Quiet Leadership

Six Steps to Transforming Performance at Work

David Rock

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780060835910
• eBook ISBN: 9780061750649
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Bookkeeping & Budgets
• Index: Business

Improving the performance of your employees involves one of the hardest challenges in the known universe: changing the way they think. In constant demand as a coach, speaker, and consultant to companies around the world, David Rock has proven that the secret to leading people (and living and working with them) is found in the space between their ears. "If people are being paid to think," he writes, "isn't it time the business world found out what the thing doing the work, the brain, is all about?" Supported by the latest groundbreaking research, Quiet Leadership provides a brain-based approach that will help busy leaders, executives, and managers improve their own and their colleagues' performance. Rock offers a practical, six-step guide to making permanent workplace performance change by unleashing higher productivity, new levels of morale, and greater job satisfaction.

Part One

Recent Discoveries About the Brain That Change Everything

Today’s revolutionary advances in neuroscience will rival the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin.

PAUL CHURCHLAND (1996)

Ten years ago I became fascinated by the sealed magic box that is the seat of our thinking, our choices, and our selves. I’ve now devoured dozens of books and hundreds of articles about how the brain works, from fields including evolutionary psychology, systems theory, genetics, linguistics, and neurophysiology. In 2003 I began to introduce a few concepts about brain functioning into my coaching programs and started to notice strong links between what scientists were finding out about the brain, and how I had been training leaders to be better coaches. I began to see that central to leadership was the ability to improve people’s thinking. Therefore leaders might benefit from knowing more about the thing that does the thinking.

Over several years of including a study of the brain in my various classes, a set of core discoveries about the brain emerged. I began to see the central ideas that anyone wanting to understand how to change human behavior should know. These insights trace their origins to brain research by a wide range of neuroscientists including Gerald Edelman, John Ratey, Jeffrey Schwartz, Joseph LeDoux, Michael Merzenich, Edward Taub, Jeff Hawkins, Thomas B. Czerner, and many others. These insights, when fully appreciated, have the power to fundamentally rewrite the rules for nearly every human endeavor involving thinking and learning, including how we educate our children, how we hire and manage staff, how we train people in the workplace, and how we develop leaders.

To me, these insights help explain why therapy often doesn’t deliver real change, why trying to give advice is usually futile, why managers are not meeting the needs of workers today, and much, much more. But enough of what my brains thinks about all this—let’s get into it.

THE BRAIN IS A CONNECTION MACHINE

Your brain craves patterns and searches for them endlessly.

THOMAS B. CZERNER (2001)

Scientists have discovered that our brain is a connection machine. Or to be more specific, the underlying functionality of our brain is one of finding associations, connections, and links between bits of information.¹ Our thoughts, memories, skills, and attributes are vast sets of connections or “maps”² joined together via complex chemical and physical pathways. I will call these connections maps from here on as it’s a short, memorable word; however you can replace this word with circuits, wiring, or neural pathway if you prefer.

To give you a sense of the complexity of these maps, imagine a topographic map of one square mile of forest, on a sheet of paper one foot square. Add in the specific details of all the animals living there, from the microbes to major mammals, and the complete specifications of every plant, fungus, and bacteria. Include in the details of each object its size, shape, color, smell, texture, and a history of its interactions with every other object, and then include a snapshot of this information for every moment in time going back forty years. That should give you a sense of how rich these maps are. As it turns out, our brains are made up of maps, and maps of maps, and maps of maps of…you get my drift. These sets of maps are created through a process of the brain making over a million new connections every second between different points. Quite something.

So every thought, skill, and attribute we have is a complex map of connections between pieces of information stored in many parts of the brain. For example, the idea of a “car” is a complex, ever changing map of connections between our cognitive or high-level thinking center, our deeper motor skills center where our hardwired activities are held, and many other regions in the brain. The map for car for you might include links to the name and shape of every car you remember, the memory of your driving test including the look of panic on your instructor’s face when you nearly sideswiped that truck, the sound of your car when it is running smoothly, your understanding of how an engine works, the history of cars, and even remembering where you left your keys.

Consider what happens when we are trying to think. When we process any new idea we create a map of that idea in our mind, and then compare it subconsciously in a fraction of a second to our existing maps. If we can find solid enough links between the new idea and our current maps, if we can find the connections, we create a new map that becomes a part of the layout of our brain; this new map literally becomes part of who we are.

Our brains like to create order out of the chaos of data coming into them, to make links between information so that our lives make more sense. We feel more comfortable surrounded by order, we feel better inside symmetry, where we can see how everything is connected. Thus we are constantly making links between maps to form new metamaps. A field called Gestalt psychology³ has done significant research on how we look at situations and make meaning out of them.

One respected theory for why our brain likes to make everything fit together is that our maps help us predict the outcome of situations more easily. In On Intelligence,⁴ Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm Computing, puts forward that our predictive abilities are the attributes that differentiate us most from the rest of the animal kingdom. The first time we use a new computer we’re confused as to where the shortcut buttons are: after a few days we have a mental map for how to hit them, and could do so with our eyes closed. The more hardwired our maps are for repetitive tasks, the more we’ve freed up our working memory for higher-level tasks.

Let’s get back to what happens when we create new mental maps. You can tell when you are going through this process yourself because you will probably stop speaking and start picturing concepts in your own mind. You can tell when other people are going through this process: their eyes become glazed, they reflect, and they often look up or away into the distance. When we are processing complex ideas we tap into our visual center: we see ideas as flashes in our mind’s eye.

We’ve all had the feeling of that sudden “aha” moment. It’s a moment when various ideas that were not linked before come together to form a new idea. It feels like we’ve seen something new. This is the moment of creation of a new map. There is a big release of energy when this new map forms, even though energy was required up front to connect the dots. There’s a tale told about Archimedes, who after an insight about how to solve a scientific challenge, leaped out of the bath and ran through the streets naked shouting “Eureka!”⁵ Such is the impact that insights can have on us.

When we create a new map we feel motivated to do something, and our face and voice change. When you watch for it, you can see that the act of creating a new map is a specific event. It’s possible to pinpoint the exact moment it occurs. This is the moment of breakthrough, a moment when we see an answer to a challenge or problem. We’ll explore the anatomy of these aha moments further in the chapter called Dance Toward Insight, where we’ll go into exactly what happens in the brain during the few seconds before, while, and after we generate a new idea.

Consider what happens when we want to think a new thought, process a set of ideas, make a decision, or unravel any kind of issue. For example, as a manager you might want to increase the sales in your division but are not sure you have the right people on board. Or as an executive you need to decide whether or not to confront a manager about their poor performance. In each instance we need to create a new map in our brain. We literally have to “think things through for ourselves.” It is important to realize this is still the case even when we are told what we “should” do; unless that “should” fits exactly with our existing wiring (which as you will see in the next insight is extremely unlikely), we still need to expend the energy to create our own maps.

Creating a new map chews up resources. Our brain needs to do a lot of comparing, associating, and matching any new idea with our existing maps. However, the creation of the new map releases substantial energy along with various neurotransmitters, and even changes the brain waves occurring. There is a sudden, strong motivation for action.

So let’s stop for a moment and reflect on the ideas I have put forward so far, and see what they might add up to.

• 1. To take any kind of committed action, people need to think things through for themselves;
• 2. People experience a degree of inertia around thinking for themselves due to the energy required;
• 3. The act of having an aha moment gives off the kind of energy needed for people to become motivated and willing to take action

It becomes clear why our job as leaders should be to help people make their own connections. Instead of this, much of our energy goes into trying to do the thinking for people, and then seeing if our ideas stick. As you will see in the next insight, this is usually a big waste of human resources. (And I mean that in every sense of the word.)

There is a new world to explore here. If we are trying to help other people think, we might develop a whole new set of skills—such as the ability to create the physical and mental space for people to want to think, the ability to help others simplify their thinking, the ability to notice certain qualities in people’s thinking, the ability to help others make their own connections. These are some of the most important skills that leaders must master today, and central to being a Quiet Leader.

UP CLOSE, NO TWO BRAINS ARE ALIKE

There are more possible ways to connect the brain’s neurons than there are atoms in the universe.

JOHN RATEY (2001)

As scientists have begun to understand the mechanics of the brain they have discovered a world of almost unimaginable complexity.⁶ The brain has around 100 billion neurons. Each neuron may have up to 100,000 dendrites (think of dendrites as roots—they gather information for the neuron) and one axon (think of the axon as a tree trunk, passing on information). The connections between our neurons, connected by the dendrites, are the maps that guide our thoughts, behaviors, and action.

If you want to determine how many possible ways the neurons in a brain could be connected, simply multiply the number of neurons by their roots and branches, and then by the number of chemical messengers they can use to communicate. As it turns out, this is a rather ridiculous number. Let’s keep it simple and just say that it’s a larger number than there are atoms in the known universe, as Dr. Ratey says.⁷ Some people think this means we have unlimited mind power; however, that’s somewhat of a misunderstanding. Yes, the brain has extraordinary capacity to develop connections: just listen to a jazz musician in full flight to see what a well-trained brain can do.

Here is a more accurate insight from the fact that we each have more than 300 trillion constantly changing connections: There are unlimited different ways that brains can store information, unlimited options for how experience, learning, and information might be encoded in the brain.⁸

Have you noticed how different people look at the same situation from quite different perspectives? Perhaps you played telephone as a child; there is a similar game played in leadership development programs. Person one explains a new job description to person two. Person two then passes on the job description to person three. Person three then explains the job description back to person one, who is then baffled at how different the job has become after just a couple of handovers. People hear even the simplest things very differently. And the reason for this is that our brains are substantially more different than we acknowledge.

I mentioned earlier that our minds process complex ideas fastest when we use our visual resources. So let me tell you a story to illustrate how different our brains are. (Note that the phrase “process complex ideas” means that we’re making our own mental maps and comparing them to our existing maps. By hearing my story you can “see” my point for yourself.)

A year ago, my wife, Lisa, bought two identical computers for each of us to use. Lisa and I have been together for nearly ten years and we know just about everything about each other. Yet after only one year of using our computers I can’t make any sense of hers. It takes me a lot longer to do a basic task on her laptop than it does on mine. I don’t know how she files information; I can’t picture the way she’s arranged her digital world.

Our environment literally shapes the physical nature of our brains; therefore our brains were already quite different to each other’s at birth. Since then, the circuitry of our brain has been molded by every sound, thought, feelings, idea, and experience, for our whole...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Why Should Leaders Care About Improving Thinking?
• Part One Recent Discoveries About the Brain That Change Everything
• The Brain Is A Connection Machine
• Up Close, No Two Brains Are Alike
• The Brain Hardwires Everything It Can
• Our Hard Wiring Drives Automatic Perception
• It’s Practically Impossible To Deconstruct Our Wiring
• It’s Easy To Create New Wiring
• Summarizing The Recent Discoveries About The Brain
• Part Two The Six Steps to Transforming Performance
• Step 1 Think About Thinking
• Step 2 Listen For Potential
• Step 3 Speak With Intent
• Step 4 Dance Toward Insight
• Step 5 Create New Thinking
• Step 6 Follow Up
• A Summary Of The Six Steps
• Part Three Putting the Six Steps to Use
• Using The Six Steps To Help Someone Solve A Problem
• Using The Six Steps To Help Someone Make A Decision
• Using The Six Steps To Give Feed Back
• Using The Six Steps With Teams
• Using The Six Steps With Children
• Applying The Six Steps To A Whole Organization
• In Conclusion
• Glossary Of Terms
• Resources
• Notes
• Searchable Terms
• About the Author
• Acclaim
• Books by David Rock
• Copyright
• About the Publisher