By Amirali Nourbakhsh
Imagine you just bought the latest model of whichever (Apple or Android) mobile brand you prefer. Now imagine whenever you want to call someone you go to your contact list, select the person you want to call, and dial. This is while you could use a digital assistant by saying “OK Google” or “Hey Siri” and then say “Call Bob.”
The phone is your brain. How you currently use your phone would be how you use your brain, and using Siri or Google would be what neuroscience can teach you to do.
Neuroscience: A Leadership Tool
The one single take-away from the latest breakthroughs in neuroscience is:
“We use our primal brain considerably more often than our rational brain compared to what we thought was the case until about 15 years ago.”
This means that we all unknowingly behave in ways that make our audience less motivated to accept our suggestions simply by the way we present ideas and ourselves. We are addressing the wrong brain part of our audience.
While the logical appeal of a message is only responsible for less than 20% of the persuasion process, most of us focus mainly on logic. In addition to focusing on the less effective 20%, we are also ignoring the more effective 80%. This is why we fail miserably while we have a better chance of motivating someone, only by presenting our ideas or ourselves differently.
How often are we surprised at why our children reject our suggestions which we know are 100% in line even with their childish interests? In desperation, we ask ourselves: “But why?” The reason, more often than not, is we addressed the wrong brain part in our attempt to motivate them. We focused on reason more than on emotions and instincts.
This happens to your company policies as well as to your engagements with colleagues: When you give feedback, when you delegate, when you try to persuade, and even when you intend to motivate others, you are running a risk. The risk is you use words and sentences, imply meanings and make impressions that the brain of your audience perceives as “threat”, while you meant reward. What kind of a threat is this? This is not a life-endangering threat. But does your brain know this? At least part of your brain might just perceive that as a threat in the same way it does a real danger. This is the exact brain part that reasons and decides on the level of a chameleon, the primal brain: The reptilian brain and the limbic system.
Thankfully, the rational brain comes to the aid of the reptilian brain and talks reason into it. As a result, you don’t perceive—on a conscious level—the micromanaging of your boss as life-threatening. However, the reptilian is more influential than the rational brain, so the result is a negative emotion (a grudge if you will) on the sub- and unconscious levels although the rational brain has saved the day on the conscious one.
And this grudge demotivates people, impairs learning and growth, and produces biases that later backfire in our own faces in the mid- to long run. Then, we wonder why Bob left the company.
Solution:
To use the cell phone analogy again, you will not always use your mobile’s highest resolution for taking photos. You might switch to lower resolution to send a picture to someone faster, or if you are in a location with limited access to the Internet.
By learning about the latest neuroscience findings, senior leaders can make their acquired and existing skills more effective and target-oriented. If you are a leader, neuroscience enables you to maximize your influence on others by showing you when and how to address the primal brain and when to appeal to your audience’s rational brain. You are probably doing it wrong, at least sometimes.
Modern leaders can learn additional skills to persuade, motivate, intrigue, and create trust in their employees. This, they can achieve by behaving in ways that engage different brain parts and stimulate different hormones that cause the right biochemical interactions in the brain. Remember: Motivation and trust are neurochemical realities of the brain created by dopamine and oxytocin among other factors.
Today, we know how to behave in ways to increase the levels of these neurochemicals in our audience’s brain. Fifteen years ago, this would have been another Spielberg box-office hit. Today, this is a reality only few leaders benefit from. Be the one who can motivate even Bored Bob.
