Applied Neuroscience For Leaders Part I Expanding Leaders’ Potential Through Understanding the Science of the Brain

By Amy Brann and David Neal

What do we mean by Applied Neuroscience?

Put simply, applied neuroscience for leaders is an approach to leadership development which employs insights from the rapidly growing field of neuroscience. Effective Leadership at any level within an organization requires an understanding of how people think, feel, behave and interact under different circumstances. Neuroscience is concerned with very similar questions and can provide a broad and sound evidence based approach for effective leadership.

Neuroscience and related fields, including behavioural economics and psychology, have the power to inform and empower beyond traditional leadership training. We believe than an understanding of the scientific, evidence-based principles of how brains work gives those with the ability to wield such tools much greater flexibility and ability to adap to new situations. Increasingly, those at the forefront of business and leadership seem to concur.1,2.

How can Neuroscience contribute to leadership development?

The research, evidence and insight underlying the application of neuroscience to leadership, particularly in business can be organized around 7 core themes3:

Connection Celebration Contribution

Control Culture

Confidence Certainty

Arranged around these key knowledge nodes are the evidence and insights from neuroscience topics that we think are particularly exciting and relevant for leaders: neuroplasticity and Hebbian learning; motivation and decision-making; learning memory and behaviour. Our focus is on how specifically these concepts can be applied on a day-to-day basis by those in leadership roles.

In this, Synaptic Potential’s first white paper on applied science, we will introduce you to the importance for leaders of neuroscience around 3 of the 7 core knowledge nodes:

Connection Celebration Contribution

Celebra'on  

Celebration, in this context, is all about activating the brain’s neural networks involved in reward and processing. This is the next layer, the deeper layer to what most people consider when mulling over celebration. Amy has interviewed many business leaders and the reality is that most organisations think that celebration is important, but are limiting themselves by their understanding of what this can mean. Some companies are even going one step further and because they don’t understand how their employees brains work they are actually being counterproductive through their efforts around celebration.

In neuroscience terms, motivated behaviours are reinforced by outcomes that stimulate neural networks relating to reward. In other words, the things we choose to do, we do because they are associated with getting some sort of reward. The subtleties of the way our brain processes rewards have implications for the way we approach rewards and motivation for both others and ourselves. Getting this wrong can cost time, money and often most valuably, quality talent.

Both the anticipation and delivery of the reward can cause sufficient firing of dopaminergic neurons in the brain to motivate a particular behavior 4.

The way in which particular behaviours are learned over time and move from requiring a conscious effort to becoming habits is thought to relate to the brain making connections between rewards and actions in the context of a particular environment 5,6. It is thought that a similar dopamine signal in the brain mediates this sort of learning 7.

Celebration then, at an individual level and at an organizational level is not just important to keep people happy. The old saying goes “what you celebrate, you become”. The evidence from neuroscience suggests that, indeed, how you encourage and lead celebration as a leader may determine the kind of organization or team that you find yourself leading – how they behave, how they self-motivate and how they interact with clients.

To be an effective leader, motivating oneself and others is perhaps the most essential role to fulfil. Trial and error can lead to a good understanding of how different rewards motivate different individuals but without knowing the science of reward and the nature of the routes available to motivation, the task remains guesswork. A neuroscience approach provides an evidenced framework for predicting, layering and evaluating the effectiveness of rewards and motivation.

How important is the connection an individual feels to a team, to an organization or to a leader? Neuroscience research has produced evidence to suggest that in several ways, it may be very important to how happy and how productive an individual is. As a social species we have evolved so isolation heightens our sensitivity to social threats. This helps to motivate us to renew social connection 8. Different people may be more sensitive to the pain of social disconnection than others 9.

As a leader you an opportunity to increase strategic and cultural awareness to this and other scientifically underpinned facts about connection to the benefit both the individuals within your organization and ultimately, the company’s bottom line as well

Connec'on  

What kind of “rewards” are important in motivating people?

Importantly, there are lots of kinds of “reward” that seem to activate the same areas of the brain in similar ways. There is an increased activation of the brain’s dopamine based reward circuits in response not only to primary rewards (like food) but also money, which is a secondary reward 10, 11.

Social Rewards

But there is also another level beyond financial reward which seems to activate the same reward areas of the brain – the ventral striatum, the ventral tegmental area and the ventro-medial pre-frontal cortex as physical rewards 12. This means that getting a good reputation, being treated fairly and being able to cooperate as part of a team all have the potential to be at least as powerful motivators as financial or material rewards 13,14,15.

As a leader, knowing how to get the best out of team means knowing how to motivate people with rewards that matter to them. Evidence from neuroscience lends weight to a diverse range of approaches, including application of rewards through connection.

Social Stresses

Stress is perhaps the biggest barrier to an individual’s ability to self-self movitvate and work efficiently and productively. At the extreme, this leads to mental illness in the form of depression but even the levels of stress experienced on a daily basis may impair focus and drive. Successful leaders need to recognize signs of stress in themselves and their colleagues and be able to take steps to avoid and reduce stress.

In much the same way that neuroscience has shed light on the importance of social rewards in motivating people, social stresses such as exclusion from a group seem to activate the same brain areas as physical pain, such as the insula, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and thalamus 12.

We know perceptions are powerful. At work if someone is experiencing, or if they think or feel that they are experiencing one of the social stresses then that can have physical

consequences. A review of 81 studies revealed that social support has been reliably linked to beneficial effects on the following systems of the body: cardiovascular, endocrine and immune16.

In many interviews Amy has conducted with leaders within organisations repeatedly she hears variations of ‘we have a family feel type culture here’. That can be a great thing, although most of us can remember those Christmases.

Applied neuroscience for leaders training can allow leaders to develop more about robust strategies for tackling stress in themselves and colleagues but more importantly, it may develop the skill of anticipating and taking steps to avoid stress.

What do you, as a leader, and your organization contribute to the well being of your team, your local community or the planet? Many companies are becoming increasingly concerned with corporate responsibility, or at least with having a readily producible policy on the matter. But what does this have to do with leadership?

As discussed above, the fundamental task of the leader is motivating people. Neuroscience has found, however, that if you do not have a good reputation or if people don’t trust you, all of this hard work could be undone before you even get started. People’s choices about who to trade with and who to trust in risky decisions has been tested with economic games. Participants’ choices are recorded and their brain function is measured simultaneously.

Contribu'on  

One particularly relevant study found that if people believe the person they are playing with has a poor moral character, they are less likely to trust them and trade with them17. Not only that, but the belief about the moral character of their counterpart actually prevented them from learning that in this particular game, trading with the seemingly less moral character was at least as financially rewarding as trading with an alternative neutral or “good” person.

As a leader, the moral validation of making clear what your contribution and the contribution of he organization is to the “greater good” could mean the difference between being able to recruit and maintain a loyal team and ending up with few options available.

Conclusions  

Successful leaders should always have an in-depth understanding of the factors influencing motivation. They should understand how to self motivate and how to motivate their team. This is essential to all that they do and underlies other critical skills such as effective planning and effective delegation.

Much understanding of motivation can come from trial and error and personal experience. Given the critical nature of the aspect of leadership, relying solely on this haphazard and sporadic approach to the development of this skillset risks falling behind the competition based solely on chance. An evidence based training programme is necessary and for this, the best evidence should be used.

How  to  find  out  more  

We run a programme for leaders which is very flexible and modules are tailored to your organization and he group you choose to go through it. The programme can run alongside other leadership programmes as it underpins, strengthens and deepens understanding of why and how older classically taught processes work.

Whether you already have programmes for your emerging leaders, middle managers and partners or board members or whether you need something foundational and other CPD pieces to, this programme is a wise choice. The content is unlikely to be found anywhere else, as it is the practical application of cutting edge science.

Contact us on bookings@synapticpotential.com and request our Applied Neuroscience for Leaders programme brochure to further assess whether this may be a good match for your organization.

Connect with us on: Twitter: @Amy_Brann https://uk.linkedin.com/in/amybrann https://www.facebook.com/neuroscienceinbusiness/

References  

1.  Waytz, Adam and Mason, Malia. Your Brain at Work: what a new approach to neuroscience can tell us about management. Harvard Business Review, 2013.

2.  Lee, Nick et al. The brain in business: neuromarketing and organizational cognitive neuroscience. Der Market, 2010; 49: 121-131.

3.  Brann, Amy. Make Your Brain Work. Kogan Page Limited, 2013

4.  Schultz, Wolfram et al. Reward Processing in Primate Orbitofrontal Cortex and Basal Ganglia. Cerebral Cortex, 2000. 10(3): 272-283

5.  Adams, Christopher. Variations in the sensitivity of instrumental responding to reinforce devaluation. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section B 34 (2): 77-98, 1982

6.  De Wit, S and Dickinson, A. Associative theories of goal directed behavior: a case for animal-human translational models. Psychological Research; 73(4): 463-476, 2009

7.  Wise, Roy. Dopamine, learning and motivation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2004. 5: 483– 494

8.  Cacioppo, J.T, et al. Social IsolaCon. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, issue: Social Neuroscience: Gene, Environment, Brain, Body.

9.  Cacioppo, J.T., L.C. Hawkley & J. Correll. Perceived social isolation within personal and evolutionary timescales. In Handbook of Social Exclusion. C.N. DeWall, Ed. Oxford University Press, New York.

10. McClure, Samuel et al. A computatonal substrate for insentive salience. Trends in Cognitive Neuroscience, 2003. 26(8): 423–428

11. Knutson, Brian et al. FMRI Visualization of Brain Activity during a Monetary Incentive Delay Task. NeuroImage, 2000. 12: 20–27

12.  Lieberman, Daniel and Eisenberger, Naomi. Pains and Pleasures of Social Life. Science, 2009. 323: 890–891.

13.  Izuma, K. Processing of social and monetary rewards in the human striatum. Neuron, 2008. 58(2): 284–294.

14. Tabibnia, Golnaz et al. The Sunny Side of Fairness: Preference for Fairness Activates Reward Circuitry (and Disregarding Unfairness Activates Self-­-Control Circuitry). Psychological Science, 2008. 19: 339–347.

15. Rilling, J et al. A neural basis for social cooperation. Neuron, 2002. 35(2): 395–405.

16. Uchino, Bert N., John T. Cacioppo, and Janice K. Kiecolt-­-Glaser. "The relationship between social support and physiological processes: a review with emphasis on underlying mechanisms and implications for health." Psychological bulleLn 119.3 (1996): 488.

17. Delgado, M R et al. Perceptions of moral character modulate the neural systems of reward during the trust game. Nature Neuroscience, 2005. 8 (11): 1611–1618