What is neuroleadership?
The term “Neuroleadership” was first coined around 2008 by Dr. David Rock, founder and current director of the “Neuroleadership Institute“, to define a specific area of action that identifies, explains, and intervenes in different relational areas within the context of interaction that originates influence. Rock observes the complex reality of leadership from the perspective generated by findings in research on the brain and its processes.
Background of neuroleadership
Prior to the formal recognition of Neuroleadership as a discipline and area of action, several academic institutions in England, USA, and Australia had developed complete research areas related to this subject. Their object of study and intervention focused on the development of leadership skills and competencies, based on evidence from discoveries and contributions from neurosciences.
Leadership adhering to models preceding the current post-digital society attempts to perpetuate itself on the premise of power concentration, while the reality derived from Neuroleadership research reinforces a model based on the efficiency of processes involved in decision-making, emotional regulation, influence, and transformation from a perspective that operates on the postulates of the effectiveness of brain connectivity.
Importance of understanding the brain
The permanent advances over the last decades in our knowledge of the brain in all its dimensions allow us to establish the first basic records of causalities between the configuration of our own brain design and the infinite record of behavioral reactions and conductual evidence in the universe of our relationships, bringing us closer to the answers of the why, the how, and the what for.
Our growing understanding and knowledge of how our brain is structured and connected enhance our ability to successfully intervene in cases where potential or “de facto” leaders need to focus and develop competencies to address the primary needs of relationships, effort planning, performance enhancement, and the strategic mobilization of their collaborators towards organizational goals and objectives.
Challenges and opportunities for leaders
A significant proportion of individuals in “Leadership” positions may report or demonstrate competency limitations. Deficiencies in listening, communicating, conversing, guiding, motivating, engaging, building loyalty, generating trust, delegating, developing, empowering, establishing guidelines for decision-making, negotiating limits, planning, organizing, and being strategic become daily one of the greatest demands for learning and consulting for experts in the field.
The challenges to generate new automatisms through learning reinforced by an effective emotional regulation system find answers in the evidence on the functioning of the networks that support personal and/or professional habits, and that explain the processes through which they are subject to transformation.
The knowledge of our brain function brings us closer and closer to determining the electrobiochemical codes that give rise to our individuality. Therefore, they have become the perfect key to open intervention opportunities to install a differentiated record of reaction and behavior that allows us to achieve the defined objectives to increase our general well-being.
Challenges of Neuroleadership
Addressing the topic of Neuroleadership includes addressing the challenges of two performance areas with significant impacts on social life in general and productive systems specifically:
- Development of Management skills and competencies
The competency development in these performance areas has been referred to by some theorists as the development of “soft skills” or soft competencies. By this, they refer to the set of key transversal competencies in the management of post-digital organizational environments. Furthermore, they also include the management and application to different processes of the contributions of neurologists, biologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, mentors, consultants, coaches, and other professionals who work with people and collaborate with the extensive areas of neuroscience research.
The understanding of management as the process that allows the achievement of strategic objectives of organizations (understanding organization from a systemic perspective), through the application of models, techniques, and tools for resource management, and of leadership as the exercise of influence to facilitate the mobilization of groups towards the achievement of objectives, allows us to remotely glimpse the impacts that the development of competencies and skills from the perspective of Neuroleadership has on the results of organizations and the lives of individuals.
- Competency enhancement of Leadership
The competency developments associated with Neuroleadership focus on the management of transformation processes, decision-making, effective achievement, interpersonal influence, and emotional regulation within societies, organizations, and even individuals. Henry Minzberg stated it with absolute clarity: “Neuroleadership focuses on how individuals in a social environment make decisions and solve problems, regulate their emotions, collaborate with other influences, and facilitate change.”
Neuroplasticity and leadership
The World Health Organization (1982) defined the term neuroplasticity as the ability of nervous system cells to regenerate anatomically and/or functionally, after being subjected to pathological environmental or developmental influences, including trauma and diseases.
In other words, neuroplasticity is the adaptive potential of the central nervous system to modify its own structural and functional organization in response to particular internal or external demands. This capacity is the foundational basis of everything we conceive as learning. We refer to the corroboration of our potential to successfully transform ourselves and effectively adapt throughout our lives, even at the moment of our death, if we understand that it requires the entire system to learn to disconnect and not communicate.
If leadership from the perspective of neurosciences, that is, Neuroleadership, refers to the competence to influence the transformation, learning, and adaptation of a group of individuals interacting in a social environment, then understanding the principles related to neuroplasticity is of vital importance for designing the different strategies to be used in the learning process, the strategies we will apply to motivate significantly, and the stimuli we will provide to achieve the desired reinforcements.
We know the relationships generated by a well-being environment with a greater quantity and quality of neural pathways preserved for the future, which will result in a decrease in the loss of neuronal quantity and connectivity, an environment that provides daily challenges to always keep the brain stimulated, in order to promote physiological initiatives that allow maintaining the optimal level of plasticity.
The leader’s greatest challenge, therefore, is to generate the necessary quantity of attractive, motivating, and enriching proposals to keep the brain tone ready for permanent plastic adaptation.
Neuroleadership, a revolution and a challenge for the current business model
The theoretical postulates and intervention models derived as Neuroleadership proposals, based on the contributions of evidence from neuroscience research, are generating the greatest number of conceptual and practical changes ever experienced in management since the great industrial revolutions.
The biggest challenge of this new perspective is to drive the competency development of leaders to successfully face the growing demands of the post-digital society in which we find ourselves. To do this, intervention technologies developed as contributions from neuroscience to the exercise of leadership, as we know it in this new context, are used.
In the words of Arnoldo Arana, Neuroleadership represents a revolutionary and novel perspective regarding the conceptualization of leadership and the key factors for its effective exercise. A vision that relates the understanding of brain function, its anatomy and physiology with the neuronal basis of leadership and management, which focuses on the observation, measurement, and description of brain processes. This explains behavior (performance), decision-making, motivation, emotional regulation, interpersonal and social relationships in general, individual and collective intelligence and learning, among other aspects linked to the organizational world and the exercise of leadership.
Neuroleadership compels a reconceptualization of relationships in different organizations, not based on classical theories based on accumulated management knowledge, but on the understanding of brain function to measure and improve the cognitive and social performance of leaders.
Our growing knowledge about brain function and structure is moving us from the practice of power and authority to the practice of influence and collective intelligence; we are advancing from the nuclear perception of organizations to the understanding of effectiveness from a systemic perspective; we understand the differences between perceptions and evidence, approaching rigor; in short, we are abandoning paradigmatic spaces to open ourselves to environments of co-creation and opportunities.
Jesús Blanco
Consultant in organizations, talent, and brands. Clinical psychologist, executive and corporate coach. Certified in Neuromanagement, Neurobiology, and Neuroeconomics. Professor in programs at UCM, UNIR, and UVa. 27 years of experience in the multifunctional sector.