Part I
Leadership Is All in Your Head
In this part . . .
Here, I show you some basics of the brain, including how the brain’s structure and function is similar to the structure and function of your business. Your brain has a CEO that makes decisions, plans for the future, and celebrates success. I tell you about what the brain needs to be at its best, as well as methods for making sure you’re leading your best.
Chapter 1
Connecting Brain Science to Leadership Principles
In This Chapter
Looking into leadership
Connecting neuroscience and leadership
Building teams with the brain in mind
Training effectively for any brain
In this book you find out how your brain works and how to work it to improve your decision-making, training, and hiring so that you create a workplace where people are happy and productive.
In order to survive and thrive through humans’ long history, the brain had to be social. Humans needed people around them to help them conquer whatever dangers they might face. Today’s world looks a lot different from that of even a century ago, but you still need people to help you prosper. Being social means establishing relationships. Relationships often require leadership.
The leadership brain learns how to be self-aware and self-confident. This brain knows how to persuade and convince others that her idea is the best. At the same time, the leader takes others’ feelings and ideas into consideration.
The good news from neuroscience is that you can learn how to be a leader. This book shows you how.
The Leadership Brain For Dummies helps you become the leader you want to be.
Defining Leadership
Leadership is the ability to bring like-minded people together to get remarkable things done. Because humans are a social species and natural hierarchies develop, the concept of leadership emerged. Someone has to be in charge, share a vision, and lead others toward the goals.
Leadership depends on relationship-building. A leader can lead only through her ability to build relationships between and among employees, customers, investors, and any other stakeholders. Knowing and amending your leadership style
Different approaches to leadership give you the opportunity to be the leader you want to be when you want to be it. You can find your leadership style by reading Chapter 6. The style you naturally use or the one you cultivate may change according to circumstances, which is as it should be. When you need to take charge because you’re dealing with new employees who need more guidance, you might adopt the authoritarian style. But perhaps in your heart you really favor group decision-making; you can then use that style in other situations, when it’s a better fit.
As a leader, you are many different things to different people. You have a lot of hats to wear, but there’s only one brain under those hats, and you get to know it better in Chapter 5, which shows you how leadership and the brain interact.
Providing feedback
As you find out in Chapter 4, feedback is food for thought. Feed the brains of your employees by providing the necessary information to keep them on task and keep your vision in sight. Without feedback, people lose self-confidence and motivation.
Feedback begins with the senior leadership team, but it goes much beyond that. Rather than relying on a trickle-down effect, leaders must provide feedback to each and every person in the organization. You find suggestions in Chapter 20 to communicate with employees throughout your organization.
Developing high emotional intelligence
Your ability to have good relationships with others gets you farther in business and in your personal life than your IQ. It’s not how smart you are that counts, but rather how you are smart.
Leaders use their emotional intelligence to handle relationships. When leaders are aware of what they feel and how their feelings affect the work environment, they can choose to handle those emotions in such a way that they use their intuition but don’t become overwhelmed by emotion. Emotional intelligence includes the ability to understand and work with what another person is feeling. For instance, the possibility of lay-offs looms in your organization. How are your people feeling? Stress levels must be high. As their leader, you have to let employees know how much you value their contributions, exactly how things stand, and what your decision-making process relies on.
Real power is the ability to control your own brain. You need to understand how the brain works, how powerful your emotions are, and how you can use your self-awareness to prevent reflexive actions. Chapter 8 highlights the importance of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and social management.
Ensuring a safe working environment
One of the basic responsibilities of a leader is providing a safe and appealing work environment. Employees face stressors in their lives every day; relieving them of the stress that an unsafe environment may cause is imperative to having happy, productive employees.
Safety in the workplace includes both physical safety and emotional well-being. After you have the safety factor covered, making the work environment fun as well as inspirational invites cooperation. Caring enough to provide an attractive, safe working environment and put the needs of your staff ahead of your own needs is a key leadership quality.
Chapter 12 tells you how to create a safe and appealing work environment.
Communicating effectively
Effective communication is a hallmark of a great leader. You need to share your vision with passion and commitment. Creating a picture for all to see requires you to make your message simple enough for all to grasp and complex enough to make it interesting. When you paint your picture and employees or customers see it, their brains connect this vision to their own previously stored networks of information to reinforce your words.
But communication doesn’t happen in just one direction. Listening to the needs, desires, and dreams of your employees is essential. And you listen and make connections between their statements and your dream.
Chapter 4 emphasizes good communication skills.
Making decisions with heart and head
Decision-making is based on prior experiences. Your brain asks, “What worked in the past?” or “In what similar situations was a decision made that was good? Or bad?”
Your emotions are very much involved in the decision-making process. The neurotransmitter dopamine is very active in your reward system. The dopamine neurons remember whether an experience or a decision made you feel good. Those chemical memories help you make every decision. If you made a bad decision, your amygdala, the raw emotional center in the brain that I discuss in Chapters 2 and 8, reacts immediately to the situation.
Good leaders make decisions based on what their emotions tell them as well as on the facts. The right hemisphere of your brain explores the challenges and possibilities in a novel situation in which you must make a decision. But your logical left hemisphere recalls routines and previously established processes that have worked in the past. Decision-making is a whole-brain activity. Good decision-m... 
