If you are a leader, be aware that whatever action you take, whatever decision you make, supports or undermines the perceived levels of status, certainty, autonomy, relationships, and fairness in your company. Thus it is understood that it is so difficult to lead. Each of his words and his looks are charged with social meaning. All your phrases and gestures are perceived and interpreted, magnified and analyzed to find meanings that you never tried to give them.
The managing with the brain model provides the means to make all these potentially tense interactions aware; helps you be alert to employee concerns (the cause of which they may not understand themselves) and teaches you how to calibrate your words and actions to be more effective.
Start by reducing the threats inherent in your business and in the behavior of your leaders. In the same way that the animal brain is wired to respond to a predator before it can focus on hunting for food, so the social brain is wired to respond to the dangers that threaten its essential concerns, rather than perform other functions. Threats always kill rewards because the response to the threat is strong, immediate, and hard to ignore. Once triggered, it is difficult to navigate which is why an incident while driving to work in the morning can be distracting and affect performance for the entire day. We human beings cannot think creatively,work well with others or make sensible decisions when your responses to threats are on high alert. Skillful leaders know this and act accordingly.
A good example is a business reorganization; reorganizations pose threats to autonomy because people feel they have lost control of their future. An astute leader will address these threats by offering employees some leeway to make all possible decisions for themselves; For example, if budget cuts need to be made, involve affected people in deciding what to cut. Because many reorganizations involve improvements to information and technology systems - undermining their autonomy as they are imposed on them without their consent - it is essential to provide ongoing support and solicit employee participation in the design of the systems.
Top-down strategic planning is often incompatible with managing with the brain. If a leader or a few come up with a plan and expect subordinates to “buy it”, it is a recipe for failure because it does not take into account the response to the threat. Rarely do people support initiatives that they did not take part in designing because otherwise it would undermine their status and autonomy. Unconscious sabotage of strategic plans can only be prevented if these interests are proactively addressed; This unconscious reaction is due to the fact that people feel that they have not been included in changes that affect them on a daily basis.
Leaders often underestimate the importance of considering threats to injustice; This is especially true when it comes to compensation. Although the motivation of most people does not depend primarily on money, they are deeply demotivated when they believe that their pay is unfair or that, by comparison, that of others is excessive. Leaders who recognize fairness as a key concern understand that disproportionate pay increases to top managers make it impossible to fully engage people in the middle or lower end of the scale. It is counterproductive to declare that a high-paying executive "is doing a great job."because those who receive less interpret that they are perceived as workers with insufficient performance.
For many years, economists have argued that people change their behaviors if they have enough incentives; but economists understand incentives as solely economic. There are reasons to believe that financial incentives are effective only when those who perceive them see them as support for their social needs. Status can also be enhanced by giving employees greater discretion to plan their tasks or the opportunity to build meaningful relationships with others at different levels of the organization.
The managing with the brain model provides leaders with more effective, more nuanced, and less expensive ways to expand the meaning of what rewards mean. At the same time, they provide a tighter and granular understanding of the state of engagement in which employees are doing their best. Engagement can be induced when goal-oriented people feel rewarded for their efforts and the level of threat is tolerable; in short, when the brain secretes rewards in several of the dimensions already mentioned.
Leaders are also not immune to managing with the brain, like everyone else, they react when they perceive threats related to their status, autonomy, relationships, certainty and fair treatment. However, their reactions have greater impact because they are picked up and expanded by others in the company (if the salaries of a company's executives are excessive, it may be because others follow the intuitive emphasis of the leader, driven by unconscious cognition that increases the status).
If you are a leader, the more you practice reading yourself, the more effective you will be. For example, if you understand why “ micromanaging ” threatens status and autonomy, you will resist the urge to improve your certainty by dictating every detail; on the contrary, it will disarm others by granting them greater discretion to comment on their own mistakes. If you've felt your hair stand on end when someone says, “Can I give you feedback?”, You know it's better to create opportunities for people to tackle the hard work of self-evaluation rather than insisting that they rely on performance reviews.
When a leader knows himself very well, he provides others with feelings of security even in highly uncertain environments. It makes it easier for workers to focus on the task which leads to performance improvements. This principle is testable in other groups of mammals, in which the skilled leader of the pack maintains the peace between all members., so that everyone can perform their functions. A self-aware leader modulates her behavior to relieve organizational stress and creates an environment in which motivation and creativity flourish. One of the great advantages of neuroscience is that it provides verifiable data (hard) that validates the efficacy and value of so-called “soft” skills (soft). It also shows the dangers of being an impulsive leader who when you try, with your best intention, to mobilize people triggers a response to the threat that puts them on their guard.
There are also many leaders who try to suppress their emotions, believing that it will improve their effectiveness, but this undermines morale and confuses people. Experiments by Kevin Ochsner and James Gross show that when someone tries to hide their feelings from other people, these other people tend to adopt a threat response. Here's why spontaneity is key to creating a true leadership “presence”. This approach is likely to minimize threats to status, increase certainty, and create a sense of justice and connectedness.
Finally, this model explains why intelligence, without more, is not enough to be a good leader. Lieberman's research suggests that high intelligence is often associated with poor self-knowledge. The neural networks that deal with information retention, planning, cognitive problem solving reside in the lateral or outer parts of the brain, while it is the middle regions that support self-knowledge, social skills and empathy. These regions are inversely correlated. As Lieberman points out: "If you spend a lot of time on cognitive tasks, your ability to demonstrate empathy is reduced, simply because you use very little of the circuits that activate the latter."
Perhaps one of the great tasks facing business leaders and politicians is creating an atmosphere that promotes status, certainty, autonomy, relationship, and justice. When historians analyze our time their judgment will depend on how organizations and societies operated. Did they treat people fairly? Did they count on them to solve problems, to promote autonomy and to stimulate certainty to the extent possible? If so, they will be recognized by the brains of the future.
This article is an excerpt from the book "#Neuromanagement" by the same author.
