How neuroscience can make you a better leader

We’ve all heard about the power of neuroscience – the scientific study of the human nervous system – but how can we use what this tells us how to be a better leader?

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Management Today

This year University College London launched the first academic consumer neuroscience masterclass. Course designer Professor Joseph Devlin gives his top tips on how managers apply neuroscience to become better leaders.

Arrive at people true motivations

Why people make the decisions they do is at the heart of neuroscience; the problem for managers is that the people they manage don’t often know why they make the decisions they do, because it’s part of unconscious thinking. However, studies prove that if you can gain insights into people’s motivations – why they want things – you can be better able to get to the reasons behind decisions.

A seminal study found that when smokers were offered reasons to quit, the region of the brain that was activated the most was related to the damage their death/illness might have on others, not knowing they might die, or being shown pictures of blacked lungs. An advertising campaign that used this messaging was shown to have greater effectiveness than simply telling people they were going to die.

In other words, there is huge power to be tapped into by understanding the root cause of people’s decision-making. For managers, this means allowing experimentation; having proper and appropriate conversations about how staff feel, and doing things that reduce stress.

Don’t over-reward

The essence of being a good leader is understanding what it is that teams do well; good neuroscience awareness highlights linkages between people’s personalities and gives a predictive clue to how they might perform. Nowhere is this more relevant than in terms of reward. Neuroscience suggests reward actually works best when it’s done intermittently. When things become ‘expected’ the dopamine levels you can create are reduced because there is an inevitability about the reward. When reward is a surprise, it floods people with a feel-good feeling – so, managers shouldn’t reward unless they really want to.

Think about ‘agency’

When managers act in an overly ‘compliant’ nature – enforcing how they want things to be done – it reduces the levels of what’s called ‘agency’ in people’s brains – that is, people’s sense of being able to do what they want to do, and do it in their own way. A good leader will want to increase ‘agency’ by recognising their people are smart and that if they are given latitude to do things their way, it will improve their sense of at-work experience. It’s about treating people in a more humanistic way.

 Accept what you think is the ‘unnecessary stuff’

It’s vital that managers train themselves to be able to listen to stuff they may not think is directly relevant – what’s often described as ‘chitter-chatter’. It’s about learning to work on your empathy and being aware of your own limitations. Chat is valuable shared experience that brings teams together. Knowing it’s your tendency to think this is wasted time is the first step to managing it. Neuroscience is really about understanding the value of why you need to make certain efforts. Acknowledging you have ‘neuroplasticity’ is vital here – it will allow you to be able to make new habits with practice.

Don’t believe the myths

There’s a ton of so-called ‘brain myths’ that neuroscience seeks to debunk that may be useful to managers. The first is that there is no such thing as left and right-side brain thinking; it’s nonsense and has no validity. Nor is it true that women think differently to men because women’s brains are distinct, or somehow ‘wired’ differently. Knowing this can go a long way to banishing some management behaviours that really have no place. Obviously, men and women aren’t the same physically, but thinking women’s brains are different is to pander to myths that women are, for example, better at multi-tasking. There is just no proof of this, and it shouldn’t be a narrative managers should carry on peddling.

You should just treat people the same, within the confines of differences to the lived experiences.”