Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders (39 page)

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Resolve the ambiguity into probabilities.
For example, if you are dealing with an investor, have him or her estimate the chances of success of an investment based on the data.

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Reframe the role definition.
For example, if a person is performing multiple tasks in a company, have that person define his or her role more overtly, even if there is not always a consistency to that role.

For amygdala interventions, employ optimism. In all likelihood, there will be data available to make a risk assessment or to state overtly that the risk cannot be assessed. Even stating the latter can remove such highly risky alternatives from choices during the decision-making process, where appropriate. Feeling optimistic (recognizing that a solution is eventually possible if one explores hypotheses) displaces fear from the amygdala and alleviates thinking strain.

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Feed risks and rewards to the vmPFC.
Overtly listing risks and rewards of an uncertain strategy is tricky, because being in an anxious state will make you think of more risks than rewards. Getting someone who is less immediately involved with the situation to assess risks and rewards of the strategy may be helpful in comparing your own assessment of risks and rewards. However, the more you feed the risks and rewards to the accountant (vmPFC), the more your short-term memory will inhibit premature action.

An investor I worked with would often come up against whether or not the FDA was going to approve a drug. If he made a call before the FDA made its decision, he could buy the stock ahead of when its price would increase. However, in many situations, there was largely ambiguous data so that the FDA decision was often unpredictable. He was tempted to make calls on all the drugs, but when he made mistakes, it was because he would skip the risk-reward considerations in a meaningful way.

What adds complexity to this is that risk and reward are sometimes registered preemptively (before you know this consciously).
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Thus, what was critical to his decision making was feeding his brain conscious information that might probe his unconscious to contribute preemptive knowledge to the accountant of his brain. To do this, he needed time. Therefore, the function of the risk-benefit lists was to look at the danger consciously and to probe the unconscious brain as well.

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Help the brain’s navigator and planner.
The posterior parietal cortex is a portion of the parietal lobe that works with mental images, and it integrates sensory and motor portions of the brain. It is involved in the formation of plans.
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Here’s how you can help the brain’s navigator and planner:

• Disengage ambiguity by bypassing the abstract use of words to form concrete images that people can hold onto. Graphs, projections, and illustrations are all much more important than abstract words when trying to get rid of ambiguity.

• Use timelines. They are critical to reengaging the PPC. They get the PPC to hold onto an image again and help overcome the disengaging effects of ambiguity.

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Help out the language inspector.
In the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), people figure out the “what” and “where” of things. That is, the definition of problems occurs here.
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This part of the brain becomes involved in the search for hidden information in language.
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Leaders should choose clear words carefully in a way that does not make followers paranoid. Wherever something is known, it should be spoken so as to stop random searches for meaning. Moving from “corporate” to “intentional” and “authentic” language is helpful in achieving this goal.

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Employ reward brain interventions.
Asking followers to resolve ambiguous tasks is in itself rewarding, and it gets them to have input and face the demands of the leader. Leaders can encourage team collaboration by defining individual roles sharply but giving teams latitude on their approach.
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Signature relationships build bonds in staff and help people know who the “go-to” people are when ambiguity becomes too overwhelming.
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Aligning a decision with the core values of an
organization can help to reduce ambiguity and increase a sense of goal-directedness and reward.
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Thus, when you help out the reward brain, you free your thinking brain from some of the stresses of the anxieties of uncertainty. This can be very motivating and help you complete tasks that were previously too undefined to be motivating (e.g., sales). The more certain and clear you can make your thinking while still realizing that uncertainty is a reality, the more you take your brain out of paralyzed mode and place it into action mode.

Alternative Brain Probing (ABP): Brain-Based Insights into Alternative Strategies to Use When Encountering Resistance

The following sample interactions can be used as a guide to developing a strategy for the leaders you work with:

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How do you access the amygdala if not through emotion?

Because the amygdala is connected extensively to the thinking brain, and because research shows that you can change anxiety by increasing attention (to something else), if, after trying to get leaders to be calmer about a situation, you feel as though you are failing, then target the ACC as outlined earlier. For example, simple reframing will calm down the amygdala because it will receive different information. If the leader is anxious about being in a new role and his or her predominant thought structure is, “I am going to fail,” you can work with the leader to change this to “How can I succeed, one agenda item at a time?” This accesses the ACC and can direct you to use more of such reframing interventions. The amygdala can be accessed through the ACC, and the ACC through the amygdala.

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The leader, manager, or employee is paralyzed and cannot perform the actions necessary.

Because observation and imagery both stimulate the action center of the brain, use these techniques when instructions about action are not working. This will provide at least subthreshold stimulation to the action center in the brain and get the process going. For example, if you walk an anxious leader through instituting layoffs, he or she can now imagine what this would be like. Also, you take the anxiety out of the anticipation realm and allow the leader to practice dealing with it.

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The leader, manager, or employee is disoriented by all the changes and can neither become less anxious nor attend during meetings.

Part of the problem here may be context. Hippocampal influences over anxiety and thinking may be intruding from long-term memory and conditioned responses. So, instead of targeting the ACC or amygdala here, you target the hippocampus, as discussed earlier, or change the environment of the meeting for a while. You do this indirectly by using short-term goal perspectives (DLPFC), thereby disengaging the hippocampus and engaging the DLPFC.

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The company is in a state of turmoil and regardless of how many times the leader tries to address this, the situation just gets worse.

The problem here may be that the ACC and amygdala interventions cannot supersede the mirror neuron effects of the leader’s own anxiety. As a result, the leader is “infecting” the followers with his or her own anxiety, and words mean little. Work with the leader through counter-mirroring mechanisms rather than how to address the ACC and amygdala of the followers.

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The CEO of a company has no ideas for new products in the pipeline. The future of the company is threatened.

Rather than “brainstorming” under pressure or inviting employees for ideas (that has already been tried), the culture of innovation at the company needs to change. Rather than targeting the PFC for logical ideas, use an insula map approach to integrate with the “innovative brain” components. Creatively apply the five steps of the insula map to each of the four brain regions. Use this as the biological basis to increase innovation.

Conclusion

Understanding the brain regions responsible for behavior allows us to do the following: (1) Develop an alternative way of packaging information (language) to the resistant leader. (2) Come up with interventions and approaches that are specific to that neural metaphor. (3) Apply brain function knowledge to phenomena relevant to organizational behavior. (4) Use this information to target alternative strategies when the usual approach becomes challenging.

Thus, brain science can be a very useful tool if the basics are understood, and you can apply this knowledge creatively through practice.

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