CHAPTER 9
Inspiring Change from the Brain Down
The final pillar of I-Presence is about being inspirational— using our presence to influence others. It’s the quality most people generally associate with executive presence, though now you know there’s a whole backstory as well. In the Introduction, when I established the I-Presence model, I talked about inner presence and outer presence. Part 1 focused on our deepest inner presence and being intentional, while Part 2 married our individual thoughts and actions to those of others in order to form authentic connections. Next, we’ll ensconce ourselves squarely in the realm of our outer game.
This final part on inspiring other people clarifies and integrates many of the ideas presented in the first two parts of the book. I’ll take a practical approach to help you build influence and followership so that the concepts are manageable. Some of the tools presented will be familiar, but with a new twist; others may be well outside your comfort zone. That’s to be expected. To be inspiring, you must exhibit your full presence; you have to stand out and get noticed. So at times, you’ll be stretching.
Being inspirational means that you are a change agent. As corporate hierarchies have flattened and the demand for creative, conceptual work has risen, old models of communicating no longer work so well. You cannot say, “Do this because I’m your boss and I say so,” and expect other people to automatically act or think differently. We need our teams and coworkers to take our ideas, internalize solutions, and personally buy into them. We want to invite them to our way of thinking, not grab them by the neck to get there.
When you inspire others, you are altering their thoughts, perspectives, or actions. They are different as a result of your exchange. Yep, you are in the change business. And while you may have heard the saying that the only constant in life is change, I’d add that the only constant about change is that it’s hard.
Inspiring requires change. Leaders are change agents.
If we can’t understand, embrace, and precipitate change, we’ll never inspire others. So that’s where we are going to begin. Before we jump into discussing the tools you can use to inspire others, it’s helpful to understand what holds back change and what encourages it on the deepest levels.
Change Starts with You
When it comes to inspiring change, there are two audiences you need to consider: yourself and everyone else. First, think about how to change yourself (that’s why you are reading this book). If you never act on any of the ideas presented here, this will be one more business book you read and then put on the shelf (and neither one of us wants that to happen). It’s one thing to find new concepts interesting and quite another to take consistent action and make sustained changes. This first step of embracing and managing change in yourself is critical and, at times, the hardest to undertake.
Second, consider how your ideas create change in others. What makes people either readily accept or flat-out reject your message? There are universal human responses to change. Understanding them enables you to frame your own communications to be heard with optimal clarity.
First learn to change yourself. Then you’ll know how to change everyone else.
Here’s the easy part: Turns out that what makes it difficult for you to change is the same thing that makes it difficult for your audience to change. No one is trying to be intractable.
You can blame it on the brain.
It’s Not My Fault, My Brain Made Me Do It!
(Neuroscience, the Abridged Version)
In the past decade, neuroscience has exploded with findings about how our brain manages information and forms decisions. Using advanced functional MRI (fMRI) technology to scan the brain in the midst of cognitive processes, scientists can now observe and measure neural activity inside the brain as we perform our daily functions. What was once intuitive is now scientifically verifiable.
Neuroscience research is having an impact on nearly every segment of medicine, psychology, and the social sciences. It’s creating new fields such as neuromarketing and neuroeconomics. Management is on the cusp of a neuroscience tidal wave, too. Go on any popular newsmagazine’s website and type in “neuroscience.” You’ll find articles written about its application to leadership and business. Brain science in the boardroom is approaching mainstream.
I was first exposed to neuroscience research in the late 1990s as a lay reader. Subsequently, as someone who makes a living by influencing human behavior, I’ve kept an interest in it. Clearly, I’m not a neuroscientist, and I suspect most of you reading this book aren’t, either. Slogging through the scholarly articles and scientific research findings on neurotransmitters and synapses can be mind-numbing. If you are looking for practical business implications, it’s tough going. But we shouldn’t ignore the findings about how people create change and form decisions. The research has deep implications for inspirational leadership.
For this chapter, I’m condensing a wide swath of neuroscience research into definable points that are relevant to our discussion of presence. (If you are interested in reading more, I’ve included references throughout the chapter and in the notes section to some of my favorite books on the subject.) To help put these top-line thoughts together, I interviewed David Rock, one of the pioneers in a new field that he has coined neuroleadership. As you may guess, neuroleadership combines neuroscience with leadership. Rock is a prolific writer on the topic, including recent books Quiet Leadership and Your Brain at Work.1 Rock has also developed a think tank of sorts—the Neuroleadership Institute—which is made up of an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners.
Rock does the herculean job of condensing tomes of research into practical business implications (for Your Brain at Work he interviewed 30 neuroscientists). Considering the relevance of Rock’s work, it’s no surprise that he is in demand as a speaker and a consultant to companies that are trying to create change or improve performance. Here are some of the neuroleadership findings that are generating “Aha! moments” in corporations around the globe—and have enormous relevance to your presence objectives.
Your Brain Prefers Life in a Worn, Comfortable Recliner
From our earliest stages of development, we begin constructing mental maps of the world around us. The maps we create become actual neural circuits—connections between distinct neurons. These connections form thoughts. As neuroscientists put it, what fires together gets wired together.
These mental maps create our automatic responses: Touching something hot means we’ll get burned. Our mental maps also create our most intricate thoughts about the world. Everyone’s maps are unique and distinctly designed based on an individual’s particular life experiences. Even when the conclusion is the same as nearly everyone else’s, the mental maps we’ve created to get there are ours alone. We may all think the United States is a great country, but how we build that belief is based on our individual perceptions.
In the brain, what fires together gets wired together.
When we are in the analyzing phase of a thought, we keep it in our prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for executive brain functioning. This is where our short-term memory resides and our heaviest mental lifting happens. The prefrontal cortex has very limited horsepower compared to the rest of our brain, and it requires an inordinate amount of energy. This explains why complex thinking wears us out, and why it’s been proven repeatedly that true multi -tasking is a myth (what we call “multitasking” is actually just alternating from one task to another, and generally being less effective at everything). As we consider new thoughts in our prefrontal cortex, we are constantly accessing and comparing them against our mental maps, which are already formed and reside across various other parts of the brain. For example, if we have an enjoyable vacation in Colorado, we compare it to our existing maps about our last trip to Arizona, and the one five years ago to Maine, and what we read yesterday about the rising cost of family travel.
Our brain has evolved to be as energy efficient as possible. We can’t hold many thoughts in our prefrontal cortex for long, so they are either forgotten or else they get hardwired to our long-term memory. At that point, thoughts are embedded in lower-energy storage as trillions of neural connections throughout the brain composed of visual, auditory, and other senses that are consolidated to create long-term memory. The brain is adept at lighting up these connections when it needs them, especially for the maps that have gotten a lot of attention. It requires little energy (or conscious thought) to sing a song you know well, but learning to sing an Italian opera would be outright taxing for most of us. We’d need to concentrate fully to have a chance of even remembering the words, let alone singing them (and afterward, we’d be exhausted, ready to veg out in front of the TV or take a nap).
The brain strives for efficiency. Therefore, reinforcing our current mental maps, which are essentially our thoughts and perceptions, feels good to us. When we see information that confirms our existing perceptions, the grooves between point A and point B on our maps become better established. Energy is saved. When we see data that disproves our existing perceptions, our thoughts spend more time in our prefrontal cortex as we compare and contrast against existing mental maps. Loads more energy gets used.
Think of the importance of this finding as it relates to change: Our brain is built to resist change because doing so enhances efficiency and saves energy. We are optimized to seek out information that confirms what we already believe to be true, and to avoid information that goes against our existing belief system.
Our brains achieve energy efficiency by confirming what we already believe. It feels best to us.
This is critical information to have about yourself as you encounter new ideas (such as those you are discovering in this book). It’s absolutely natural, from our deepest biology, to resist change and new ideas. However, there exists a sort of social folklore that we should rely on our first instincts to decide what’s good or bad for us. If we have a gut feeling to avoid something, then we should because it’s not right for us. I simply want to offer another explanation: Perhaps your initial reaction isn’t actually instinctual foresight, but your brain’s automatic response to a dissonant idea. We crave the familiar, the comfortable, and the path of least resistance. Anything else is going to set off some alarms.
“We have a lot of automatic response to the world,” says Rock. “Most of our responses are automatic and unconscious. Our brains prefer certainty to uncertainty. Certainty activates a reward response, while uncertainty activates our threat circuits. A small level of uncertainty is a novelty, but anything above a small level of uncertainty quickly feels like pain.”
And Yet You Don’t Have to Watch a Midlife Crisis to Know People Change Every Day
Now, you may wonder: How does anyone ever learn and grow? But of course we know that personal development is an integral part of being human and can be a great joy in life. We confront new ideas all the time. The brain is constantly changing, taking in fresh information, forming new mental maps, and adapting old ones. The brain’s malleability, or neuroplasticity, is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Think of how your thoughts differ today from when you were 15 years old, or even last year. We are all profoundly glad we don’t walk around with the same brain our whole lives.
So how do we change our thoughts, and their ensuing behaviors, most effectively? We know that it’s hard work to change an ingrained perception that requires rewiring an existing mental map. As it turns out, it’s much easier to create entirely new mental maps. And on top of it, we even get an energy boost.
It’s far easier to create new mental maps than to change existing ones.
Consider this familiar scenario: You go to hear a compelling speaker, perhaps in a training or workshop setting. As the speaker talks, you may have an impulse to sit back for a second to ponder, which means you are comparing this new data against your existing mental maps. You analyze how the new ideas fit in with what you’ve observed. And then, in a burst of energy, you think, Aha! You get excited about this fresh idea. Suddenly some pieces come together and you are ready to take action or share what you’ve learned. You’ve just created a new mental map! Even better, that burst of energy you felt was adrenaline being released, which gives you a lift. (You can actually observe this response in someone, and it doesn’t take state-of-the-art brain scanning equipment. It’s all over a person’s face.)
You leave the training excited to go out and apply your new learning. Then you return to your office and begin going through all the emails that have collected, and before you know it you’re thrown into a minor crisis. In other words, essentially, life takes over. Does this story sound familiar? A few days after the training you struggle to remember what you were so excited about earlier in the week. When you try to explain it to a colleague, you find yourself straining to recall how all the details fit together. The moment has passed, and you’ve lost the motivation to take action on your new insight.
Insights are energizing but fleeting.
What I’ve just described happens to all of us. When I was a CEO member of Vistage International, we had engaging speakers come in every month speaking on topics such as revamping sales and marketing, HR processes, and leadership models. It was a well-worn joke among our staffs that when we returned to our offices afterward, fresh with new insights, our teams would roll their eyes and think, “Good grief, here she goes again!” They knew to wait it out, because our enthusiasm for overhauling the status quo would fade within a week or so. Some ideas stuck, but most never made it to action.
Five Steps to Optimize Your Brain for Change
So where does that leave someone who wants to turn insights into action? We know that creating a new mental map is key. But the way to keep it alive is through focused attention. Rock explains the power of attention this way: “Like most things, it’s a whole brain phenomenon. Attention is like an entire orchestra coming to a note. When we’re not paying attention, our brain is like an orchestra all playing at once. When we pay attention, it all becomes synchronized and the circuits start firing together, which helps to create long-term memories.”
Rock is referring to “attention density” (a term coined by Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz). To sustain a new mental map—to wear the newly established grooves down so that they become a default path—we have to keep the focus on what we are trying to accomplish with frequency, intensity, and deliberation. For most of us, that means being purposeful about setting up processes and systems to make change happen. If you want to create lasting behavior change around the presence ideas in this book (or anything else you care about), here are some helpful steps.
Step 1: Make Room for Reflection Time
Intuitively, we know that it’s important to have a chance to look inward and gather our thoughts and collect ourselves. In leadership coaching, it’s a nearly universal strategy to help clients improve their effectiveness by building in reflection time (other names for it are “strategic thinking,” “planning time,” or “prioritization”). The brain benefits from contemplation in specific ways. As Rock puts it, when we aren’t focusing, our neural circuits are lighting up in a cacophony of thoughts. Being reflective quiets the mind; it allows us to observe our own thoughts as we process connections and access mental maps.
Being reflective involves taking a cerebral step back. It’s not about forcing our full mental heft on the problem at hand. It’s about creating space to allow thoughts to come to us (and old mental maps to be dug out of our gray matter). In his book about human motivation, Drive, Daniel Pink talks about the phenomenon of functional fixedness.2 It’s the scientifically validated idea that when we are overly focused on the most obvious definition or use of something, we can’t see alternative definitions or uses. Researchers have created puzzles to illustrate functional fixedness. You’ve likely seen such puzzles where, for instance, objects such as boxes must be turned into trays in order to meet the objective, but people can’t see past the use of the boxes as containers. Another example is where subjects are presented with a familiar sentence that has alternative meanings, yet all but the most obvious one escapes them. This concept has been proved in studies across cultures, decades, and ages. All people over the age of seven have some degree of functional fixedness at work in their brains.
Reflection time involves letting thoughts come to us, which helps overcome functional fixedness.
Now, let’s put it all together: The human brain’s propensity to validate what we already believe, and to get fixated on the most obvious answer, handicaps our capacity for creativity, expansive ideation, and unfamiliar mental shifts. When we purposefully quiet the loud parts of our minds and create room for emergent ideas, then we are more likely to process those ideas fully and build the all-important neural pathways that create insights.
Your Brain and Presence: Action Item 1
Find a quiet place in your office or home. Once there, think about the ideas in this book that felt right to you. Also, which ideas created an automatic discomfort? How would you like to approach your presence going forward?
You may find it helpful to write down your thoughts, make a list of ideas to try, or draw a diagram of your plan going forward. Or simply turn off all distractions and just think.
Step 2: Focus on Solutions, Not Problems
Attention shapes our mental maps. By pivoting our attention we can begin to develop new modes of thinking and doing. Consider your brain to be like a muscle: The thoughts we work on the most get stronger. If we keep our attention on what’s wrong or on our failures, those thoughts will dominate our minds. Alternatively, if we choose to focus on what’s working or what’s possible, those thoughts become more vivid. That’s why focusing on problems over solutions can hold us back on every level.
Unfortunately, our societal culture often encourages us to remain in the problem phase. We are rewarded for getting to the bottom of what’s wrong in a situation. When circumstances go awry at work, we spend hours in meetings discussing what happened. When an employee messes up, we bring her in our office to understand how she failed. As I wrote about in Chapter 3, most psychological treatment requires involved discussions of negative emotions and personal limitations (which has spawned Martin Seligman’s groundbreaking work in positive psychology, as well as a groundswell of antidepressant drugs). The tendency is to go to the problem phase quickly—and usually lull there. When we do that, our negative mental maps are pumping iron.
When we focus on problems, our negative mental maps are pumping iron.
When we are trying to create change, we have a far better chance of succeeding if we make a concerted effort to focus on solutions. (Of course we need to understand the basics of the problem, so we don’t repeat it, but beyond that, the future is in the solution.) This goes for us personally as well as professionally. If we focus on our weaknesses, then we buy into our limitations. If we spend our mental energy on our strengths, we see our potential. In coaching, we use a technique called appreciative inquiry to foster and strengthen new positive mental maps. Through a series of questions, we guide clients to what’s right and possible and pull them out of the morass of what’s wrong.
As you encounter ideas in this book, your first response might be, “I’m not good at communicating because I’m an introvert” or “Whenever I speak to a group I get nervous.” Keep your focus there and it will continue to be true. But if you want to inspire yourself to change, recognize resistance as a natural default, based on your existing mental maps, and try to lasso your thoughts. Don’t buy into the cultural norm of focusing on the problem. Consider solutions instead. To extend the example, your perceived introversion can make you a keen observer of others, which is a critical skill in executive presence. Perhaps you can reframe your thoughts around nervousness to consider that while you have felt anxious in the past, with practice and repetition you’ll gain confidence the next time you have to speak before a group. (Plus, you learned how to abate your nervousness using the tools in Chapter 3.)
Your Brain and Presence: Action Item 2
As you try out the ideas in the book, take note of where your mind naturally goes. Are you quick to determine why something won’t work? To break this habit, try for an 80/20 rule. Spend 80 percent of your thought time on solutions, and only 20 percent on the problem.
Two questions to ask yourself:
• What strengths do I bring to this presence concept?
• What would success with this concept look like for me?
Step 3: Strike While the Aha! Moments Are Hot
It feels great when we get that release of adrenaline from newly formed connections. We are primed to take action in that moment, but the clock is ticking on our excitement. You’ll have far greater success with change if you can capture that moment and act quickly, or at least create a path to action.
The easiest action to take is to write down your ideas. Sketch out your thoughts in the moment, so you can recall them when the adrenaline rush is over and your brain is flooded with other thoughts. (Use the “Ideas I Want to Try” sections at the end of each chapter to capture new insights.) It can also be helpful to set a clear personal goal for yourself that will keep you on track and bring the new idea or behavior into the reality of your daily life.
One of the elements of attention density is frequency, or ensuring that you revisit desired behavioral change again and again. Rock adds, “If you want to sustain change, you need to set up your environment to keep that change alive. That means having reminders in the forms of systems, processes and people.”
Having a personal executive coach to hold you accountable is a huge benefit, but not one that’s within reach for most people. Finding a colleague who can keep you to task and provide feedback also works. Top executive coach and author Marshall Goldsmith coined the term feed forward, a process whereby you let colleagues know ahead of time what you are working on so they can share what they observe in natural occurrences.3
Finally, stating our intended change in public creates intrinsic motivation to achieve it. A technique I’ve used is to go around the room after a meeting and have people state what they are committing to. Those things we promise out loud and in front of others are more likely to get done; so let others know what you’re up to.
If you want to keep an insight active, sketch it out, revisit it often, become accountable for it, and broadcast it.
In short, the next time you want to turn an insight into an action, sketch it out, revisit it often, become accountable for it, and broadcast it.
Your Brain and Presence: Action Item 3
Go back through the previous chapters and reread what you filled out in the “Ideas I Want to Try” sections. If you haven’t filled them out, start doing so from this chapter forward.
Select one tool or idea you want to put into practice. Sketch out how you can apply it, with as much detail as possible, including actual scenarios. Or tell a trusted colleague and have him observe you at work and provide feedback.
Step 4: Just Do It (At Least in a Small Way)
The goal of many coaches is transformational change; that is, helping the client to make a significant mental shift that alters behavior. It’s rewarding to be part of a profound positive change. Change can definitely happen that way, but it usually doesn’t. Instead, people make incremental change, gain some confidence and perspective, and then try the next goal. It’s much more comfortable for people to envision a tangible, discrete step than to jump to a faraway place they’ve never been before. Change is a process. If our brains sense some degree of certainty, then we are more likely to be open to change and allow it to happen. One of the themes of this book is to incorporate a few new behaviors that feel most comfortable and see what fits, then continue building from there. I wanted to avoid the mental shutdown that comes with uncertainty or the wholesale reorientation of a person’s modus operandi.
As it turns out, there’s also science behind Nike’s famous slogan to “Just Do It.” Taking that first step (just doing it), and seeing success, has a profound impact on the brain. A 2009 study led by neuroscientist Earl Miller at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory showed that we absorb more lessons from success than from failure.4 Furthermore, each ensuing success is processed more efficiently. Because the brain doesn’t know exactly what to retain from most failures to safeguard against future failures, it doesn’t exhibit the same type of neuroplasticity as it does with successes. We learn quickly what made us succeed.
The brain learns more from success than from failure.
Learning new ideas is rewarding, but if we want our thoughts and behaviors to truly change, we have to put ourselves out there—even if it’s one step at a time. It’s one more way that success breeds success.
Your Brain and Presence: Action Item 4
Take the step. Put into practice the idea that you wrote about in Action Item 3. If you can’t do it today, put it on your calendar. Make a commitment to yourself!
Step 5: Find Your Flow
In his seminal work that created an eponymous business term, Flow, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi laid out his research findings on what creates intrinsic joy in our work and in our lives.5 Flow happens in those moments when we feel “in the zone,” when we are immersed in an activity, lose track of time, and bring our full skills to bear. In Drive, Dan Pink brings flow into the conversation of how to create internal motivation in our age of conceptual, right-brained work. Pink discusses the need to create goals that are just enough of a stretch for people to seek mastery, but not too far out of their capability to cause frustration. This aligns with what David Rock has observed about a little uncertainty being a novelty.
Flow is when we feel in the zone and are bringing our full attention and skills to bear on an activity.
We all sense flow in our own lives. If you think back to your most rewarding and exciting projects, there were likely moments of flow. You can create the same experience around your presence objectives. Start with incremental steps, trying new behaviors that are a small stretch. Set a goal for yourself that causes you to extend your capabilities or puts you on the path of mastery. The joy of flow is in the process.
Your Brain and Presence: Action Item 5
Think about the behavior change you decided to make happen in Action Item 4. Now figure out your next one or two stretch steps. Remember, the idea is to keep improving—one manageable stretch at a time.
Now That You’re Inspired, It’s Time to Inspire Others
Any of these suggestions about how to inspire yourself can be used to inspire others. You can see how readily focusing on solutions or enabling flow would work in managing people or teams. These suggestions may reinforce effective management practices that you already use. Now you know the science behind why they work!
At times, our need to inspire is less about initiating practices and more about the subtle art of influence. We need to communicate so that others hear us with clarity and take that personal leap to buy into our message. In those moments, our only tool is our full and total presence. We’re transmitters hoping for clear and successful reception. Here are some ways to increase the odds.
Rock offers a compelling model for a mental environment that is conducive to influencing change. We’ve all heard of fight-or-flight, that reaction deep in our limbic systems that causes us to respond to external stimuli in an avoidant way. According to neuroscientists, fight-or-flight is a central organizing principle of the brain. We are constantly on alert to determine if anything, or anyone, will lead to a reward or a threat. This impacts our cognitive function in real ways. When our threat response is activated, oxygen and glucose are drawn from our prefrontal cortex (the working memory and higher-level, decision-making part of the brain). In that state, we lack the ability to perform at our most rational, cognitive best. What’s more, we are limited from accessing the brain’s full cognitive power. Consequently, we are likely to miss subtle cues needed for informed processing.
In our daily lives, we have a parallel interior world where we constantly assess others as either friend or foe. When we are in doubt—as with strangers or even those people we don’t know well—our default is to assume that the other person is a foe. This has a remarkable implication for communication. Rock explains, “You don’t process what a foe says using the same neural circuits as you use when processing what a friend says. If someone is a friend you process what they say using the same circuitry as you process your own thoughts. That’s not the case when you think someone is a foe.”
You can easily see how this fight-or-flight response can be beneficial from an evolutionary standpoint. If a tiger is chasing you, your best chance of survival is to shut out everything and run. However, humans are very complex animals; our limbic systems aren’t activated only by physical threats. Stress can produce it, and stressors come in many forms.
When we feel stressed or threatened, our cognitive functioning is limited.
Rock defines five social triggers that result in a threat-reward response. He calls the triggers “SCARF,” which stands for status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness (see Figure 9-1). The brain seeks to minimize threat in each of these five areas and maximize reward. If we can create an environment that keeps positive attention on the elements of SCARF, then we’re more likely to influence and change behavior. Think of it as creating an optimal listening environment where your audience can tune in to what you are saying and tune out of the reactive mode. In other words, more thoughtful consideration and less thought about being chased by tigers.
SOURCE: From David Rock, Your Brain at Work (New York: Harper Business, 2009) p. 196.
Let’s break down the elements of SCARF and discuss them further:
Status People feel rewarded when their status is protected or increased. Heightened status is the feeling of being more than something else, which could mean being smarter, wealthier, more successful, or higher up the hierarchical chain. Our status increases when we are publicly appreciated, promoted, or acknowledged for being smart and capable. Anything that makes someone feel less respected or appreciated can cause a status threat.
Certainty We are most at ease when we know what’s going to happen next, and when the future fits with our existing perceptions. Certainty reduces cognitive dissonance. Of course, it’s not always possible to know every next turn in business, but the more expectation setting you can do, and the more detail you can give about timelines, the less threatened others will feel.
Autonomy People like to think that they have control over their own fates and as much of their daily lives as possible. We enjoy the certainty of knowing what’s expected, and we are least threatened when we aren’t micromanaged about how to get there. Autonomy gives us a sense of personal agency (in neuroscience terms, the ability to originate and direct our own actions) that respects our individuality.
Relatedness All of us can recall a time when they felt the sting of social rejection. We feel threatened when we are excluded from social groups and rewarded when we are part of them. Thus, we form groups constantly because the sense of being one of the team is fulfilling, especially if you believe you are an important part of the team (status). Anyone who qualifies as a foe—whether a stranger, competitor, or saboteur—creates a threat response. This explains why finding commonalities and forging connections is critical for influencing.
Fairness People want to be treated fairly. We are keenly frustrated when we sense a situation is unfair or unjust (consider how an undeserved promotion can wreak havoc on a corporate culture). The more that people can be assured that a decision is fair and balanced, the easier it will be for them to accept it.
The social triggers of SCARF are easy to understand because they hit home. Keeping them in mind when you need to persuade or motivate others will only help you communicate more clearly. Consider the next time you need to deliver a change message. Are you on the reward side or the threat side of SCARF? With a few message tweaks, you can achieve greater resonance, buy-in, and success.
The Human Drive to Connect to a Higher Purpose
For a good portion of my career I’ve worked with entrepreneurial technology companies. It’s common to see people take lower wages, work longer hours, and put blood, sweat, and tears into a company that may or may not survive a year. For many people outside the industry, this seems crazy. How many times have we learned that you can’t pay the mortgage with stock options and a promise? Why would people put themselves through this aggravation?
The answer is that entrepreneurial companies often create a strong sense of purpose for their employees. New technologies are changing industries, shaping the way we live, and leaving a legacy. (Imagine a world without Google or Facebook, or the PC for that matter.) For the people who work in technology start-ups, yes, there is a chance to get rich. Yet everyone but the most naive knows that’s a gamble. What smart entrepreneurial companies guarantee is a chance to be part of something larger than any individual, and maybe even to be part of history.
You don’t have to recall great philosophic debates on man’s search for meaning to know that purpose is motivating. Humans crave it. Gallup Organization’s well-known and exhaustively researched Q12 engagement survey tests for purpose. Look at Barack Obama’s 2008 purpose-driven presidential campaign. Whatever your politics or history’s final judgment on Obama, it’s a fact that he mobilized millions of people (many of whom had never voted before) to cast their ballots, including a historic number of younger voters, through use of exciting rhetoric about how to be part of change in America.
Purpose inspires people to self-motivate. Yet, in many companies and in our daily work lives, purpose can be hard to find. In Drive, Dan Pink says that providing a sense of purpose within organizations is a critical success factor in motivating people to meet the requirements of the future.
A sense of purpose inspires people to self-motivate.
When inspiring others, you are not just creating change; you’re also illuminating it. And the more you can foster an intrinsic pressure to keep moving toward a new possibility, the easier the change will happen.
If you want to be a purpose-driven leader to inspire others, you have to define and communicate the reason that the company/project/program exists. Like everything else we’ve discussed, focus is key. We have daily opportunities in our work to keep ourselves, and everyone else, focused on a higher calling. Pink offered this point to me in an interview: “We’ve neglected the importance of purpose in our organizations. In the typical staff meeting you spend 45 minutes talking about how people do things or what they’re supposed to do. Instead, spend four minutes talking about the why. What’s the purpose of this enterprise? Why do we get up every day and work hard? Try spending even four minutes on purpose—on the why—and 41 minutes on the how and the what.”6
Drawing attention to the why, and linking it to each individual’s role, has a real impact on behavior and outcomes. Plus, it makes work a lot more interesting. Of course there’s a neuroscience aspect too, as you’ve no doubt deduced. We are helping others to create new mental maps by focusing on solutions and creating attention density around positive insights. We are also enhancing rewards for status (being part of something important), certainty (identifying where we are headed), and relatedness (belonging to a team).
It’s also why vision is critical for leaders, as we’ll discuss in the next chapter.
This Is Heady Stuff, but Not Hard to See
When I first began learning about neuroleadership it seemed like a lot to digest. Frankly, it is. The good news is that even knowing the highlights is beneficial—and intriguing! The research findings make intuitive sense and validate human behavior that we observe in ourselves and in others throughout the workplace.7
Understanding how your brain operates gives you a broader and deeper perspective. Neuroscience explains why you might get a sense of overload as you read through a book, or why you might categorize an idea as “too hard” and mentally shut it out. It also explains why corporate reorganizations usually go so badly. Neuro-science takes common behaviors out of the personal and puts them into the biological, creating a different problem to solve with an opportunity for fresh solutions. It’s acceptable and natural to feel the way we do; we are neither purposefully intractable nor personally inadequate. We’re human. And given what we now know, we can approach change in an enlightened way.
Ultimately, what excites me the most is that neuroscience uncovers the potential that we can easily overlook in ourselves. It can help all of us become true inspirational forces for positive change and to understand the possibilities in ourselves and in our relationship to others.
Key Takeaways from Chapter 9
1. Neuroscience findings are revealing intriguing aspects of how the human brain processes information, makes decisions, and manages change. We know that the brain creates neural circuits—mental maps—that form the basis for our thoughts and perceptions. Each person’s mental maps are unique.
2. Our prefrontal cortex, or the executive portion of our brain, is where our short-term thoughts and complex decision making occur. This is where the brain does its heavy lifting. Long-term memory (i.e., ingrained thoughts) requires less energy to store.
3. The brain is built for efficiency and energy conservation. When we confirm what we already know, energy is saved. When we confront ideas that conflict with current perceptions, we expend energy.
4. It’s easier for us to form new connections in the brain than to change existing ones. When we create new mental maps that result in insights, we have a surge of adrenaline and often feel excited to take action. However, this feeling quickly wears off if we don’t jump on it.
5. We sustain change by keeping our focus on the new insight. When we apply attention density—frequency, intensity, and deliberation—we are most likely to hardwire the new perspective into the brain, where it’s stored as long-term memory.
6. To influence others, we must be mindful of the human brain’s organizing principle of threat versus reward around status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. By staying on the reward side of these factors, we allow our communications to be heard with greater clarity and less reactivity.
Ideas I Want to Try from Chapter 9:
