the biggest impact on me. The idea is that we all can put every single thing we do into one of the four quadrants.
| Urgent | Not Urgent | |
| Important | QUADRANT I crises, pressing problems, deadline-driven projects |
QUADRANT II prevention, Principle Centered activities, relationship building, recognizing and leveraging new opportunities, planning the future, recreation |
| Not important | QUADRANT III interruptions, some calls, some mail, some reports, some meetings, popular activities |
QUADRANT IV trivia, busy work, some mail, some phone calls time wasters, pleasant activities |
The ones who spend the bulk of their time doing things in the “important” quadrants are simply going to have a much higher life satisfaction quotient. This very concrete model gave me the courage to say no to things that did not fall into the Quadrants I or II. Today, I let people assume I am extremely busy (everybody does) and if pressed I will admit that I am no busier than anyone else, just extremely focused on what is most important to me and ferociously choosy about what I focus on. Don’t tell anyone.
Learn to Love Chaos
The second book in my series on books that knocked my socks off and made an appreciable impact on my coaching practice: Leadership and The New Science
In the early 90’s I was having lunch with a friend and mentor Alex Caillet and I asked him what one book would make the biggest difference for me and he recommended Meg Wheatley’s Leadership and The New Science. One of the things I had noticed working with clients is that they were desperate for answers. The right answers. Of course, as a coach, it was not my job to be the truth dispenser with all of the right answers. But I did feel an obligation to help clients articulate a set of internal values that they could use to make decisions no matter what the situation. But I was still at a loss for a set of Universal Laws that were consistent, were not beholden to any particular world view or religious law. I kept coming back to quantum physics – there had been a recent splash in the news about complexity theory and I had been noodling on how to apply those laws to regular life and work for my clients. Well – Meg beat me to it, and what an amazing job she did. Her breakthrough book made a huge impact on me and in the business world at the time, but as happens with many great books, it has fallen out of circulation. I say, it is time to bring it back. Some of the earth shaking concepts:
- Order will naturally emerge out of chaos. You have to be patient and order will come naturally from within. Good leaders accept occasional chaos as a revitalizing and renewing step.
- Relationships are the only things that matter- it is critical to develop a diversity of relationships.
- Information is the organizing force in the universe; it is the life blood of any system. If it is not flowing freely, the system will not self organize properly.
- Vision is an invisible field and it is the leader’s job to hold this field.
Is that all? Isn’t that enough? Going back to re-read this book to create this blog post, it has once again rocked my world.
Click here for a terrific, oldie but goodie interview with Meg Wheatley
PS I think it is important to give credit to whomever introduces us to great books. The person who introduced me to the Angeles Arrien book mentioned in the previous post is an old, dear friend Belle Linda Halpern, founding partner of The Ariel Group.
Unexpected Inspiration
In my mentoring of coaches and coaching practitioners in organizations I am often asked what my influences have been, so I thought it would be fun to do a short series about the books that have rocked my world as a coach. Not the obvious ones, the books that are not necessarily on the beaten paths and the coaching school reading lists. Over the next few weeks I will share some of my favorite books with a short review of their key messages.
To get us off to a brilliant start for 2012, I will tell you a little about The Four Fold Way: Walking the Paths of the Warrior, Teacher, Healer and Visionary by Angeles Arrien. Arrien is an anthropologist who travelled and lived among indigenous peoples and studied change agents – all of whom draw on the power and wisdom of the 4 archetypes in the title. What she found was that no matter what their culture – peace loving or warlike, maternal vs. patriarchal, agrarian or nomadic – all of the effective leaders follow roughly the same four principles which comprise the Four Fold Way.
- Show up and choose to be present (Warrior)
- Pay attention to what has heart and meaning (Healer)
- Tell the truth without blame or judgment (Visionary)
- Be open to outcome, not attached to outcome (Teacher)
I have been using these principles personally as a self leader, and experimenting with them with clients for over 15 years. They have proved to have astonishing staying power and have supported those who wish to build personal power, be more effective with groups, and increase their coaching skill. Most fine leaders are not as well rounded as they might be, and find very little inspiration in competency models to articulate their gaps and create a real plan to close them. This model provides another angle and I have found that the principles work regardless of religious conviction or cultural background.
Managing in an Age of Superstars and Superegos
The new issue of ESPN the Magazine is entitled, The Interview Issue. As you might have guessed, it is filled with one-on-one conversations between different sports personalities and ESPN staffers. One interview in particular, captured my attention.
The interviewer was John Sawatsky. He is described in The Mag as “a former investigative journalist,” who, “coaches many of the network’s reporters in the science of asking the right questions at the right time.”
Photo courtesy of SD Dirk via Creative Commons
The interviewee is the recently retired manager of the World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals, Tony La Russa. Over the course of his successful 30+ year managerial career, La Russa has won three World Series titles and four Manager of the Year awards. His next award will likely be induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
So, what we have here basically boils down to one “coach” interviewing another “coach.” (And as an added bonus, Sawatsky critiques his own line of questions in the footnotes.) While I recommend reading the interview in its entirety, Sawatsky tosses one question that La Russa knocks out of the park…
Sawatsky: So how do you manage in an age of superstars and superegos?
La Russa: Personalize, personalize, personalize. You need to show you care; you need to earn their trust and respect. This is the entire staff, not just me. And trust means telling the truth. Sometimes that’s not what they want to hear, but you can’t bulls–t them, because there goes your credibility.
But you also understand that these guys have a life. So you make it clear that if at any point there is a personal need I can help with, I’m there.
In his brief response, La Russa effectively demonstrates that the key to his success as a manager was to be a leader.
- Treat your people as individuals. Don’t lead with a one size fits all approach.
- Build relationships on a foundation of trust and mutual respect.
- Surround yourself with a team who lead by a set of shared values.
- Give honest feedback. Don’t be afraid to have difficult conversations.
- Be empathetic, and offer support, when personal issues inevitably arise.
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What Neuroscience Can Teach Leaders About Change
There are probably six excellent change theories and models, and hundreds of books. Here are a couple of little factoids about the human brain that just cuts to the chase on this topic:
- People can only really focus on one big goal at a time. Setting another goal will most likely cancel out the original goal (Rock).
2. Change is hard for everyone and really really hard for some, because it literally sets off alarm bells in the brain (Rock and Schwartz). When navigating a change, take more time than you think should be needed, set up systems for people to have conversations about the change to process it. People need time and coaching to relate, repeat and reframe (Deutschman) their thinking about the changes expected of them. Be ready to be talking about the change long after you have become bored to death with it.
As Peter Senge so advises:
- Start small
- Grow steadily
- Don’t plan everything and
- Expect challenges.
Image by Paul Brentnall
What Neuroscience Can Teach Leaders – 7
Many people have an intuitive sense about how sensitive people are to their own and others’ status. Some are oblivious. BUT…it is critical that you be mindful of your people’s status. People need to know where they stand, and will respond well when treated appropriately in terms of their status (Rock) (Zinc et al).
People who feel that their status has not been fully recognized will also feel a damaging sense of unfairness which will negatively impact how they feel about their work environment far beyond what might seem rational (Tabibnia). When people act like lunatics, before you judge them, check first to see if someones’ place in the hierarchy has been threatened. Don’t upset the cupcakes, unless you mean to.
What Neuroscience Can Teach Leaders About False Consensus
You will vastly overestimate what people know, for example, your take on the current context or your reasoning for a specific course of action, assuming that others know what you know and see what you see; this is called False Consensus (Ross et al). Remember this when explaining the nuts and bolts of your vision, strategy and goals. Become accustomed to seeing the world differently from others, and defining reality as you see it regularly, more than you think you should need to (Senge).
Stan Slap once said “Most leaders would just get where they’re going by themselves and send a postcard if they could.” Don’t try it, it won’t work. Stand at the front, hold the map aloft and keep explaining again and again. Long past the point when you are bored.
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