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>> Final Module 1 Assignment - Neuroscience of Leadership - Decision Making and Problem Solving <<
1. Introduction
Most of the managers have little or no knowledge about how to manage emotions in the workplace. Their approach is usually just the intuitive common sense one, based on their general experience from their life interactions with other people.
They have not enough knowledge even to realize that it is them who could influence the impacts of emotions (primarily of the negative ones) on human mental performance. This paper shows where an undesirable increase of the emotions typically originates and discusses its impacts on work efficiency in the workplace.
To make my conclusion more solid I will support them by bringing together relevant findings of neuroscience. At the final part of the paper, I will propose possible measures to be introduced in the workplace to change the negative impacts on productivity.
The paper is focusing on the situations which I was recognizing very often at my clients and even when I was managing people in organizational units or in project teams. After collecting some knowledge from neuroscience in the past 1.5 years, I wish I had known more about our brain functionality when I was in top management positions!
2. Typical workplace scenarios of interest
Most individuals and teams are exposed to situations, when instant mobilization of the knowledge, creativity and judgment is necessary to get further. For people, who are involved in standardized repetitive operations usually set up in advance by process standards or rules, these are the situations when conditions of the operation diverge from those expected and the people are not prepared for them by training or the process manuals.On the other hand, knowledge and creativity workers have their work organized primarily towards the goals and outputs to be achieved and by a set of principal rules providing a certain direction and limits for their work. No detailed set-up of the process and no manuals are possible and even desirable. A substantial part of their work comprises various products of their thinking – rational (mainly analytical) thinking, creative development, decision-making, scenario/option development, forecasting or other very complicated mental tasks.
Their education, experience and ongoing learning usually help them to manage the situations successfully. Nevertheless, the vast richness of alternatives and unpredictable options excludes the ability to be prepared in advance for all of them.
In fact, to solve these situations and to find the best achievable (preferably optimal) possibility is an essential part of their job description. “Capacity to work under stress is required” has become a part of most job requirements.
Truck drivers, pilots, firemen, policemen, emergency workers and doctors, as well as call center specialists, customer service officers, managers of all levels and executives, and many other professions deliver a high degree of their work under uncertainty, in non-standard, unpredicted conditions, where their training, education, work experience do not give enough guidance to let them solve the situation without feeling a certain level of threat.
It is not necessarily threat of live, theirs or somebody else’s; they can feel threatened for many broadly varying reasons, objective or subjective. For many professions the potential threat is permanent and ubiquitous.
As the notion of threat[1] is probably not acceptable for many people (typically in the positions where there is not a danger of life, like executives, managers, politicians etc.), we usually call it stress in common language, but this is a much broader concept. Therefore, in this document I will use the term threat, which is more precise and closer to understanding of psychology and neuroscience of leadership.
For the sake of the further thinking, let us narrow now the scope of situations we are going to focus on.
Let us assume there is a certain level of threat, which people may manage successfully thanks to their preparedness for the role they are delivering in the organization (or other structure their position is a part of - enterprise, social system, transportation system, business process etc.). We are going to focus then on the impacts of interactions internal to the system (from other subjects of the organization) towards the individual’s performance. We assume that primary intent of the interactions is to increase the probability that goals of the organization will be achieved. Because the organization with defined goals interacts as a system, I will call it system disturbing interaction.
Examples of these system disturbing interactions may be for instance the following:
• Truck driver driving on the jammed highway, who gets a wireless coercive command from transportation dispatcher: “The load must be at the customer place on time!”
• Call center consultant noticing that his communication with a client gets monitored by the supervisor in the middle of solving a complex client complaint.
• A project manager to prepare for unplanned meeting due in 20 minutes with the project sponsor, who has just learned, that the project got to the red-alert risk situation.
The aspects, all the situations have in common, are what we would like to focus on:
1. inherent threatening situation already existing at the moment of system disturbing interaction (the driver in a traffic jam, consultant solving client complaint, PM knowing the project has got jeopardized)
2. interaction coming from the organization with the apparent primary intention to achieve its goals (get the load to the customer in time, to satisfy the client of the call center, to get the project off the risky situation)
3. relatively strong influence of the system disturbing interaction on the emotional state of the worker (transportation manager superior to the driver pushing him hard to solve situation beyond his control, an unknown reason why call center supervisor is stepping in the current communication with the client, project sponsor obviously giving unusually short time notice to discuss the problem).
What is the influence of the system disturbing interaction on the worker’s performance in situations of this kind?
3. Disturbing interaction from the neuroscience point of view
We specified the extrospective facts describing the situation of the worker in chapter 2 as follows:
i. the worker is exposed to a certain level of permanent pressure as inherent part of his[2] job position. Let us call it ambient threat level. The person is trained and skillful enough for this level of pressure, which allows him to manage his work to the expected standards (unless he fails to follow his knowledge, skills and/or experience).
ii. the worker is subject of the system disturbing interaction aimed to ensure the goals of the organization are achieved
The system disturbing interaction is usually implied by superordinate person (the part of the system with the power of control) in the way or in the moment increasing the pressure on the individual (or a team). What more, it is frequently believed that it will make them improve their performance, what might be true when they are idle (with low level of arousal), but generally not under conditions of the ambient threat level.
Let us focus on the situation from the neuroscience point of view in the following paragraphs.
We can start with analyzing what we called the ambient threat level. It is a state when we are under permanent light threat emotion, caused by the fact we are permanently facing new situations, which we cannot leave to the reflexive brain, as our anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is signaling the novelty of the stimuli configuration (Rock, 2009, p.51). The perceived novelty is a typical state on the very threat/reward edge and the prevailing emotion is at the end given by very subtle impact of stimuli we usually do not consciously recognize. This is why for instance I love to be consultant, coach or project manager, as it is never twice the same situation, every client, every workshop or coaching session is completely novel - and motivationally exciting and interesting (concept of eustress). Being in the situations fully novel, which means not identical or similar enough to what we experienced before, we are always vulnerable to fall to the unsafe side, where we feel the threat of the workshop not going well, or the client not satisfied with the progress of coaching or the project running to the dead end (a notion of distress).
This may happen when the novelty and stimuli, significantly unlike those we know from the past, detected by the ACC, are either too frequent or too significant. The arousal is then passed through thalamic nuclei to prefrontal cortex (PFC) to our conscious attention and at the same time to our limbic system to trigger the reflexive reaction based on the gained reflexes or genetically inherited brain maps. Such a reaction is usually also motoric and often backwards reinforcing the original emotions.
We have a short time window of 0.2 sec to process the stimuli consciously and react by dampening the emotion and the physical reaction (Rock, 2009, p.54). It is done primarily by the right ventrolateral PFC. When we get rid of the redundant emotion, our PFC can return back to the demanding sequential processing of the mental tasks of conscious thinking – understanding, decision making, recalling, memorizing and inhibiting (and also much more complex prioritizing).
What I described in the previous paragraph, is in my opinion the brain functionality sequence, which we use frequently, when we are managing the ambient threat level well, which means when we are trained, experienced and skilled enough to meet the standard requirements of our profession. During the time, we get more resistant to the ambient threat level, as we
- increase our skills and knowledge, which means that more stimuli become “usual” (i.e. their endangering novelty diminishes) and well manageable;
- learn to decrease impact of disturbing stimuli by filtering or consciously inhibiting them, which is always at the price of high energy consumed;
- can get trained to avoid the threat reaction by relabeling the stimuli or some other way of reappraisal (Rock, 2009, p.126), which helps us to dampen the emotional response.
Let us focus now on the situations, when a system disturbing interaction, as described in chapter 2, occurs. Being most of the time on the threat/reward edge, such an invasive stimulus (like supervisor monitoring the worker’s communication with a call center client) may throw the worker’s subtle mental balance to very strong threat state. Recognizing the signal of the conversation being monitored is a stimulus immediately processed by ACC as something, which is not in line with what we appreciate. Our past direct or indirect (someone else’s) experience is stepping in with the message that our supervisor may assess, comment, criticize or in other form endanger our future status.
Similarly, as with the other four key aspects of the SCARF model, the feeling of our weakening status is a very strong trigger throwing our mind in the threat state. The emotional arousal is so strong, that our PFC is paralyzed, the burst of norepinephrine shifts our mental state towards the overarousal and our mind gets rather under control of our limbic systems, namely amygdala.
In such a case it takes a certain time, usually inappropriately long from the daily life point of view, to gain control over our emotions again and mobilize our conscious thinking. It is because, we have not got sufficient conscious control over our emotions, our PFC being rather new part of the brain is still to certain extent subordinated to our limbic system, which is the phylogenetically very mature part of the brain developed to protect our existence.
Workers in the situations of this kind lose (fully or partly) their ability to proceed rationally, to solve the situation, to take decisions, to concentrate enough on what they are doing, to recall information needed from the long-term memory and to act appropriately and they fail at the end to meet the standards of their working role.
For the pure reasons of our brain processes and certain brain functionality limitations, the people (usually managers), who elicit the system disturbing interaction with original intent to put forward the goals of the organization, actually endanger even the regular functioning of it.
4. Practical impacts into the workplace daily operation
As there is typically very limited knowledge of the phenomena discussed, the repetitive unfavorable interventions are a typical part of the communication at the workplace.
The ambient threat level is frequently increased to reach emotional peaks paralyzing the abilities of the knowledge workers to cope with their non-routine tasks, challenging their experience and endangering the organization’s standards of the quality of service.
While the external sources of pressure like traffic jams and accidents, client deep indignation, or project progress irregularities are in fact typical hardly avoidable intrusions in the standard set up of their stressful jobs, the system disturbing interactions are just redundant and undesirable.
It may lead to three general scenarios, which are in fact based on the inherited reactions of our predecessors. When we feel endangered either we try to counter-attack (fight) or we run away (flight) or we stay paralyzed (“dead beetle” or “ostrich reaction”). The social skills and our ability to think about the future usually lead us to the reaction most appropriate to how we perceive the balance of the social relations and to what extent we perceive the situation endangering in the longer term. We are able to barter the long term benefit for the short term discomfort.
Nevertheless it always consumes rather a lot of mental energy (at the end also with physical impacts) to cope with the ambient threat level, system disturbing interaction and the aim of longer-term benefit.
For the truck driver it would be hard to make a good decision under given constraints and without support from outside (perhaps more detailed information about other options he has).
For the call center consultant the only proactive positive approach is to eliminate the stimulus, and focus fully back on the conversation with the customer. It requires much strength of a very strong personality, emotional management capabilities and a support of long-term experience.
For the project manager it is a situation requiring again a strong personality, experience and ability to think outside the box. He may fall into the emotional trap when realizing that the project sponsor is apparently under strong negative emotions, which may have threat behind (SCARF!). But then the project manager would fail to prepare reasonable options to get the project on track again and to discuss them with the sponsor to decide about the future action.
To summarize, the situation following the system disturbing interaction always requires much more energy, higher social and emotional management skills and more experienced and strong personality to manage the situation towards the original intention of the distraction - organization goals and standards.
5. Steps to manage disturbing interactions
After learning the neuroscience background of the situation and realizing the negative impacts of the system disturbing interactions, the measures to minimize negative effects seem to be obvious but definitely not usual.
The people (supervisors, managers), who elicit the disruption, can benefit of learning about the basic brain principles behind and also of getting acquainted with the SCARF model and its value for the management of the threat (and award!) response. They gain the knowledge and gradually get accustomed to new behavioral patterns, which will positively influence the interactions with their reports exposed to ambient threat level. This new brain based approach will allow them to manage difficult situations much easier to the benefit of their reports, the organization and themselves at the end as well.
What they might have done if they knew about the brain principles?
The dispatcher might call the driver asking him about his situation and arrival time estimate and providing him with alternative route proposal, leaving the decision on the driver at the end.
The call center supervisor might stop the further incoming calls to this particular consultant and ask him for the meeting after he finishes the current call.
The sponsor might indicate his intention for the meeting and give the project manager an option to either discuss with him the sponsor’s support needed today or prepare solution alternatives with the project team for the following day to consult with him.
All three examples would most probably allow the workers to decide and choose the best option for them without being disrupted in midst of threatening situation and without having their conscious thinking paralyzed by emotional burst.
At the end, all that would be for the clear benefit of the organization - short term by maintaining the ability of the people to perform according to requirements and standards and long term by maintaining the motivation of the people thanks to respecting fully SCARF principles.
6. List of references
Rock, D., [2009]. Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, And Working Smarter All Day Long. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.
Rock, D., [2007]. Quiet Leadership: Six Steps to Transforming Performance at Work. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.
Radecki, D., [2010]. PGCNL Lectures [online] Neuroleadership Institute, Middlesex University. Available from:
Petrides, M., [2007]. The Orbitofrontal Cortex: Novelty, Deviation from Expectation, and Memory. Annals New York Academy of Sciences. 1121, 33–53.
Rock, D., [2008]. SCARF: A Brain-based Model for Collaborating with and Influencing Others. Neuroleadership Journal. December 2008, Vol.1, No.1, 44
[1] threat I understand to be a summary notion of a complex emotional state originating from the mental processing of combination of stimuli (mostly sensual), compared (by anterior cingulate cortex) with relevant existing memory maps, i.e. knowledge and experience. The scale of difference is then evaluated partly consciously (reflectively) but mainly unconsciously (reflexively). The measure of the difference and the experience with the possible consequences lead to an emotional reaction managing the motor cortex and subsequently directing the lower brain to organize a physical reaction.
[2] I will use masculine forms in this document for the sake of simplicity of the text with all due respect to female workers
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