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The Neuroscience of Strategic Leadership. A version of this article appeared in the Summer 2. Have you ever had a difficult executive decision to make? This is the kind of decision where the best options aren’t obvious, the ethics aren’t clear, and the consequences could affect hundreds of people or more. How do you figure out the right thing to do?
More importantly, how do you develop the habit of making better decisions, time and time again, even in difficult and uncertain circumstances? Neuroscientists and psychologists are beginning to learn what happens at moments of choice inside the human mind (the locus of mental activity) and the brain (the physical organ associated with that activity). If you understand these dynamics and how they affect you and those around you, you can set a course toward more effective patterns of thinking and action.
You can replicate those beneficial patterns, at a larger scale, in your organization. Over time, this practice can help you take on a quality of strategic leadership: inspiring others, helping organizations transcend their limits, and navigating enterprises toward lofty, beneficial goals. For example, consider the case of a human resources director for a regional professional services organization, a linchpin in its local economy. When the firm hit a long stretch of dwindling revenues, Natalie had ideas for turning things around, but she wasn’t included in strategic conversations.
Instead, all personnel issues — including sexual harassment cases, bullying claims, and layoffs — were delegated to her. One year, she had to move the firm’s financial accounting staff offshore. About 3. 0 local people lost their jobs. It was a painful but necessary decision that allowed the firm to survive.
How Strategic Leaders Use Their Brain. Neuroscientists are learning how executive decision- makers can use their minds to transform organizations. Stress took its toll.
For years, Natalie worked 7. Her marriage was on the rocks, she came to work anxious, and she lost the ability to hide her chronic irritation. As a result, her performance reviews slipped.
She felt herself panicking: If this goes on much longer, I won’t be able to cope, and I’m going to lose my job. Fortunately for Natalie, there were people, including an executive coach, who helped her see what was happening. First haltingly, and then with growing enthusiasm, she adopted a regimen of practices that included mindfulness. Every day, soon after arising, she spends a half hour alone, focusing her attention on the deceptive brain messages that underlie her stress. For instance, she knows she tends to see everyone but herself as prone to error. Most people are screw- ups, and need to be tightly managed. She has also felt at times that the firm’s leaders don’t respect her.
I’m just the head of HR, and the real work happens in sales and finance. She used to assume these were accurate statements of reality; now, she has relabeled them simply as brain messages, which she can observe dispassionately as they rise into her awareness. Related Storiesby Jeffrey Schwartz, Pablo Gaito, Doug Lennickby Jon Katzenbach, Gretchen Anderson, Art Kleinerby Art Kleiner, Josie Thomson. As she reflects, she reframes these messages, choosing alternative ways of looking at her situation. These don’t come out of thin air; she practices thinking through the firm’s problems — sometimes in areas she knows well, such as recruiting and training, but also in less familiar domains, such as mergers and growth — and proposing strategic approaches. She refocuses her attention on these alternatives, returning again and again, for example, to ways in which she could make a valuable contribution.
Before any major meeting, she thinks about how the various leaders of the company might respond to the points she will make. As she makes critical decisions, she reminds herself to pay attention to the way others respond and follow up. In all this, she calls upon a construct that she has developed in her mind: a “Wise Advocate,” like a disinterested observer whom she can consult for guidance and perspective. Natalie began this discipline around 2.
She is now regularly invited into conversations about strategy. Download Google Chrome. When there is a possible crisis, people turn to her first, as if she were a Wise Advocate for the larger enterprise. The company’s prospects have turned around — in part because of opportunities she has pointed out — and instead of laying people off, she’s now recruiting. She has also reduced the amount of oversight and number of approvals in the HR function; she no longer has to work 7. Natalie made a deliberate transition, from a harassed functionary bent on pleasing her bosses to an influential leader.
You might think this is just standard good management practice, nothing special. And you may well be right. But it was beyond Natalie’s skill four years ago. She made a deliberate transition, from a harassed functionary bent on pleasing her bosses to an influential leader with strategic perspective.
The potential for this change was there all along, but nothing external — no incentives, rewards, threats, or “burning platform”–style pressure — could force her into it. The leverage came from transforming her thoughts. By refocusing her attention, she became the kind of leader needed in that company at that time. The Power of Focusing Attention. The shift that Natalie made was conscious, pragmatic, and replicable; anyone reading this can make it too.
Her story exemplifies a hypothesis about the way people become effective leaders of large organizations, especially at times of turmoil and change. This hypothesis suggests that better, more strategic leadership can be developed by combining two often- misunderstood cognitive habits: mindfulness (clear- minded awareness of one’s own mental activity) and mentalizing (paying close attention to what other people are thinking and are likely to do next). For all its complexity, the wise leadership hypothesis, as we sometimes call it, can be boiled down to one core principle: The focus of your attention in critical moments of choice can build your capacity to be an effective leader. In most business decisions, you are likely to focus your attention in one of two basic ways.
Exhibit 1 shows them in schematic form. We call one pattern of mental activity the Low Road, because it favors expedient actions aimed at giving you what you want and giving others what they want, as rapidly and efficiently as possible. The other pattern, the High Road, often manifests itself as the mental construct we call the Wise Advocate: a voice within the mind, making the case for fundamental solutions with longer- term and broader benefits. The Low Road is tactical; the High Road is strategic. As it happens, these two patterns of mental activity are associated with two aspects of the prefrontal cortex — dorsal (higher) for the High Road and ventral (lower) for the Low Road. When people hold their heads upright, the dorsal area sits above the ventral area in the brain. This is one reason that the names High Road and Low Road seem apt to us.
Because they link mental activity and brain circuits, both the High Road and the Low Road are habit forming. If the wise leadership hypothesis is true (and it is consistent with current knowledge about neuroscience, psychology, organizational research, and ethics), then the relationship between them illuminates the source of strategic leadership.
The interaction between mind and brain is central to this hypothesis. When experimental subjects are encouraged to pay attention in particular ways, certain areas of the brain demonstrate observable activation, often in the form of blood flowing to those parts of the brain. Thus, for example, when people are shown a frightening picture, the amygdala is activated in a way that is made visible by functional magnetic resonance imaging (f. MRI) scans. This activation is physical and passive.