All in the mind
Guardian Work
Published on Saturday September 15, 2007
The art of leadership is, in fact, a science – so say the proponents of ‘neuroleadership’. Chris Alden reports on controversial new thinking.
It happens every day in a workplace near you. A humble employee – let’s call him Darren – is called into a meeting with his boss. The moment the door closes, Darren realises it’s a trap: he’s being bounced into taking on a project he just doesn’t want. It means more hours for the same money, and on the face of it he doesn’t have a choice. Then it comes: that sense of injustice, that rush of blood to the head, and as Darren struggles to avoid saying something he regrets, he stops listening. All he wants to do is leave the room. So he says yes, takes the work, and scarpers.
That afternoon, still stewing at how things went, Darren browses the job pages. If this is how they treat him, maybe he won’t be working here much longer.
It doesn’t take a scientist to realise that what is happening here is, in part, poor communication and poor leadership. And it helps explain why the people companies choose to train their leaders are usually experts in soft skills – leadership gurus, management coaches and social psychologists among them.
But in today’s business world, where measurability is vital, are these skills enough? Step forward “neuroleadership” – the practice of applying lessons from neuroscience to the art of business. Darren’s “rush of blood” has a chemical cause; if that cause can be explained and analysed, the theory goes, perhaps Darren can be better managed.
It seems businesses are ready to devote time to this new science of leadership. An MBA with neuroleadership at its core has been set up at Cimba in Italy, and companies such as AIG and Cargill are applying findings from the field to their management training. The first neuroleadership conference took place in May.
The most active proponent of neuroleadership is David Rock, an Australian author and coaching consultant who coined the term. His goal is to take neuroscientific research – especially the growing body of research into how people interact – and use it to try and help leaders get people to do what they want them to do.
“It’s about teaching leaders how the brain works, because that’s what they’re interacting with. Whether they know it or not, they’re trying to rewire people’s brains,” Rock says. One process to be aware of, he says, is the relationship between the emotional centre of the brain – the limbic system – and the thinking centre, the prefrontal cortex. Explaining simply how these work together can help leaders to understand how to manage people better, he says.
The emotional centre of the brain works essentially as a “toward and away” system, Rock says, with two modes: advance and retreat. “If you’re trying to influence someone and change the way they think, and they’re experiencing a retreat emotion, you have zero chance of influencing them – unless you’re using a stick. This is well studied,” says Rock.
Conversely, when people reach answers themselves – in other words, are given room to grow and learn, through focus and attention on goals – they experience positive neurochemical responses. “There’s a lot of adrenaline and dopamine, and pleasurable chemistries, when people come to answers themselves, especially new answers. That chemistry is very useful: people want to do things.
“We know now, for example, that status has its own reality in the brain. When you feel your status goes up, it impacts your brain chemistry [in a positive way]; when you feel rejected socially, the same circuits in your brain light up as when you feel physical pain.
“When people feel they don’t have a choice, that’s where you can’t influence them,” he added.
If you want to do your best thinking, suggests Rock, you need to pamper what neuroscientist Amy Arnsten calls the “Goldilocks of the brain” – the prefrontal cortex, which needs everything “just right” before it can work properly. “One finding is just how difficult it is to do good, clear thinking,” says Rock, “because people spend so much of their time emotionally over-aroused, especially in an organisation.”
So far, so sensible, and with far-reaching implications for businesses. But Rock has run into opposition to his ideas – not for his conclusions, but for the importance he attaches to the science. Alex Haslam, professor of social and organisational psychology at the University of Exeter, thinks neuroleadership is limited because it describes the effects of leadership, not the social-psychological basis.
“There are some interesting neuroscientific questions, potentially, but how you motivate people to want to think different things is a logically prior question,” Haslam says.
“Why is it, when you watch The Office, that people aren’t influenced by David Brent when he tells them to think of themselves as all friends? That’s because they think he’s an idiot.”
Charles Green, the US-based founder of Trusted Advisor Associates, points out that to explain a process does not necessarily mean you can derive predictions from it. Green says one of the reasons for Rock’s popularity is that he is tapping into a feeling in the business world that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”.
“Those things sound great to a business person: ‘I want a causal explanation that allows me to manage and predict people’s behaviour – tell me about the chemicals.’ [But] the belief that the world can only be managed with statistical or physical descriptions dehumanises many of the important relationships in business.”
Green says Rock has some “beautiful conclusions” – but says you don’t need to be a neurophysicist to figure them out.
But Rock is mindful that “you’re going to get more attention and credibility if you can support what you’re saying with a hard science”.
And he stresses that he is disproving nothing of existing leadership theory. “It’s just providing a richer language,” he says. “There are hundreds of scientists doing this kind of work. Let’s use this where it’s useful.”
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