Improving leadership, management and governance behaviors is all about behavior change, in particular changing habits and raising people’s self-awareness of behaviors that they often know have negative consequences.
Yet when it comes to people actually changing their behaviors, after this or that workshop, seminar or program, I notice that often they don’t. In all the years I have helped people to improve their leadership skills, I can’t begin to count the times people said that communication is critical, that good listening is essential for a leader, that planning is the proper thing to do. Yet I observe over and over that these pieces of good advice, to ourselves and others, are not followed, or at least not all the time, and not consistently or consciously.
I have pondered why this is happening for a long time and started to delve into neuroscience to look for answers. We all know our brains have something to do with habits and behavior but how? (A good read about how our brain influences our behavior and our behavior influences our brain is ‘Behave’ by Robert Sapolsky). Why can't we just tell people what they should do different?
Neuroscience has gone through an enormous growth spurt thanks to the advances in neuroimaging technology. Yet the field is still relatively young, with daily discoveries, plenty of questions, much controversy and a lot of neurobabble (sweeping statements about the brain that are actually not supported by compelling evidence).
Here are some things I am discovering that have some bearing on this complex phenomenon of the behavior of leaders, managers and those who govern.
Fast and slow
David Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow), Elkhonon Goldberg (the Executive Brain and other newer books) and many others have written about how we make decisions. The adult brain has stored many routines and short cuts that keep our Pre Frontal Cortex (PFC), the latest evolutionary development of our brain, from overload. If slow thinking is the work of the PFC, the conductor in our brain, then fast thinking is the product of sloppy work by other parts of our brain. They make lots of mistakes, such as taking a cellphone for a gun. Fast thinking is responsible for biases, impulsiveness and simply making poor decisions. Yet is serves a function – we couldn’t be slow thinkers all the time – we would get exhausted.
Our PFC consumes much more energy than any other part of our brain. If we could not rely on routines, templates, shortcuts, we would get overloaded, and maybe blow some fuses, and surely exhaust ourselves. And yet, the prescriptions we bring to our clients and counterparts presume that all decisions are made in a way that can only be done by PFC. It is our PFC that recruits all those areas of our brain that need to chime in on a decision we have to make (including a habit to change). Another labeling of these brain phenomena are the Default Network (DN) and the Executive Network (EN). Marcus Raichle from The University of Washington first coined the term Default Network which describes the mode to which our brain defaults when not on task.
The interaction between the EN and DN has been wonderfully described by Olivia Fox Cabane and Judah Pollack in their book ‘The Net and the Butterfly,’ (Chapter 2). In their reconstruction of how the Rolling Stones’ hit song ‘Satisfaction’ came about they illustrate how the DN and EN work together. The DN team that creates the breakthrough consists of Leonardo Da Vinci, Sun Tzu, Joan of Arc, Sherlock Holmes, Amelia Earhart, Napoleon, Euclid, Marie Curie, Michelangelo, Teresa de Avila, Erasmus, Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein. They are in the skunk room surrounded by Post-It Notes, clay, notepads, music, toys soldiers and airplanes, pens, markers, whiteboards and more. Keith Richards is like a CEO (if you can imagine that): he (granted, unwittingly) formulated a challenge and then goes to sleep, or does some mindless task so as not to interfere with the team’s creative problem solving. The interplay is critical, as is our ability to not always be ‘on.’ Hence, an exhortation to be creative, rational, on-task, is unlikely to work all the time (or at all), and may even be counterproductive. ‘Take a walk in the woods’ would probably result a better yield, yet in most organizations this would be perceived as slacking. Yet we know enough about the brain now (and meditation experts have known this forever) that such a walk can calm down our frantic brain; calming it down enough to look at multiple and novel options, whether these are about hard decisions or new strategies.
Fear and self-protection
When we are in a bad place, either because we are not well, someone close to us is suffering, or when we have experienced trauma, it is hard to get excited when our boss or chief executive talks about our vision or mission, the good we do in the world or the importance of our jobs. When we are in a bad place the most primitive part of our brain is activated. The limbic system which lies deep in our brain is the (evolutionary) old brain that served us a long time ago. It was primarily preoccupied by survival and belonging. This part of the brain is activated when strong emotions occur, emotions that accompany thoughts like ‘I am going to die’ (or my incompetence will be exposed) or they will kick me out of the tribe (I will be fired). While nowadays most of such threats are psychological in nature, they still activate these (fast acting) parts of our brain and put us in protect mode. When an individual, a team or an entire organization is in protect mode, and leaders need productivity and creativity, it is unlikely that exhortations will work. The first order of business is to create stability and safety. Once these basic conditions are in place, people can start to come out of their corners. But don’t expect them to become enthusiastic and energetic co-creators, which is what we usually want, and want it now (‘that’s enough slacking, back to work!’).