What Neuroscience Can Teach Leaders

From brain science comes optimism. Ignore its power, and you'll deprive yourself and your workers of greater skills

By John R. Ryan

What’s on the minds of business leaders these days? Judging from the explosion of books and articles on the subject in the past year or two, it’s quite obvious: their own minds. The burgeoning field of neuroscience—the study of the nervous system and the brain—has gone mainstream. The race is on to translate its insights into practical applications at work.

Consultant David Rock takes up the topic in his thought-provoking book Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long. Tony Schwartz does the same in The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working: The Four Forgotten Needs That Energize Great Performance. A recent piece in Strategy + Business entitled “That’s The Way We (Used To) Do Things Around Here,” by Jeffrey Schwartz, Pablo Gaito, and Doug Lennick, explores how knowledge of neuroscience can give companies an edge in creating lasting cultural change.

At my own firm, we are intrigued as well by neuroscience’s potential for enhancing leadership effectiveness. Success as a leader, after all, often comes down to specific behavioral traits. The more we know about how to encourage positive behavior and change limiting behavior in ourselves and others, the better we will meet our challenges. Last spring we convened a special lecture series of neuroscience experts from around the U.S. to learn about their latest work.

Here’s the bottom line: We are all creatures of habit. It takes real effort to alter the pathways those habits form in our brains, whether we’re talking about eating, listening, or remembering to floss our teeth. But those pathways have far more plasticity than originally thought, meaning we can learn new and smarter ways of doing things at any age if we make the effort.

GETTING AROUND THE BUZZ SAW

We all overrate the importance of “inherent talent” while vastly underestimating our potential capabilities. This reality has major implications for leadership. At an individual level, we can take shortcomings—such as a tendency to withhold praise from direct reports or not to delegate work—and develop a deliberate, behaviorally driven approach for rectifying it. At the organizational level, we don’t have to let the old refrain “we’ve never done it that way before” turn into an innovation-killing, energy-draining buzz saw.

We should, at the same time, greet the torrent of neuroscience-driven business and personal growth advice with some skepticism. When complicated scientific findings are popularized, they can end up oversimplified, overstated, and ultimately, underwhelming. Still, the body of evidence suggests neuroscience has the power to influence how we work and how long we can continue to be effective. So it is increasingly incumbent on us to lead with an informed view of the brain. Our experience in changing the behavior of leaders, combined with data from the some 400,000 leaders with whom we’ve worked, suggests several tactics we can employ right now to boost our own performance and model success for our colleagues.

First, be positive. This sounds like a dusty old cliché, but research underscores its validity. Psychologist Martin Seligman explored the power of “learned optimism” 20 years ago. Today, Jessica Payne, an assistant professor of psychology at Notre Dame, reports that a positive mood increases verbal fluency, improves creativity and problem solving, and helps us think less linearly, which are key to innovation.

Overall, the more positive we are, the more likely we are to have penetrating moments of insight. Our research indicates leaders must exude confidence, a can-do attitude, and passion for their work. On a day-to-day basis, this means walking the halls with a smile on our faces (especially when we don’t feel like it), praising our women and men for work we appreciate, and offering encouragement to colleagues facing challenges on the job or at home.