Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders (11 page)

Although many leaders may not initially understand the actual need to extend and apply their understanding of their areas of expertise beyond themselves—in part because the skill sounds like a soft skill—neuroscience is increasingly “hardening” this attribute by describing what goes on in the brain when we engage in situations of relevance to social intelligence. In this chapter, leaders, managers, and coaches will learn how to apply these concepts in neuroscience to their own working environments. It is important to remember that these findings are a guide to thinking about how the brain works and not absolute facts, as our understanding of the meaning of this research continues to evolve.

The Neuroscience of Empathy in Business

The neural basis for empathy has multiple dimensions. In
Chapter 2
, “How Does Positive Thinking Affect the Business Brain?”, we saw how fear can be contagious and how fear activates the amygdala both consciously and unconsciously. Thus, we began to see that
leaders and their followers can affect each other profoundly by the contagion of these emotions and that the neural basis for empathy justified leaders having an understanding of their emotional environments. But why else is empathy important to leaders and managers?

• It helps in the management of teamwork and conflict. Project managers, for example, benefit highly from empathy training.
⁹

• It helps in cross-cultural communication. A recent study of multicultural construction project teams showed that empathy was critical to leadership.
¹⁰

• It helps in emotional information management in situations such as public service announcements and advertising response.
¹¹

• It is critical in transformational leadership.
¹²
That is, it is critical to influence and impact.

• It may be critical to customer relations and understanding customer needs.
¹³

The basis of empathy in the human brain is thought to rely on mirror neurons. The following experiments describe how this works.

The concept:
One of the most important recent scientific findings in humans is that human beings have mirror neuron systems.

Concept 1

When observers watch the actions of other people, their brains mimic those actions as if the observers were performing that action themselves.
¹⁴
Only certain parts of the brain make up this mirror. Earlier experiments have shown convincingly that our brains “imitate” the brains of the person we are observing.
¹⁵
It appears that we don’t actually move in the same way because we inhibit this.
¹⁶
This imitation and inhibition both occur in the same brain regions. As shown in
Figure 3.1
, the brain regions that constitute this mirror system are the pSTS—the posterior superior temporal sulcus (and the TPJ, the temporoparietal junction), the medial prefrontal cortex, and the temporal pole.
¹⁷

Figure 3.1. Connections of the mirror neuron system

So why would this be of any significance to a leader?

Concept 2

It turns out that our brains can mirror not only actions, but intentions as well.
¹⁸
The right pSTS has been implicated in mirroring the intentions of others.
¹⁹
In addition, the premotor system has been implicated in mirroring intention.
²⁰
Thus, leaders can understand the intentions of others automatically in part through a mirror neuron mechanism.

Concept 3

We are also able to mirror other people’s emotions as well.
²¹
Although all our brains do this, more empathic people are able to do this better than others.
²²
While some of these regions are also involved in mirror neuron systems for emotions, a recent review has suggested that emotion simulation involves affective, motor, and somatosensory components (that is, mirroring emotion relies on more than perceived emotion; it relies on perceived movement and more subtle variables such as perceived movement in space).
²³
Nevertheless, an emotion mirror system does appear to exist.

The application
: Goleman states the following: “Mirror neurons have particular importance in organizations, because leaders’ emotions and actions prompt followers to mirror those feelings and deeds. The effects of activating neural circuitry in followers’ brains can be very powerful....”
⁴
Essentially, if you are able to activate mirroring neural circuitry in followers, you can increase the likelihood that their actions will be in accordance with your own intentions and emotions. As stated earlier, having this empathic attunement can affect bottom-line productivity by a sense of shared meaning, cooperation, connection (loneliness can have negative consequences on productivity),
²⁴
understanding, and alignment. Alignment of core values throughout a corporation is a valuable asset. Mirror neurons and social intelligence allow for this.

One of the core underlying determinants of productivity in an organization is alignment, and this includes emotional alignment as well. This alignment is determined at an unconscious level by mirror neurons activating in the brains of any two interacting people, thereby setting up an automatic chain of emotional events that can impact the organization. By understanding that mirror neurons exist, coaches can help leaders start to contemplate the factors that could bring people into more effective alignment. Without this understanding, the idea of “emotional sensitivity” and “fairness” may seem like idealistic emotional variables irrelevant to the workplace. The concept of mirror neurons highlights how important “countermirroring” interventions may be for leaders within an organization (see
Chapter 8
, “Coaching Brain Processes”).

Aside from being empathic about emotions, leaders can also benefit from empathy around intentions. By understanding that mirror neurons (when leaders communicate with their followers) also activate to shared intention, leaders, managers, and coaches can understand that communication with employees will activate unconscious mirror mechanisms that will attune them to the intentions of their employees. Thus, leaders will be in a much better position to be able to plan in
accordance with these read intentions.
^25
,
26
Isolation in their offices will deny them this knowledge.

Beyond Empathy: The Neuroscience of Perspective-Taking in Business

The concept:
Although empathy is an important way to understand what people are thinking and feeling, and thus plan, in certain situations, empathy as it is traditionally understood (the emotional understanding of another) may not be as important as perspective-taking (the intellectual or cognitive understanding of another). For example, one study on service quality in private retail banking found that responsiveness and reliability of service determine customer satisfaction more than assurance and empathy,
²⁷
and another study of cooperative banks (CB) and Islamic banks (IB) in the UK found that empathy and responsiveness were important for customer satisfaction for CB whereas compliance issues were a priority for IB.
¹³
This indicates that every organization should assess its own priorities with regard to customer satisfaction. Perspective-taking is one way in which we can enhance responsiveness. The following experiments explain why this may be so.

Concept 1

A recent study showed that perspective-taking increased an individual’s ability to discover hidden agreements and to both create and claim resources at the bargaining table. However, empathy did not prove nearly as advantageous and at times was detrimental to discovering a possible deal and achieving individual profit.
²⁸
(See
Chapter 8
to view an application of this concept.) Thus, managers, leaders, and coaches who value empathy should balance this with perspective-taking because this is a separate relational variable.

Concept 2

Brain research shows that empathy kicks in earlier than perspective-taking in the brain,
²⁹
and that taking a third-person perspective as opposed to a first-person perspective has been associated with brain activation in the inferior parietal cortex, the medial posterior cortex, and the prefrontal cortex,
^30
,
31
indicating that different perspectives activate different brain regions. Furthermore, this study found that the development of the ability to reason about another person’s mind (as opposed to feeling what they are feeling) accompanies a shift in activity from frontal to posterior brain regions and from bilateral to unilateral left inferior parietal cortex.
³⁰
In addition, this has been shown to correlate with DLPFC glutamate,
³²
indicating that short-term memory is involved in the reasoning process. This kind of focused and “immediate” perspective rather than “historical” and diffuse emotional relatedness has a value of its own and is a separate process in the brain. Thus, reasoning about another person’s mind (as opposed to feeling about this) causes brain changes that are different from empathy.

The application:
Managers, coaches, and leaders can thus reflect on the dynamic interplay between emotional attunement and cognitive attunement. Because prediction from a third-person perspective enhances the integration of information from a different (attentional) perspective that can reveal hidden agendas in conversations and can also help to reach consensus more easily, understanding the other may be more valuable in certain situations than simply feeling what they are feeling. This effect has been shown to affect the accountant (vmPFC) and short-term memory (DLPFC) in the brain as well as the brain’s navigator (posterior parietal cortex). This can be especially helpful and organizing when emotional attunement leads to chaos. A sobering cognitive perspective can restore order. Managers, coaches, and leaders need to remember that brain science tells us that there is a difference between feeling what someone else is feeling and understanding how they are feeling from a third-person perspective. Sometimes we need to switch our brains away from feeling what someone
else is feeling to understanding what they are feeling by thinking about this.

For example, Dennis H. is a CEO who always found himself in a difficult position when he talked to his sales manager. His sales manager always complained that no matter how much he motivated the sales force, they were still underperforming and their projections were looking dismal. Dennis H. used to listen “empathically” and try to support the sales manager by asking him to persevere, and telling him that he knew of this age-old problem. He had felt that by supporting the sales manager, he might relieve him and thereby help him continue to motivate the sales force. However, when Dennis H. eventually hired a coach to try to help with understanding why the sales strategy could not be executed, Dennis H. recognized that he had not taken the appropriate perspectives; that is, rather than recognizing that the current methods of motivation were not working, his “empathy” misled him into perpetuating a nonworking strategy. When the coach asked him to take a step back, Dennis H. recognized immediately that he had not been looking at some simple variables: that the “motivation talks” were often being delivered in the last hour of the day and that the sales manager used the same technique he was using (empathy) rather than understanding the mindset of the sales force. By instituting a new structure to the sales process (more frequent breaks and high-intensity call-out volume), the sales force was better able to execute on the calls and the sales call–to–conversion to customer rate started to increase.

The Neuroscience of Fairness

The concept:
People respond very powerfully to fairness. Unfair offers can impact productivity significantly. The following experiments describe how this is mediated in the brain.