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!
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.
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 Feedback
Feedback: The never ending mystery! Here is yet another installment in the series on what we have to learn about Leadership from the study of neuroscience.
Feedback:
- Hire for Feedback Orientation. Individuals, who have feedback orientation like feedback, believe it has value, seek it regularly, have the wherewithal to process feedback with and without help, are sensitive to others’ view of themselves and generally feel accountable to act on feedback (London and Smither). Ask yourself about your own feedback orientation? Are you a role model for asking for and receiving feedback?
2. Build a culture in which feedback is natural and given in the moment. A culture of feedback is :
“…one where individuals continuously receive, solicit, and use formal and informal feedback to improve their job performance. This may be linked to effective policies and programs for performance management, continuous learning and career development. The individual’s feedback orientation depends in part on the support and climate for learning. The more frequent the feedback and the closer it follows the behavior in question, the more likely it is to be accepted. The more support [from you the leader] for learning and development, including the availability of behaviorally-oriented feedback, the more the individual is likely to develop a positive orientation toward feedback. ” (London and Smither)
3. People who have sustained a great deal of trauma are going to have a very hard time distinguishing a real threat from a potential one (Rock). This means that workers who go through rounds of layoffs and are not given new information to raise their levels of certainty will most probably become less and less able to receive any critical feedback. Only people working in an environment where they feel safe will be open to learning, be more likely to have insights and be generally more creative and productive (Gordon).
Image from Grant Cochrane
What Neuroscience Can Teach Leaders 4
A new installment in the series on what we have to learn about leadership from the study of neuroscience.
Fear is bad for Business:
Well, it’s true. We suspected that it was, but now we know for sure. No one gets smarter when they are afraid. Living in an environment of constant threat erodes creativity and cognitive ability (Phelps) (Gordon).
And:
Expectations have real power. The disappointment of expectations feels much worse to people than simply not liking events or policies when something happens. If an employee has an expectation of a reward or promotion that is not met, the brain feels just terrible. It is critical to manage expectations carefully to avoid people feeling awful and taking it out on each other or even more likely, your customers (Rock).
Image from IdeaGo
What Neuroscience Can Teach Leaders 3
1. The division between thoughts and feelings is in fact an artificial one. From a brain standpoint they are indistinguishable (Phelps). The best ways to understand what you are thinking and feeling is to make time to reflect upon them, (Ochsner et al) and use language to label them (Lieberman et al). This means you will need a trusted advisor who will listen to you, e.g.: get a coach if you don’t already have one.
2. Habits are driven by the unconscious. Some are useful, some are not. It serves you well to notice your habits, examine each one and choose whether or not you want to allow it to continue (Rock).
What Neuroscience Can Teach Leaders 2
Attention: What You Pay Attention to Matters
1. You can choose what happens in your head when you are not thinking about anything in particular by choosing to be mindful instead of simply letting your mind wander in what is known as the “default network”. Mindfullness is defined as:
a) Self regulating attention so that it is maintained on immediate experience thereby allowing for increased recognition of mental events in the present moment
b) Adopting a particular orientation toward one’s experiences in the present moment, an orientation that is characterized by curiosity, openness, and acceptance (Bishop et al).
By practicing mindfulness you can choose to pay attention to sensory information coming in. What you pay attention to is what you are conscious of (Rock)(Berman).
2. What you choose to pay attention to can dictate the quality of your mood, your quality of life and the quality of life of people around you. Pay attention to the past and you will end up ruminating uselessly, whereas when you stay focused on the present, you get useful information about what is going on with your own thoughts and feelings (Tang et al) (Hassed).
3. One of your key jobs as a leader is to continually remind your people of what to pay attention to (Hassed).
Image by Carlos Porto
What Neuroscience Can Teach Leaders
Pioneers in the coaching profession began coaching people using age old wisdom gleaned from history, philosophy, art, spirituality, anthropology, psychology, psychiatry and business. The techniques we used were built from trial and error, when we found ones that worked we simply kept using them even if we didn’t necessarily know how or why they worked. The great value of the study of neuroscience in the context of leadership is that what we intuitively knew to be true is in fact supported by the scientific research. The following will be part of a series over the next few weeks. Each item is short referenced, full references available on request.
Your Brain is Key:
Take care of your Pre-Frontal Cortex, the “seat of judgment”. It requires rest and glucose. It fatigues easily though you don’t necessarily feel it when it is tired (the way you do when you are physically tired). Every decision you make adds to “decisions fatigue” and erodes your energy for thinking things through (Beameister). Your ability to regulate your emotions and make good decisions declines with fatigue. People who make consistently good decisions aren’t necessarily smarter; rather they know when they are not at their best:
“Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested and their glucose is low. The best decision makers are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.” (Baumeister in Article by John Tierney, NYTimes Sunday Magazine, August 17th, pg. 47)
Image: Carlos Porto
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