Fostering Change: Neuroscience Backs What Great CEOs Do Naturally
Since 1996, Bill Synnot has been one of Australia’s leading innovators in change management, regularly conducting public and in-house masterclasses/workshops and training on the subject. He will be speaking in Brisbane on 25 October at the Brisbane NeuroLeadership Symposium 2012.
_____________________________________________
Natural abilities
Richard Branson (Virgin)
Kerry Packer (Consolidated)
John Chambers (Cisco)
Paul Orfalea (Kinko)
Walt Disney (Disney Entertainment)
Ted Turner (CNN)
Kerry Stokes (Channel 7)
The well-known CEOs on the list above have something in common: they are all dyslexic. It’s counterintuitive that they should be among the world’s most successful businessmen, but being dyslexic appears to have unique benefits. First, they are used to failure, which makes them more willing to take risks. As slow readers, they are forced to extract only vital information and they tend to prefer face-to-face meetings in order to focus on non-verbal cues. They are willing to delegate. Plus, they tend to think ‘differently’, which means they are more creative.
Peter Drucker, one of the best-known and most widely influential thinkers and writers on the subject of management practice, says that“…organisations today have to be designed for change as the norm and to create change rather than react to it…”— something these CEOs enthusiastically embrace in running their companies. Both the idea of ‘change’ and the willingness to change are critical to their success.
Taking a common definition of change management, it’s easy to see why. In the simplest of terms, change management means experiencing and doing something different—in other words, being creative. What they understand intuitively is that change is a human journey that involves shifts in culture, attitudes, behaviours and beliefs. What it’s not is ‘change control’—something that’s imposed.
Facilitation is key and may be accomplished in a number of ways:
.
Building on, not burying the past
Understanding that nothing changes without personal transformation
Building the right relationships
Encouraging self-awareness and reflectiveness
Challenging the status quo
Changing inappropriate behaviours
Starting the emotional “buy-in”
Letting go of the old ways
Changing mindsets
Fostering a willingness to be challenged and to feel insecure
.
Successful CEOs are experts in this kind of facilitation. But don’t give up if you aren’t dyslexic. It’s possible to utilize recent research in neuroscience to bring about positive organizational change.
.
Threat, reward, and productive conflict
The human brain perceives social threats and rewards with the same intensity as physical threats and rewards. It is important to recognize that the brain experiences the workplace as a social situation.
David Rock, the founder and CEO of the NeuroLeadership Group, expands on this:
Although a job is often regarded as a purely economic transaction, in which people exchange their labor for financial compensation, the brain experiences the workplace first and foremost as a social system. Leaders who understand this dynamic can more effectively engage their employees’ best talents, support collaborative teams, and create an environment that fosters productive change. Indeed, the ability to intentionally address the social brain in the service of optimal performance will be a distinguishing leadership capability in the years ahead.
Rock’s SCARF model offers a way of creating brain-friendly environments and processes, stressing the importance of the five domains of human experience: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness.
Unless we view the person as a whole system, we’re missing the amazing dynamism of human functioning and the interrelatedness of social communication. The good but challenging news from the neuroscience front asserts that fragmentation isn’t really possible without a significant cost to well-being.
One of the best ways for a CEO to lead is to acknowledge the importance of status and relatedness, to allow employees a degree of certainty and autonomy, and to be mindful of perceptions of fairness.
However, even with all this new awareness of reward and threat responses, conflict in the workplace is a given. If handled intelligently and systematically, it can be a positive—in fact, conflict can be the impetus for the best kind of change.
.
“The brain is a team of rivals”
According to David Eagleman, author of Incognito, just like a good drama, the brain runs on conflict. In his view, this is a good thing. Eagleman’s thesis is that the human brain functions much like a large organisation: “Beyond a collection of local expert systems, we are a collection of overlapping, ceaselessly reinvented mechanisms, a group of competing factions.”
Much of what we do becomes hardwired into the brain’s circuitry and happens automatically. The prefrontal cortex (PFC), also known as the CEO of the brain, doesn’t need to get involved in these smooth-running systems. The job of the CEO is to set higher-level directions and assign new tasks. But if conflict arises or if something unexpected occurs, the CEO is called in. As humans we experience this as consciousness.
According to Eagleman:
From an evolutionary point of view, an animal composed of a giant collection of zombie systems would be energy efficient, but cognitively inflexible. It would have economical programs for doing particular simple tasks, but if wouldn’t have rapid ways of switching between programs or setting goals to become expert in novel and unexpected tasks. In the animal kingdom, most animals do certain things very well (say, prying seeds from the inside of a pine cone), while only a few species (such as human) have the flexibility to dynamically develop new software.
While neuroscience frequently uses the large business organisation as a metaphor for how the brain functions, it’s instructive to take what brain science tells us about optimal conditions for complex systems. The main lesson we can extract from biology is that it’s better to cultivate a team of populations that attack the problem in different, overlapping manners. The team-of-rivals framework suggests that the best approach is to abandon the question “What’s the most clever way to solve that problem?” in favour of “Are there multiple, overlapping ways to solve that problem?”
Most leaders are on unfamiliar ground when it comes to understanding human dynamics. Embracing innovation may mean looking at employees in an entirely new light. Old paradigms need to give way to new ideas and actions that may seem uncomfortable and “uncertain” at first.
The first step is overcoming our personal resistance to change by convincing our brains this is a good thing. Then, we must provide our employees with the conditions to be truly flexible and innovative. We can either work with the brain or work against it. One thing is certain—change in one form or another is inevitable.
A CEO with the willingness to embrace change, take risks, try new things, and give teams the autonomy it takes to become experts will have a greater likelihood of heading a flexible, dynamic enterprise.
With the new knowledge neuroscience offers, we are in a position now as never before to know who we really are, how we function, and what’s possible in the workplace. .
.
_____________________________________________________________
With around 40 years of experience, Bill Synnot is widely recognized as a leading international change management specialist, as well as an effective public speaker, consultant, trainer, author and facilitator. He has co-authored a book entitled The Toolbox for Change: a practical approach and a CD on change management (50+ frameworks & 200+ tools). He has published in professional journals and regularly presents at conferences internationally.
He is increasingly using neuroscience research findings in his work.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 3 so far )
Brainwaves For Leaders 