Are the Brains of Leaders wired differently?

Are the Brains of Leaders wired differently?

Everyone’s brain is wired differently. Successful people will have some differences compared to the average population. I say successful leaders because of what they have had to learn to be good at what they do.

When you practice anything, it changes your brain and leaders have had to practice staying cool under pressure. They experience levels of stress that would overwhelm most people – from having too much to do, dealing with uncertainty and being seen by others. Successful leaders have managed to learn to manage the stress response from all that. If they don’t learn to do that, their ability to think goes down dramatically.

Successful leaders have very good emotional regulation techniques, and you can pick that up in all sorts of tests. It relates to the brain’s “braking system”, which is just behind the right temple. So effective leaders have strong braking systems that are well-developed.

And how did those leaders rewire their brains?

Anything you pay attention to, changes your brain. If you pay attention to the words of Cantonese, you will learn the language and your brain will change as a result. If pay attention to colours or light, that will also change your brain.

For someone who has always been a technician or a performer (like a sales person), when they first become a manager, they need to change their brain. And it is a change that people often struggle with, because they actually have to stop themselves from doing. They have to use the braking system to stop themselves from solving the problem for the other person.

As you practice that, you will get better at it and it will change your brain. If you don’t practice that and you keep doing things the way you did as a sales person, and you keep doing the work for other people, you would become an ineffective manager. Instead of motivating people, you will threaten them.

Is it all about paying attention to the work that you do, then?

It is about adapting to the environment. In nature, the creatures that adapt well are the ones that survive. In the workforce when the situation changes, you need to be someone who can adapt to the new situation.

When you become a manager or a functional head for the first time, you need to adapt and change your brain. Each time you need to rewire your brain, and the way you do that is by paying attention and noticing stimuli in the environment instead of acting automatically. Paying fresh and focused attention is how we rewire the brain.

Are there limitations to the brain?

The brain is an interesting paradox. It the most complex thing in the known universe and has tremendous limitations. And those limitations mostly involve conscious processing of information.

For example, we have a terrible memory. Unless we really focus, the average human’s memory is very poor. We can accurately remember what happened in the last two seconds, and that is what we can accurately reproduce. Beyond that it gets much harder.

Another example is how long you can think well for. It is exhausting to focus for a couple of hours. We think people can do great work all day, but there are big peaks and troughs within our capacity to work well.

So how does that affect something like a brain-storming session?

Keeping it under an hour and doing it in the mid-morning will be extremely useful. Trying to do a brain storming at three or four in the afternoon is almost pointless in some situations.

So it’s better to have it short than a long drawn out process?

If you are doing something that is routine, the brain is tremendously efficient. But when you have to consciously think about your work, then you are using the prefrontal cortex of the brain that is the most inefficient. The prefrontal cortex only uses 4% of the total brain but it tires very easily and this is where a lot of limitations emerge from.

(Courtesy: Sydney-born David Rock, author of the book Quiet Leadership and CEO of Results Coaching Systems International)