Management Lessons From Neuroscience (Part I) ASSOCIATIONS NOW, September 2009 Management mainstays such as feedback and data-based

decision making sound great, but it turns out the human brain is wired against them both. Advances in neuroscience are showing that many of our trusted management methods simply don't work. By: Interview by Joe Rominiecki The brain's internal wiring is vastly complex, so it's no surprise that managing your fellow humans can be tricky. Advances in neuroscience, however, are teaching us new lessons on leading people and winning minds. As it turns out, we're all wired against many of our traditional management methods. (Titled "Tangled in Your Head Wires" in print version.) As advanced as we humans have become as earthly creatures, we still have a fairly nascent understanding of how our own brains work. With every new discovery, however, we are gaining new insight into the machinations that drive perception, emotion, and conscious thought, all of which, of course, play a constant, daily role in the workplace. Associations Now recently spoke with Charles Jacobs, author of Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn't Work and Other Surprising Lessons From the Latest Brain Science, about how the tendencies of the human mind must be accounted for in management. In Part I of the interview, below, Jacobs explains how the brain is wired against constructive feedback and how change managers must succeed in physically altering the brains of those they lead (with words and actions, of course, not scalpels). In Part II of the interview, Jacobs delves deeper into the inner workings of the brain's decision-making process and the role that storytelling plays in winning minds. Associations Now: Early on in your book, you focus on the basic idea that every human being's brain is literally wired differently, every person understands the world differently, and every person sees a different reality. What does this mean for even the most simple of human interactions? Charles Jacobs: All of management, all of "People respond to us not logically, business, is about human interaction. So we can not objectively, but based on their deny that people play a role in business, but it's emotions, on how they feel." people that formulate the strategies, that implement Charles Jacobs the strategies, that buy the products, that manage the business. So this is all about how people deal with one another. This idea that we walk around with our own versions of reality means that we can never believe necessarily that others are seeing things the way that we are or that we're seeing things the way that other people are. So, while we may logically expect certain results from actions that we take or from words that we say, those aren't necessarily going to be the results we get. It's compounded by the fact that

people respond to us not logically, not objectively, but based on their emotions, on how they feel. So it's almost as if we're living in different realities. A lot of the management strategies you talk about hinge on the effects of cognitive dissonance, particularly when one's own beliefs don't match with external inputs. Can you explain that further? We have this view of the world that is very much tied up with our self-image, how we feel about ourselves. When we encounter any information that is in conflict with that, because it's so difficult to change the self-image we've built up over a lifetime, our tendency is to change the information that conflicts with it. So, for instance, if I'm in an argument with my spouse and she tells me that I'm downright being unreasonable, my first response isn't necessarily to go, "Oh, am I?" and to stop myself. My first response is instead to discount what she's saying: "Well, she doesn't understand what I'm talking about," or "Women are too illogical." I'm always trying to change information to fit the pattern that we carry around in our mind. When you watch what happens on the MRIs of the brain, the same thing is basically happening at a very physical level. The brain is responding primarily to patterns that we're already aware of. So when we perceive something, we have to compare it to our memory of similar situations in order to recognize it. If it doesn't compare to that memory, we either just ignore it or change it. Or, if it's really powerful for us, what it does is completely change the way we're thinking. So there's this kind of double-edged dissonance. On the one hand, we reduce it every chance we can, but dissonance that can't be reduced is "When we take an idea that's a new idea, it changes chemically ultimately what what goes on in the brain. Ideas have enormous power to change enables us to how the mind works and how we do things." Charles Jacobs change our minds. What implications does cognitive dissonance have for feedback, reward, and punishment? Whatever comes at us that is in any way perceived as negative to us we are going to rationalize away. Just think about experiences that you've had, like somebody walks up to you and says, "Let me give you a little feedback on that," or your boss says, "Why don't I give you a little feedback on your performance." Our initial response isn't to have this nice warm glow and to say, "Oh thanks, because I'm going to learn from it." Our initial response is going to be emotional; we tighten up. So that's the way we're always responding to this feedback, and when managers give us some feedback, and it conflicts with our self-image, we could completely discount our entire life unless there is some way that we can change that feedback. So the way that we change it is, if there's a shortfall in performance, we blame it on things external to us. We had bad customers, a

bad market, bad employees, whatever it may be. We literally don't even register it. We ignore it, or we discount the source of the feedback. With managers, that's a pretty easy thing to do. "Well, what does he know?" or "She's grinding an ax," or whatever it may be. So that's why when feedback comes at us from other people, the psychological dynamic is against it working. There are some people I suspect that are healthy and take feedback and know how to respond to it. I'd like to think at times that I can do it, but for the most part we don't. So my approach is to play the odds. Assume the feedback coming from someone else isn't going to affect performance, and therefore, try to get people to give feedback to themselves. You recommend "turning the management relationship upside down," being Socratic, and asking questions so that employees set their own goals and self-evaluate. You do, though, admit in the book that, "It's a considerably more difficult way to manage." So what are the keys to doing it well? If the odds are against feedback that comes from a third party, that it's not going to be effective, not going to work, let's play the odds. Let's try the best we can to make feedback work, and that means that we get people to do self-feedback. This is all tied up in the idea that we just don't like being controlled by others. You can see in our closest relatives, chimpanzees, that they don't like dominance displays. They want to be the ones that are dominant. A lot of people believe that life is simply about trying to establish your dominance over other people. We don't want people to control us. So, what we need to do as managersor parents or Read More just simply human beingswhen we want people to change what they're doing, we've got to ask them "Our decisions are being made unconsciously first through emotions, and questions. Initially, it's a little bit uncomfortable because it's really such a different approach. I mean then subsequently we come up with this if I see an employee do something wrong, it's really logic supposedly to justify that," says Charles Jacobs. Read more about how the easy for me to say, "Okay, you did that wrong. Let human mind works in "Management me tell you why." I can say it probably Lessons From Neuroscience (Part II)." dispassionately, but that doesn't mean that the employee will respond to it that way. Instead, I have to step back if I'm going to ask questions, think about what kind of questions I can ask, sort of a series of them, and lay out a strategy to get the person to literally give feedback to themselves. Initially it becomes a challenge in two ways. The first way is ask them questions and not sound like a prosecuting attorney. I've seen managers do that in workshops. The second thing is, what are the follow-on questions where you can really get people to the point where they are going to take a look at themselves unemotionally and realize how they need to improve? So, initially, because it is sort of different, it's difficult. Over time, it gets much easier because all of a sudden, you don't have all this emotion invested in the relationship. You're not fighting against the psychological dynamics, and it ends up ultimately working for you.

Sometimes a radical "paradigm shift" is what's necessary to break through a person's strongly held beliefs and encourage that willingness to change. Managing change is a huge challenge for any leader. What exactly does it mean to create a paradigm shift, and what effect does it have on a person's mind when you're trying to influence him? Let me just start for a moment with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was a guy who was just a zero early on in his life. He was a playboy. He cheated on his wife. He didn't seem to take anything seriously, and then all of a sudden he finds himself with polio. You couldn't imagine what this meant to this guy. He was a real active guy, and a guy that also wanted to be seen as attractive by ladies. He is so paralyzed that he can't stand without locking his metal braces in place. If he stands and gives a speech, he breaks out in a sweat because the effort required is so enormous. Well, what this really did to him was to stop him, change his view of the world, and enhance his understanding of people. Anything we can't process logically through rationalizing it or through discounting it is going to literally stop the automatic processing of our brains. When we encounter something novel, something unexpected, the other hemisphere of the brain starts to firethe left hemisphere, rather than the right. That's the hemisphere that's responsible for holes without having seen the big picture. So, when we encounter something that doesn't fit our current view of the world, it makes us stand back and see that there are other views possible of the world. When you see other views and are willing to accept one including the fact that you may not be infallible, you will also then be willing to entertain that lots of people see the world in different ways. It really just makes you much more aware of what's going on. Now, in organizations, you somehow have to alert people to the fact that the world is going to be a different place going forward. I've done enough change initiatives in organizations to see how incredibly resistant people are. I've heard the term "initiative du jour," or whatever we're changing today. There are people that are just so used to it that it just rolls right off their backs, but instead you establish a marker, something that says the world really is different. Obviously, if the business is failing like what's going on with General Motors, that's a pretty strong marker to people. That says the world is a different place. Or if you bring in new leadership, that says the world is a different place. Short of a catastrophe in the business or new leadership, what managers need to do is somehow send a strong message to people that things are different. I've seen this happen when managers eliminate reserved parking spaces and all the executives' perks symbolically. I've seen it happen when managers all of a sudden change the way they run staff meetings and have other people running the meetings, rotating leadership. Any way that you send the message that things are going to be different; [this] then opens people up to the idea that they need to change as well. If you can pick one, is there a single-greatest lesson that the last couple decades of neuroscience has taught us about management?

I think the key lesson that we're learning is that the world that exists in our heads isn't the necessarily the same for all people. If we keep that in mind, it's just going to make it much easier for us to accomplish what we need to accomplish. I would also piggyback that with one other piece that we haven't yet talked about. This is actually mind boggling, but if we look at what happens when we take an idea that's a new idea, it changes chemically what goes on in the brain. In other words, ideas physically change the brain, and when we physically change the brain, they change the way the brain works, the way that we think. What this really means is that ideas have enormous power to change how the mind works and how we do things. So, for so much of management, we've been focused on behavior and technique and tools and what are the things that we should do. I think what we ought to be focusing on is how we manage the way that people think and make sense out of the world. The way that we do that is with ideas, and the bigger ideas are the more powerful ones, and the bigger ideas are the ones that are tied in with our sense of wanting to do something that's important, that's for the good of community. Those are just powerful. When we think those ideas, when we live those ideas, it ends up giving us a tremendous power of people who want to sign up and support us just based on that. So I guess those are the two that I come down to: The world is just in our head, but ideas will change that world.