Neuroscience and Leadership - Understanding How Your Brain Works Can Help You Become a Better Leader Significant advances in EEG and fMRI scanning in recent years have deepened neuroscientists understanding of how our brains work. This is helping those of us involved in learning and development to help leaders to use their brains better to: Solve problems and make decisions Stay cool under pressure Have difficult conversations Collaborate with others Facilitate change

What insights is neuroscience providing to leadership development?

Let’s take the field of achieving peak performance at work. Neuroscience is providing essential information for leaders in this area, for example:

• Peak mental performance requires just the right level of stress, not minimal stress OR over arousal
• Peak mental performance occurs when you have intermediate levels of two important neurotransmitters, norepinephrine (adrenaline) and dopamine, which relate to alertness and interest.
• You can consciously manipulate your levels of norepinephrine and dopamine in many ways, to improve your alertness or interest.

For those of us interested in leadership development this last observation is critical. It means that we can create tools and techniques to help leaders to improve their alertness or interest at times and in places when they need both the most.

Staying calm under pressure

Another insight which neuroscience is providing on leadership concerns how we operate under pressure, for example:

• The brain has an overarching organising principle to minimise danger (an away response) and maximize reward (a toward response).
• The away response is stronger, faster, and longer lasting than the toward response.
• The away response can reduce cognitive resources, make it harder to think about your thinking, make you more defensive, and mistakenly class certain situations as threats.
• Once an emotion kicks in, trying to suppress it either doesn’t work or makes it worse.
• Suppressing an emotion reduces your memory of events significantly.
• Suppressing an emotion makes other people feel uncomfortable.
• People incorrectly predict that labeling an emotion will make them feel worse.
• Labelling an emotion can reduce limbic system arousal.
• Labelling needs to be symbolic, not a long dialogue about an emotion, for it to reduce arousal.

Again, as leadership developers this is invaluable knowledge in our quest to provide leaders with ways of staying calm under the pressures of current business life.

If you are interested in exploring…

• What insights neuroscience is providing to leadership development
• How L+D professionals can incorporate these insights into leadership development programmes

   …then join us at the…

JCA Learning Network Free Event
Central Manchester (Dukes 92, Castlefield)
9.30 – 11.30am Tuesday 14 February 2012

You can register by email or phone:      jonathan@jonathanchalstrey.co.uk      +44 (0)7899 781540