Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders (20 page)

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Chapter 5. The Challenge Prior to Change: How Brain Science Can Bring Managers and Leaders from Idea to Action Orientation

The fundamental task of all coaching is to provide a context for change. This is true whether the coach is an external coach, an internal coach, the manager acting as coach, or is self-coaching. This context is powerfully dominated by language and emotion. The more tools we have to inform our language and emotion, the better our position to make intelligent coaching decisions. When managers or leaders try to improve things, they have to create the change they want or manage the change that is confronting them. The bottom-line goal is usually
to increase pleasure, productivity, or profits,
but the process to get to that place is far from simple, purely analytical, or obvious.

In fact, transformational leadership relies on the leader’s own ability to change.
¹
Change within an organization may range from local or intra-organizational reorganization to mergers and acquisitions, and leaders may have to know how to lead and follow in order to model this for other members of their organizations.
²
Although external change is easily detectable, it is not always accompanied by “true” or “real” change.

Why Is Change Such a Challenge in the Human Brain?

Competing Forces

The concept:
When you are hired to coach a person to change a behavior, there are competing forces at play. Broadly speaking, these are forces “for” and forces “against” the change. Several brain processes need to be in order for this change to occur:

1. The “change” or action center in the brain has to be activated (see
   Figure 5.1
   ).
   

   Figure 5.1. Location of the brain’s action center
   

   

2. The action center has to receive a decision from the brain’s accountant (vmPFC) after the pros and cons of action have been calculated. In turn, the accountant then makes the calculation and informs the action centers as to whether to act or not (see
   Figure 5.2
   ).
   

   Figure 5.2. Connection of the brain’s action center (motor cortex) with the accountant (vmPFC)
   

   

3. Ideally, the accountant receives information from multiple brain regions, including the reward centers (basal ganglia), the emotional register (amygdala), the conflict center (attentional center or ACC), and short-term memory (DLPFC). Refer to
   Figure 5.3
   .
   

   Figure 5.3. Inputs to the brain’s accountant
   

   

   Here, we can see that too much information obstructs change.
   ³
   On average, executives at Intel get 300 emails a day, and Microsoft workers need 24 minutes to return to work after each email interruption. Information overload creates distraction, obstructs change, and is quite prevalent.
   

4. Long-term memory also feeds into this equation of pros and cons, in part by its connections to the emotional register, by contributing its material and content, as shown in
   Figure 5.4
   .
   

   Figure 5.4. Connections between long-term memory and emotional regulation
   

   

Thus, the basic concept is that action itself is a result of multiple inputs and reciprocal exchanges between different brain regions feeding into each other and eventually into the action center.
Table 5.1
provides the anatomic names for the centers just described.

Table 5.1. Anatomic Names for the Brain Centers

Although these are not names you need to remember, the longer ones essentially locate the structures as follows:

•
Dorso
This abbreviation of “dorsal” refers to being relatively posterior or behind in the brain.

•
Ventro
This abbreviation of “ventral” refers to being relatively anterior or in front in the brain.

•
Lateral
Refers to being on the side of the brain.

•
Medial
Refers to being near the middle of the brain.

Figure 5.5
provides a side view of the brain from the outside. If we cut the brain down the center, from front to back, and looked at the inside of one hemisphere, we would have what is shown in
Figure 5.6
.

Figure 5.5. Side view of the brain