Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders (32 page)

External conflicts always come up in business environments. Whether it is asking for a raise, trying to negotiate with someone, or working with a person you simply cannot stand, the ACC will play a role in picking up this conflict until you resolve it. In all negotiations, you want to keep the ACC of the other person as quiet as possible. For example, if you want to ask for a raise, you don’t want to say, “I was thinking that it’s about time I got a raise!” This will immediately activate the ACC of the listener for many reasons: (1) It may sound rude and attacking. (2) It sounds immediately demanding. (3) It may seem like an impossible demand in an environment where the business is losing money. If instead you say, “I would like to start discussions to figure out when it may be reasonable to get a raise, because I am putting my heart and soul into the job, and I think that a raise would be motivating to me in a myriad ways,” you take off some of the heat of the demand. The ACC of the listener will still activate, but less so, because you are not creating a time demand and are explaining your thinking about the situation.

The ACC is connected to the amygdala, which activates to unconscious fear. Thus, when the amygdala activates, the ACC is in a unique position to “detect” this and stay in conflict mode until the anxiety is alleviated. If, for example, you are being audited, you may become anxious a month prior and not recognize that the upcoming audit is the reason. When the ACC picks up the amygdala’s unconscious anxiety, it starts to activate and will stay like this unless you act on this anxiety and calm the ACC down. The importance here is that it is difficult to get to unconscious things. Hence, trying to diminish amygdala activation may be very difficult. However, accessing the ACC is possible, and the interventions listed next help us understand how.

The ACC will also pick up subtle and overt conflicts and start to activate until you resolve this. For example, it may activate when a new CEO from the outside takes over the company and is unable to integrate him- or herself into the business without being overly critical of how things are done. New hires often want to make a statement about their unique prowess rather than first supporting past positive practices and then making recommendations. This overt “taking over” mentality may cause employees to become disgruntled even more than the mere “change” of leadership will cause. The ACC will activate and managers may be left with the task of working with employees to calm the ACC down.

The conflict detector can be harnessed by taking one of the following actions: resolve, reassess, refocus, reengage, or reframe. (A handy mnemonic is
SAFE-F
rame:
S
olve,
A
ssess,
F
ocus,
E
ngage,
F
rame.)

Essentially, whenever there is a conflict, these approaches can help “stabilize” the conflict detector so that it is easier to focus on executing a business-related task.

Resolve: Reduce Conflicting Priorities

Because the ACC is activated by conflicting priorities, including beliefs and preferences,
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focusing on internal and external conflict resolution can significantly help bring the ACC back to its own power.
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That is why it is important to ask workers to discuss their grievances, because this will help to move them toward resolution rather than carrying a conflict within themselves in a way that decreases productivity.

Also, most businesses overlook the fact that beliefs and preferences often do not match with actions. When managers are trying to speed up implementing strategic decisions, they may consider the conflict between beliefs and actions in order to try to resolve it. For example, most workers do not even think about what they believe. When I recently worked with a bank manager who managed client advisors around risk, the manager began asking his client advisors about their beliefs. He found out that they did not believe what they were saying to their clients because they knew that they were in a volatile market and they did not feel in control. However, when the manager pointed out that some people do well in volatile times through planning while others do not, his advisors realized that this was true and started to think about what determined success. This led to a resolution of conflict between beliefs and actions in the advisors, and productivity soared along with client confidence.

Selective attention to what is relevant reduces the distractors that the ACC has to deal with and, in so doing, supports short-term
memory processes that can be used as vital information to address the crisis.
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That is, when a conflict is about large issues, focusing on the short-term and on what needs to be done rather than a million possible obstructions may help to reduce the conflict and ACC activation as well.

Refocus: Focus on the Positive

Pain studies have shown that the amount of pain a person experiences is not related to the pain itself as much as it is related to how much one focuses on the pain.
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If a person has been hurt before, he or she may project this prior pain (such as a layoff) onto the current situation, even when that pain or threat does not exist.
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,
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Therefore, by focusing on positive things, leaders take the stress off of the ACC and refocus the ACC on the positive.

When managers or leaders are training people, asking them to refocus without a reason may not be fully understood. However, if people focus on the tragedies or negative situations of their lives at work, managers and leaders can tell the people they manage that focusing on those facts, as real as they are, causes the brain to create more pain.

This is also a useful framework in which to understand a situation where two people are not in agreement with how difficult something is: One may be focusing on the pain of it, whereas the other is not. The person who is focusing on the pain of how difficult something is may have an overactive ACC, and may benefit from focusing instead on (and training themselves to focus on) the benefits of what needs to be done or the process of doing it. When salespeople are asked to make more sales calls or sales visits, they often go straight to the pain of the rejection. Although it is true that the majority of sales will be rejected, salespeople stand to be in a much better position if they refocus on the process. They help two parts of the brain if they do this: They help the anxiety center (the amygdala) decrease its activation when they trust the process, thereby freeing its effect on the
thinking brain (a little anxiety may be motivating, but too much obstructs thinking). Also, they help the ACC activate less in response to the “pain,” thereby lessening the degree of brain conflict that exists.

Reengage: Include People at All Levels of the Company in the Discussion

Studies have shown that social exclusion may increase ACC activation.
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By inference, being more inclusive may decrease stresses on the ACC and “social pain.” Managers, leaders, and coaches should be aware that one way to change the amygdala disruption is to make sure that all people are in the know. Transparency in companies can significantly decrease ACC activation because the anticipation of anxiety and conflict is less.

Paradoxically, I recently worked with the CEO of a company who felt isolated from what was going on in the company. He had done an excellent job of delegating, but as he sat alone in his office wondering what to do, he felt unable to concentrate. One reason might have been that his ACC was activating to his social exclusion. He might have been at the head of the company, but he was unable to lead effectively due to this disruption in his brain. He could not put his finger on his lack of concentration, and to his surprise, when he took on more tasks that got him involved with people at the company, he was able to concentrate more rather than less. This is a counterintuitive reality for many people, and knowing this may help people change their social behavior an reengage with people in the business environment.

Reassess: Decrease Catastrophizing

Framing a situation as a catastrophe can make the pain of a crisis feel worse.
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Leaders should be aware and alert to reframe all catastrophizing, which increases the pain sensation and adds to the chaos.

Especially in these “Armageddon” days, life often seems to be a series of collapses—if it is not a story of corruption on Wall Street,
then it is the financial impact of an oil spill or increased taxes for small businesses that people simply cannot manage. Reassessing what is possible is very different from reassessing an entire situation. When managers assess the impact of falling sales and rising taxes on a business, they may recognize an impending catastrophe (I encountered a similar situation when small banks recently started to feel very threatened because of the business development costs they had to front). Although the catastrophe may be true, it may increase the “brain pain” and ACC activation to stay in “catastrophe” mode. Instead, managers and leaders can understand the impending crisis as a signal to act and be grateful for identifying this. Or they may focus on where to cut costs and simply look at the catastrophe as a mountain to get over rather than an impenetrable wall.

It would be akin to being in a “code red” security-breach emergency. You could see this as a sign of danger or a sign that the danger has been identified and you are now safer.

Reframe

The ACC has been implicated in the process of framing.
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One study showed that when faces are paired with emotionally significant movies, people tend to attribute associated characteristics of the movies with those faces. The ACC and amygdala are involved in this emotional tagging.
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In certain situations, managers, leaders, or coworkers may associate their own negative experiences with the reality of what is going on and may have a distortion of what is actually going on due to this. It is important for the leader to listen to followers and help them dissociate negative experiences from what is happening. In so doing, this will lessen the negative attributions to their own state and help them reframe what is happening.

Reframing covers many of the earlier categories. Some people may see this as shifting the deck chairs on the
Titanic,
and it can be, when reframing is only soft padding. In the case of a “code red” emergency, the idea is not to pretend that there is no danger, but to
know that safety measures are being taken. Introducing different frames can be really helpful in alleviating the amygdala burden.

A bank that was hit by the mortgage crisis (no danger of breaching confidentiality here!) was paralyzed for several months because of the bankers’ feeling of being a deer in the headlights. The amygdala’s overactivation and the ACC’s conflict detector were both out of control. However, once the bankers realized that they would have to rearrange the company very differently to cut costs, and only then work with moving forward, they were able to act in an expeditious manner. The situation had not changed—just the frame did. When the brain is overwhelmed with inaction, change the frame.

The Feeling Brain

1. The Amygdala

When leaders, managers, or coworkers are very anxious, the amygdala can overactivate. The significance here is that the amygdala may be activated by conscious or unconscious fear. A person filling in a position with rapid turnover may think that he or she is focusing on the task when in fact he or she is being “hijacked” by amygdala activation.

One can assume that in any given business situation involving blocks to the execution of strategy or inefficiency, unconscious anxiety (and amygdala activation) is at play. When a manager, leader, or any other worker is overtly anxious, the amygdala is overactivated. This can significantly impair “thinking” and acting. Learning how to decrease amygdala activation can be very helpful in helping someone get back to the path of thinking more clearly. A senior manager with whom I worked had become very anxious that her life was going nowhere. She was much admired at work, but every day she would feel that there was no place for her to advance. When she started to feel this way, her performance dropped, and no matter how hard
she tried to “get her act together,” she couldn’t. When we talked about the possibility that her anxiety might be affecting her work, she promptly started to plan in order to decrease her anxiety. This mode of crisis intervention helped free her thinking, and she was able to carve out a unique position for herself on the way to the top. Excessive stress and anxiety may also make thinking more habitual. Old ways of thinking need to make way for new ways of thinking when one is stuck. Excessive amygdala activation prevents this.

When a business appears to be unproductive, it may be that the task of the business is so overwhelming that the amygdalas of the workers are stalling any further actions and slowing down the pace of development. An entrepreneur who was excited about leaving his senior management position to pursue his own dreams was unable to get started due to feeling overwhelmed with his options and also confused about what he really wanted to do. All he knew was that he wanted to start a consulting business, but because he never started a business previously and really didn’t want to go to business school, his amygdala paralyzed any forward movement. When I asked him how his services would differentiate him, he immediately started to think differently, and then decided to document his ideas and intellectual property. This action significantly decreased his anxiety and amygdala activation.