Book review: NEUROSCIENCE FOR LEADERS
A Brain Adaptive Leadership Approach
Genres:
- Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Leadership
Review posted on:
3.4.2019
The number of pages:
240 pages
Book rating:
5/5
Year the book was published:
First edition published 2016
Who should read this book:
- Entrepreneurs, Start-up founders, Management, Leaders, Influencers, Marketers.
Why did I pick up this book and what did I expect to get out of it:
In my opinion, if you want to improve as a leader you need to learn how your brain works. And when I saw Neuroscience for Leaders by Nikolaos Dimitriadis I was sure that this would be an interesting read. The only worry that I had was that Nikolaos would do deep dives into science and terminology and I wouldn’t be able to follow what he was trying to get across. After checking reviews on Amazon I was sure that I made the right choice of picking up this book.
I expect to read about scientific research and findings about the human brain, emotions, and relationships, and how all of this can help you in business.
My thoughts about the book:
Neuroscience for Leaders is written in a quite clear, easy-to-understand style when you consider the amount of theory and science it contains. I especially appreciate that the authors were focused and did throughout the whole book provide explanations of how theory could and should be implemented in real-life business cases.
I highly recommend this book because of its mix of simplicity and complexity (difficult information presented in a simple way). The authors make it a lot easier to understand what they are talking about because they also present case studies and other research for each topic. So nothing is left to blind assumptions and when you finish the book you can go through your past experiences and take “another look” with a different “pair of eyes”. You never know, maybe you have been doing everything as you should have or maybe you made a couple of mistakes. If you did, learn from them and adapt.
If you pick up this book please let me know what you think of it in the comment section.
A short summary of the book:
In Neuroscience for Leaders, the authors talk about how your brain works, changes over time based on your experiences and way of thinking, how your brain can trick or blindside you based on your biases, and much more. The authors offer an approach (Brain adaptive leadership – BAL) to understanding and implementing “a leadership brain”. This approach has four pillars/groups of ideas that are based on scientific insights. The first pillar reflects the cognitive functions – thinking of your brain, the second reflects emotions, the third reflects automated responses and protocols of your brain (brain automation) and the fourth pillar reflects relations. The surprising thing about the book is that it is written in an easy-to-read manner so you do not have to be an academic to understand what the authors are saying at the same time there is so much research and facts in the book that you get an in-depth explanation of how and why hormones, emotions, and triggers from the environment affect you the way they do.
One of the most important takeaways is that your brain is physically changing all throughout your entire life. Based on what you do, with whom you surround yourself with, and how you think. Based on that the neurons in your brain dissolve or are created. The less you do and think of something the less you trigger those neurons and in time they dissolve, on the other hand, the more you think or do something the stronger they get.
My notes from the book:
- Leadership is an attitude and it simultaneously consists of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. As an attitude leadership can be found anywhere and everywhere in everyday life. It’s not defined by hierarchies, and it’s not a given qualification.
- Leaders are powerful social actors with a huge responsibility for improving everything and everyone, all the time.
- Biases can sway people’s opinions in a subconscious way and thus need to be confronted openly in order to lose their undetected power over our decision-making.
- Leaders need to be aware of biases in order to consciously decide when these biases are helpful and when they are not.
- Being able to spot the right emotion early and deal with it accordingly is essential for better leadership. If a leader is in a wrong mood they can destroy the collaborative spirit of a team.
- Words will put people, including you, in a specific frame of mind so choose them carefully and strategically.
- Too much talk and over-thinking seems to take away from experts their brain’s ability to perform. So, fewer endless explanations and more targeted actions pave the way for better brain preparation for repeating great results.
- Leaders must establish links with people who have different characteristics. By creating “weak” ties they inject necessary new ideas, new experiences, and new practices. Fresh ideas, strategic information, out-of-the-box innovations, change initiatives, alternative perspectives, and disruptive technologies are rarely the product of tired, over-squeezed, and over-familiar relations within groups of people working together too closely for too long. You can read more about how “weak and strong” ties influence you in my book review Connected: How your Friends’ friends’ friends’ affect everything you feel, think, and do.
- The way people think, feel, and behave within their company-specific environment directly affects the success of a corporate culture.
- Be very careful in choosing your words at the beginning and the end of important announcements. The same goes for when meeting new colleagues and employees. They will clearly remember your first and last words in the meeting if they are powerful.
- Confusion of authority harms your persuasion potential. A communicator who is perceived as possessing high expertise can influence both attitudes and the memory of others.
- No leader can inspire action if others do not connect with them in deep and meaningful ways. Relations are built and nurtured through communication.
- Positive or negative emotions spring us into action to either go towards or retrieve ourselves from a situation.
- Emotions are what is happening within us, while feelings are the subjective perception of what is happening in us and its elaboration. Emotions are automated biological reactions in the form of chemical and neural responses to bodily or environmental stimuli. They are generated automatically regardless of whether the stimulus is processed consciously or unconsciously and their role is to make us move/react in order to survive. Feelings, on the other hand, are cognitive representations or perceptions of the changes caused by emotions as well as the evocation of thinking processes and mental states consistent with the emotion.
- It is your general mood that will determine greatly the type of emotions you will express at any given moment.
- Harvard Business School found that when there is emotional arousal because of an upcoming important challenge people do much better when they interpret it as excitement (of doing something) rather than anxiety. People who use the strategy of calming down do badly.
- Neuroplasticity is the proven ability of the brain to change, be trained, adapt, grow new neural connections or degrade the existing ones. All these depend (apart from the genetic factors) on ourselves and the environment we live in and how we interact with it.
- By understanding how the brain works and by accepting our ability to alter how the brain reacts to stimuli, we are in a better position to reflect on experience and formulate judgments, and therefore, to adapt our behavior towards ourselves and others.
- The brain takes, in total, more than 20% of the whole energy available to the body. It takes only 2% of our body mass but it consumes 20% of the oxygen and 25% of the glucose. The brain consumes 90% of its energy in a calm state when people are not asked to do much thinking.
- Willpower and self-control are not infinite. When we are exposed to situations where we need to portray self-control we consume brain energy fast and thus perform much worse in the next task.
- In situations of low energy levels, when someone has worked very hard over the last few days and feels very tired, the brain will retreat to a habitual mode and replicate default behaviors to save power. These default behaviors, if guided by deep-rooted values, will align with aspirations and will decrease the possibility of undesirable reactions to external stimuli.
- Our brain is a social organ. It can deal with many things, but not with the absence of interaction. Our brain grows and it becomes better through social interactions.
- The brain loves patterns. It does so because it makes it feel secure in situations of high uncertainty. Not moving is more dangerous than moving, so the brain will try to find clues to quickly figure out the best option and go for it. It will do so regardless of the quality of the clues.
- One of the biggest flaws of the brain is that it prefers to resort to less energy-demanding neural patterns and see things as they should be and not as they really are.
- Creativity is neuroplasticity at its best. Identifying new solutions to new or old problems, learning new ways, exploring unexpected insights, and challenging the status quo are enabling new neural pathways to regularly be built inside our brains and keep us effective and competitive for a long time to come.
- The mindset you develop greatly affects your behavior, relationship with success and failure, and ultimately your aptitude for happiness and well-being.
- A study by neuroscientist Jason Gallate and his associates revealed that creative people benefit the most when taking a break from focusing on a given problem and that this break allows for non-conscious processes to take over and provide insightful solutions.
- Priming works best when people are not aware of its effect. When we become aware of the effect, priming stops working. Priming triggers implicit memories that help us perform, mostly automatically, a task based on previous experience.
- The brain is not independent of its environment. It will continuously receive and process subliminally much more information than our conscious mind could ever handle and it will reflexively respond by altering our conscious mind’s ability to make decisions. You can read more about triggers in my book review Triggers: Sparking Positive Change and making it last.
- Symbols can powerfully shape our thinking and acting because we perceive them effortlessly and rapidly and because they embed themselves deep in our memories. They are “magnets of meaning” instantly retrieving associations hardwired in our brains by previous experiences and priming us for specific attitudes, decisions, and behaviors.
- People form new habits on average in 66 days with a wide range of 18 to 254 days. Once a habit is formed, new and old goals, expressed by our controlled thinking, do not interfere much with the process, but for starting new habits goals are important both for starting the process and for maintaining it over time for the habit to be fully formulated.
