Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders (19 page)

The application:
For enhancing expert performance, the following brain-based principles may be used: (1) Keeping cool when it is needed
requires extensive practice to “train” the brain to focus attention. (2) Although emotions are necessary for making decisions, just before action, focus is critical. Experts have already filtered out all emotion while about to perform their tasks. (3) Experts rely on creative aspects of their brains to perform expertly—keeping thought processes or even interventions linear will not take advantage of developed expertise. (4) Gut-instinct centers are active in the expert brain during practice. Therefore, during the coaching session, keep yourself open to all the information your brain and body provide to you. (5) It is clear that a staged approach to problem solving may not be the only way to solve problems. Coaching may sometimes be at odds with this. Coaches working with leaders may find that a greater flexibility is needed on the part of the coach to stimulate intuitive problem solving. Asking an expert leader to use a staged approach is like asking an expert pianist to “think” about what he or she is playing. The feeling of the musicality is lost.

The Neuroscience of Advice-Giving

The concept:
Leaders are often in the position of developing other leaders. In the course of doing this, they are in the position to give advice. Advice, although it demonstrates the competency in the leader, may in fact restrict and not share that competency, according to a recent brain imaging study.
⁷⁰
This is because brain imaging shows that when advice is given, it “offloads” the value of decision options from the listener’s brain (intraparietal sulcus, posterior cingulate cortex, cuneus, precuneus, inferior frontal gyrus, and middle temporal gyrus) so that there are no correlations between brain activation and attributed value when advice is given, as compared to when it is not given. Furthermore, “probability weighting” brain regions (anterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral PFC, thalamus, medial occipital gyrus, and anterior insula) activated more flatly when advice was given compared to when it was not.

The application:
One of the reasons it may not be useful to give advice is that this turns off probability weighting and value attribution (essentially effective decision making) in the brain of the follower.
That is, advice turns the brain of the listener “off.” This can be very important to reflect on when leaders micromanage or are convinced of their own experience and thus want to give advice. Mentioning this brain imaging work may help put this advice into perspective.

Once again, we are still learning what these brain findings mean, and as our knowledge increases, even more subtle levels of application may become possible.
Table 4.2
illustrates how brain science can facilitate coaching intangible vulnerabilities of leaders.

Table 4.2. Coaching Interventions on Leadership Intangibles

Conclusion

Intangible vulnerabilities register in specific ways in the brain. By understanding this and using the brain findings as targets, leaders and managers can improve their performance.

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