TEXT: AMANDA THURMAN

Neuroleadership applies the findings of neuroscience to the art of leadership.

A growing body of research indicates that understanding what is happening in our brains can actually improve our leadership skills. Neuroleadership – a term coined by Australian author and leadership consultant Dr. David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz, research psychiatrist at UCLA – applies the findings of neuroscience to the art of leadership.

Courses on neuroleadership are already being taught in leading universities and business schools. Also, companies such as Cargill, an international producer and marketer of agricultural products, and AIG, an American multinational insurance corporation, are putting it into practice in their management training. Even the United States military is investigating whether neuroleadership could enhance the abilities of their troops.

Schwartz has a simple message to help us become better at the things we do: pay attention. It seems that focusing the mind on identifying and creating new leadership behavior, rather than continuing with the same old habits, can actually create chemical and physical changes in your brain. “From my perspective,” explains Schwartz, “the real link between neuroscience and leadership is attention. Neuroleadership accentuates the insight that attention rewires the brain, and uses neuroscience as a means of helping leaders train the attentions both of themselves and of their organizations.”

Paying attention is vital

So how does it work? Well, the brain is very malleable, and this “neuroplasticity” allows it to constantly adapt at a cellular level in reaction to our environment and experiences.

Taxi drivers, for example, have a much larger posterior hippocampus than average, as this is the part of the brain devoted to the spatial representation of surroundings. Monks and others who regularly practice meditation show less activity in the default mode network – a network linked to self-centered thinking, daydreaming and anxiety. Athletes’ brains are larger in the parts that control hand-eye coordination.

Basically, the more time you spend on a specific activity, the stronger the neural pathways responsible for executing that activity become. Paying attention actually changes the brain – meaning professionals in different parts of business actually have physiological differences that may make them see the world differently.

When you are not used to an activity, it is very energy-intensive to carry it out. Any new task will use your brain’s working memory – the prefrontal cortex – to process the new information and compare it to information already stored. Once you have mastered the activity, the process is dealt with in the basal ganglia, where you do not really need to consciously think about it.

Using the basal ganglia requires much less energy, which is why we find tasks we are used to less tiring to handle. The prefrontal cortex tires easily and can only process a limited amount of information at a time. To free up its processing power, we need to consciously repeat an activity, so it can be dealt with semi-automatically.

Change causes discomfort

A lot of what leaders do in their day-to-day work lives is governed by the basal ganglia – they have the experience to make leadership routine. The downside of this is that changing their activities – for example, bringing a new management practice into place – leads to discomfort and mental exhaustion, because it requires the use of the prefrontal cortex again. The result? An avoidance of change, even if it is for the better. There is a hardwired neural response to feel physiological discomfort when presented with change.

When bad management techniques and cognitive errors become habits, they become “wired into the brains of leaders and wired into the organizational structure of how decisions are made,” explains Schwartz. They are now “part of the habit center that runs cognition in the brain and impedes the use of frontal cortex activity – because habitual patterns involving cognitive distortions do not give the frontal cortex adequate information to work on.”

To help with this, Schwartz suggests mindful awareness and paying attention to attention. His new book You Are Not Your Brain is full of practical training tips and cognitive and mindful awareness exercises.

Neural signal of leaders

Associate Professor Pierre Balthazard is the principal investigator of The Neuroscience of Leadership Project at Arizona State University. Instead of looking at how the findings of neuroscience can be applied to leadership, he and his colleagues have been using brain scans, such as EEG and fMRIs machines, to study executives’ brains in the hope of finding patterns to use to develop training. “So far, we have assessments of over 350 individuals in leadership positions.

We also have data from 43 entrepreneurial teams (210 individuals), where we examined concepts like shared leadership,” says Balthazard.  All this data is now being analyzed – “my group is in the process of translating our work into leadership development protocols,” explains Balthazard.

Data from the brain scans has been correlated with the results of a leadership questionnaire given to the subordinates of those scanned, asking whether the leaders were inspirational and charismatic. The most outstanding leaders have a visionary impact on both their workers and their organizations, and it is these leaders that the study wants to find ways to emulate.

Balthazard has demonstrated that there is a neural signature of leadership – a pattern of neural activity – which means that a norm can be derived. Once there is enough data to see what a normal leadership pattern is, “neurotherapies – not unlike clinical therapies for attention deficit disorder or stress – can be developed,” Balthazard says. ”My goal is really to understand the underpinnings of leadership per se and then work with neuroscientists to come up with an operant conditioning protocol to achieve desired changes. We will be testing out such a protocol in 2012.”

Finding effective leadership

These protocols are basically brain-training methods that help individuals change their behavior. The ultimate goal of Balthazard’s work is to assess leadership potential using neuroscience technology and then use neurofeedback to develop the neurological connections associated with effective leadership behaviors. “The trick is to split leadership into its antecedents or components – like ‘vision’ or ‘attention to detail’ or ‘memory’ instead of a generalconcept like ‘leadership,’ ” he says. “Indeed, my team is developing exercises for a suite of leadership ‘behaviors.’ ”

“Our subjects already receive feedback on a number of marker patterns that seem consistent with visionary or transformational leadership,” he continues. “Although we do not use operant conditioning yet, this feedback alone offers opportunities for subjects to learn about themselves.” Biologically speaking, leaders’ brains are not that different from those of normal workers. “Leaders are no smarter than average people. What they do have are neural pathway patterns that provide them with capacities to deal with people and problems with empathy and ease.” These can be developed and improved.

Balthazard also believes neuroleadership has a commercial future: “As a researcher with a healthy skepticism about new theories and practices, I now have little doubt that valid neural approaches to develop leadership will become commercially viable products in the not too distant future.”

Reading the mind

 Christina Krause, professor of cognitive science at the University of Helsinki’s Institute of Behavioral Sciences, is also studying executives’ brains. She is heading up an exciting new project with the evocative title “Do you mind if I read your mind?” (DYMIRYM). The project – which is still being piloted – aims to use neuroscience to help enhance leadership training and development. “The main goal is to provide leaders with information about themselves that they would not be able to acquire any other way,” explains Krause. “This information, we hope, will then be used for personal development.”

The project will look at how the crucial aspects of leadership can be observed in human brains – both in how the brain activates in response to leadership thoughts and actions and how the actual brain structure may differ. “New EEG-signal tools, which have been developed in previous cognitive science research projects, will be utilized,” says Krause.

The neuroscience project will help leaders by showing how their brains react to situations typically encountered in leadership roles. “The findings from the DYMIRYM project will give leaders insights into their level of pressure tolerance – will they crack, overreact or behave normally in high-stress situations – using psycho-physiological and behavioral techniques,” she explains. These insights into rising arousal and stress have the potential to be developed into commercial applications.

Reaching your potential

Leena Huotari, director of the Aalto Leadership Lab® at the Aalto University Executive Education, which is partially funding the project, sees this as one way to achieve their goal of helping people to reach 10X leadership. Huotari describes 10X leadership as “developing leadership to such a level that it will cause a tenfold increase in organizational competence and talent.” With her team, she is looking for expertise across the sciences to find the best way of doing just that.

Neuroscience is becoming an important innovator in business education, according to Huotari. “For instance, there already are research results showing the reasons for people’s behavior,” she explains. “Neuroscience will provide more hard facts to explain human behavior which still is seen as a soft, unreasoned, even irrational area of business. It will give information that will help us to become more conscious of our reactions and behavior and help us to change them to more fruitful ones. Reflection skills are a key element of leadership development.”

Huotari has high hopes for the project results. “We hope we will find information that will help us to carry out leadership training and coaching more effectively,” she says.

So, it seems if we want to be better leaders of more efficient organizations, the future of neuroscience is something we all should be paying attention to.

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Neuroleadership in practice

Josephine Thomson, Master Certified Coach and founding member of the NeuroLeadership Institute, sees firsthand the benefits of using neuroleadership techniques in her coaching. And she is finding more and more companies are interested in reaping the benefits. “Organizations are seeking growth in very competitive contexts – a squeeze on resources, global competition, and economic unpredictability,” she explains.

“Advances in our under-standing of neuroscience will help us form better leadership and management practices for sustainable human and organizational growth and improvement,” Thomson continues. “Understanding the brain significantly assists in the development of practical skills in the four domains of neuroleadership: decision making and problem solving, emotional regulation and staying cool under pressure, collaborating with and influencing others, and facilitating sustainable change.”

Thomson firmly believes that the discoveries and research being generated from the field of neuroleadership will lead to improved practices in leadership thinking and performance. “I know what I have learned through my post-graduate study of the neuroscience of leadership has significantly enhanced the effectiveness of my coaching sessions – and it is addictive!”

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Email, Facebook, Google and Twitter – just what are they doing to our brains?

Are you fully immersed in this issue of Profile, or are you multitasking, distracted by the ping of an email, or have an urge to check the latest headlines? Perhaps you had a quick look on Facebook or Twitter, before returning to the magazine? If you always find yourself hopping from one distraction to another, you are not alone.

Dr. Gary Small, a leading American neuroscientist at UCLA, wonders whether the constant bombardment of information we experience may be destroying our ability to concentrate. Despite the great things technology has brought us, there are studies showing potential links with increases in attention deficit disorder, depression, anxiety, autism, and social isolation.

In his 2008 book, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, Dr. Small explores how the Internet has changed our brains. He divides us into two groups: digital immigrants – those over 30 – and digital natives – those under 30 who have used technology their whole lives. Brain scans taken while the subjects surfed the web showed that the digital natives had far more extensive brain activity than the immigrants, particularly in the parts of the prefrontal cortex associated with problem-solving and decision-making.

Small repeated the test six days later, having told the digital immigrants to spend an hour a day online in the meantime. Now their brain activity was much closer to that of the natives. “Five hours on the Internet and the native subjects had already rewired their brains,” wrote Small.

Limiting our focus skills

On the surface, this sounds like a good thing, but Small does not think that our constant multitasking is beneficial to productivity or attention levels – instead, he says, we are “keeping tabs on everything but not really focusing on anything.” And while we are developing our problem-solving and decision-making skills, we are losing our abilities in other areas. “As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills,” he writes.

In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, Nicholas Carr also questions the effects of technology on our brains. A few years earlier, he found that he could no longer fully concentrate over a longer period of time, for example, when reading a good book.

Shattering our attention spans

“I would get a couple of paragraphs in or a couple of pages, and my mind wanted to behave the way it behaves when I am online – jumping from page to page, checking email, clicking on links,” he says. When he asked around, he found there was widespread anxiety about how the Internet is changing the way we think and behave, and many people reporting shattered attention spans.

Carr feels that while books allow us to think deeply and remain focused on a topic for an extended period, the Internet encourages us to flit from one thought to another. “It is possible to think deeply while surfing the Net,” Carr writes, “but that is not the type of thinking the technology encourages or rewards.” Instead, it tends to transform us into “lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”

Carr explains that the brain simply does not have enough working memory to comprehend so much incoming information. Only two to four items can be processed at a time – way fewer than the usual number of links and adverts we see on a typical webpage. And for every new bit of information coming in another bit is lost before it can be properly processed and transferred to long-term memory. Instead of a constant flow of information that we can digest at our own pace, we have a jumble of inputs from a myriad of sources, leading swiftly to cognitive overload.