The Leader's Brain

Enhance Your Leadership, Build Stronger Teams, Make Better Decisions, and Inspire Greater Innovation with Neuroscience

Michael Platt

• Publisher: Wharton School Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781613630983
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Toma de decisiones

A pioneering neuroscientist reveals how brain science can transform how we think about leadership, team-building, decision-making, innovation, marketing, and more. Leadership is a set of abilities with which a lucky few are born. They're the natural relationship builders, master negotiators and persuaders, and agile and strategic thinkers.The good news for the rest of us is that those abilities can be developed. In The Leader's Brain: Enhance Your Leadership, Build Stronger Teams, Make Better Decisions, and Inspire Greater Innovation with Neuroscience, Wharton Neuroscience Initiative director Michael Platt explains how.Over two decades as a professor and practitioner in neuroscience, psychology, and marketing, Platt's pioneering research has deepened our understanding of how key areas of the brain work—and how that understanding can be applied in business settings.Neuroscience is providing answers to many of leadership's most vexing challenges. In The Leader's Brain, Platt explains:
Why two managers, when presented with the same set of information, make very different decisions;Why some companies (Apple) build strong social and emotional connections with their customers and others do not (Samsung); How some of the most significant events in sports history, like the "Miracle on Ice, " contain insights for how to build a team; Why even some of the most visionary business leaders can make disastrous decisions, and how to fix that.
The Leader's Brain relates findings like these, and many more, to help enhance leadership in an ever-shifting world entering a "new normal."In this fast-reading and engaging guide, you'll gain actionable insights you can put into practice as a leader. You will also learn what's going on in your team's brains when they are working in sync with one another, how you can tweak your message delivery to make sure others hear you, how to encourage greater creativity and innovation, and much more.

Chapter 1

Leadership Is About Relationships
Building Connections with the Social Brain

Ready for an exam? We’re going to take the E test.

Snap your fingers five times quickly with your writing hand. Then, with your index finger, draw a capital E on your forehead.

If you drew it so someone else could read it (the open side of the E is facing to your left), you’re more likely to consider the perspectives of others. If you drew it so you could read it, you tend to be self-oriented and less interested in others’ perspectives.

This test, developed by Wharton management professor Maurice Schweitzer and coauthor Adam Galinsky, was designed to determine who is more likely to be “boss material” and who isn’t. But the test, published in Schweitzer and Galinsky’s book Friend & Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both,³ has another takeaway.

“Power blinds us to the plight of others,” the authors said. “And this ‘blindness’ can have serious consequences. It can lead the powerful to lose their kingdom.”⁴

Not taking others’ perspectives also turns down what’s known as your social brain. Those below you in a hierarchy may have valuable ideas, opinions, and insights that you can’t access if you’re too self-oriented.

Relationships are key to business success. That’s good news, because humans—like monkeys, crows, groundhogs, and other animals—are biologically specialized to connect with others. In fact, there is a direct relationship between social integration and survival: Relationships provide safety, a buffer from stress, and other biological advantages.

The meta study “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk,” by researchers at Brigham Young University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, found a “50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships, regardless of age, sex, initial health status, and even cause of death.”⁵ Strong social connections have also been linked to lower risks for high blood pressure, stroke, and heart attacks.

But we’re not just healthier—we’re also happier when we have strong social connections. One study concluded that making connections with others results in lower rates of anxiety and depression,⁶ and—as you’ll soon see when we look closely at the social brain network—relationships help us better regulate our emotions. At work, studies show when we connect socially with others we’re more productive and engaged, better at cooperating, more likely to be promoted, and even more successful at starting new ventures. In short, we are more satisfied, and we make more money.

The opposite is also true. A lack of social connections—loneliness—results in lower engagement and higher absenteeism and turnover rates. The negative effects of the stress that loneliness puts on the body are equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.⁷

The Leadership Link

Leadership is a set of abilities that only a lucky few are born with. They’re the natural relationship builders, master negotiators and persuaders, agile and strategic thinkers, and seekers of new perspectives, ideas, and voices. The good news for the rest of us is that those abilities can be developed, as Google discovered with Project Oxygen.

Google began the project in 2008 to figure out what makes a great manager. The results forced the company to rethink its entire process of management training and selection. Google learned from its workforce that great managers were not necessarily the people being promoted—those with strong technical skills. Instead, the best managers had strong social skills.

Google identified eight behaviors that great managers have in common, such as good coaching and supporting career development, and then trained managers on them. A 2018 article on the company’s blog reported the results: “an improvement in management at Google and team outcomes like turnover, satisfaction, and performance over time.”⁸

During the years Google was working to develop strong managerial social skills, neuroscientists made a remarkable discovery: Each of us possesses a “social brain network,” a collection of brain areas that work together to allow us to interact with other people.⁹ This means we are no longer restricted to asking people about their own social skills when evaluating them for a leadership position or as a member of a team. We have an unbiased and objective way to identify who has strong skills, who would benefit from improving them, and which interventions and training are most likely to pay off.

Breakthroughs in neuroscience have identified the brain mechanisms that support our ability to connect and communicate with others—the social brain network—and reveal how we can strengthen it. Other research into our visual system and its connection to the brain has revealed just how little we perceive of our sensory environment and how that narrow view can lead to assumptions and biases. Left unchecked, these assumptions and biases can adversely influence our effectiveness at creating and developing new ideas, along with our ability to lead, manage, negotiate, and build relationships with colleagues and clients. We will explore steps that can be taken to develop your social brain.

The Social Brain and the “Superbrain”

Both the size of the areas making up the social brain network and the robustness of the wiring between these areas are directly correlated with your ability to make social connections. By measuring these parameters, neuroscientists can predict with startling accuracy how many relationships you have.

Neuroscience research shows you can be born with a strong or weak social brain network. People who suffer impairments in their ability to connect with others, such as those with autism or schizophrenia, show real differences in their social brain networks. But recent research in monkeys reveals that it’s not all destiny. You can also enlarge your social brain network and make the connections between neurons more dense. How? By using it.

Researchers at Oxford showed that when monkeys were challenged to get along with more monkeys, the size of the social brain network and connections within it actually grew.¹⁰ And we know that a larger, more connected social brain network is a key factor in how well we manage our interactions with others.

Thalia Wheatley, a professor of psychological and brain science at Dartmouth, has studied human brains to better understand how they behave in a social context.¹¹ Her research involves simultaneously scanning people’s brains as they talk to each other while lying inside MRI machines in different rooms, a method known as hyperscanning. The findings demonstrate that when we communicate and connect, our brains continuously adjust and adapt to each other. Wheatley says that when people “put their heads together,” they create something greater than the sum of their parts—what she calls the “superbrain” or “ubermind.”¹²

While two or more brains working together creates both individual and collective benefits, the opposite is also true. In a recent study, mice that were removed from their communities and placed in isolation showed signs of brain damage.¹³ After one month, their neurons had shrunk by about 20%. Levels of the protein BDNF, a catalyst for neural growth, were reduced, and there was more broken DNA in their neurons. As Wheatley noted, “That’s a hint that it’s not just that we like interaction. It’s important to keep us healthy and sane.”¹⁴

Hormones like oxytocin also enhance social brain function. Sometimes referred to as the “love hormone,” oxytocin can be traced back to the earliest animals with backbones. In mammals, its primary role is to cement the bond between mother and infant (it’s released during childbirth and nursing). But it can also turn up connections between other people, and it’s showing great promise as a therapy for social impairments in disorders like autism.

Oxytocin is also released in the brain when we receive a gentle touch. In other words, a hug can actually deepen our relationship with someone on a biochemical level. This might help explain, for example, why athletes often embrace in the huddle. Eye contact also releases oxytocin, which is even true between humans and dogs.¹⁵ When you take a break from reading this book, look your dog in the eye—you’ll both get an oxytocin boost, a great tune-up before socializing with others.

The message is clear. At the end of a long workweek, you could spend Saturday and Sunday bingeing your favorite show on Netflix. Or, you could get out and engage with others, exercising your social brain by talking to people at the farmer’s market or community picnic. Doing this every weekend will boost the structure and function of your social brain network and make you better at relating to other people—both at home and at work.

These practices can be challenging, if not impossible, while practicing social distancing to slow down the spread of infectious diseases like COVID-19. Although technology has made it possible to interact with each other and our teams using apps like Zoom and BlueJeans, the limitations of videoconferencing are often painfully clear. Online video often obscures the tiny muscle contractions, known as microexpressions, that continuously play out across our faces as we interact with others. Poor video resolution and variation in lighting can also mask changes in pupil size that track our engagement and interest. Moreover, the geometric offset between the location of the camera on a computer and the eyes of the person on-screen frustrates mutual gaze, which is an important component of normal face-to-face interactions. All these challenges are intensified when multiple people are on-screen in tiny “Brady Bunch” windows. For these reasons, remote teamwork and videoconferencing often feel exhausting—not just for leaders and their teams but for teachers and students too.

One solution is to take breaks from videoconferencing and rely on purely audio conference calls instead. Although you’ll miss out on some of the nonverbal cues we normally rely on to navigate communication, at least you won’t be mentally taxed or confused trying to read and interpret distorted visual social information.

How to Develop Your Social Brain

To make a connection and develop your social brain, it’s critical to understand what’s going on during social interactions. The key to managing that connection in any interaction is simply to pay attention to the other person. There are two key ways to do that.

Watch and Learn

You need to take in sensory information and make sense of it. That includes observing facial expressions, which scientists tell us are universal (and even extend to other mammals—when monkeys or rats taste something bitter, they make the same expression we do).¹⁶ In fact, the only reason we make these facial expressions is to communicate with others. If you spend meetings looking at your phone instead of the people around you, you’re starving your social brain network of the information it needs to make sense of others. The same holds true when you’re on a Zoom call and you’re texting on your phone.

Visual information (as well as other sensory information, such as what we hear other people say) is passed on to the social brain network, which then extracts meaning from it. If you’re seeing a person, for example, you will interpret their facial expressions, note where they are looking, sense their emotional state, and create a mental model of the individual. This model asks, What are they doing? What are they likely to do next? What do they want? What do they know? Will they cooperate with me or try to deceive me?

Reading the Mind in the Eyes

How well can you read emotions in the eyes of others? The Reading the Mind in the Eyes assessment tool was developed by University of Cambridge professor Simon Baron-Cohen to test levels of empathy and EQ, or emotional intelligence. Baron-Cohen has used the test with adults with high-functioning autism and Asperger’s syndrome to measure variations in social sensitivity. Studies using fMRI have shown that the social brain network is typically activated during the exercise. You can take the test at http://socialintelligence.labinthewild.org/mite.

Take Someone Else’s Perspective

The next step in understanding another person is perspective-taking, which involves putting yourself in someone else’s shoes to understand things from their vantage point. Because we are h...