Managing Your Brain

The week before Thanksgiving I presented at the Healthcare Business Women’s Association Annual Conference in San Francisco on the topic of Neuroleadership. I’m been learning about this fascinating field for the past three years. Knowing how our brains work can help us develop our emotional intelligence (EQ). One part of EQ is knowing how to control your own emotions.

So here’s a very quick and very basic lesson on the brain. The prefrontal cortex, located at the front of the brain, is the executive center or decision-making part of the brain. It’s the most recently evolved part of the brain. The amygdala is the emotional fear center of the brain located deep within the brain and is an ancient, older part of the brain. It sends warning signals about danger (either real or imagined) out to the rest of the brain and starts the chain reaction for getting us ready to defend ourselves in some way. The problem is when the amygdala fires it flushes the rational prefrontal cortex with arousal chemicals and we literally experience “brain freeze” — you know that feeling when you can’t think of what to do or say. Well, it’s because you really can’t. The logical, reasoning part of you has been hampered. The original purpose of the amygdala is protection, but we have to be careful about how we respond to its signals and make sure that we don’t react in someway that might not really be helpful or constructive.

With science now telling us more about how the brain works, we are finding out how to manage our brains and our behavior better. But good management takes practice. With regard to the amygdala, here are several suggestions for managing its impact. First, you must become aware of being triggered so you can say “no” to how you might otherwise have responded and substitute a different and more appropriate behavior. Therefore, you must be highly observant of yourself. And you must have a supply of familiar mind/body techniques or healthy behaviors that you want to use in that split second you have to respond. Second, with lots of practice, particular behaviors can become the automatic response to the amygdala (which is basically what training in the military does since the danger is generally real and present and calls for the right automatic response). Third, you can be more proactive and practice mind/body techniques to keep you generally more calm and centered.

I’ll continue providing quick peeks into the brain in these short blogs and future newsletters. For more about the brain and neuroleadership, see past issues of my newsletters at my website: www.columbiaconsult.com/newsletters-ginny-obrien.html.

Thankfulness

Since it’s the week of the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, I have to write about the role of being thankful in leadership. Leaders need to demonstrate how much they appreciate their followers. In the workplace, that translates into showing gratitude to your direct reports for their hard work and performance. Brain research shows that people want to be treated with respect and fairness and will respond positively to sincere positive reinforcement. Showing your employees and team members that you value them and their efforts reinforces their motivation and loyalty. Your demonstration of thanks through recognition and appreciation creates a reinforcing loop that leads to higher performance and happier people. So thank your people this week, but make sure you mean it!

Humility or Arrogance?

I consider humility a characteristic of leadership that reflects emotional intelligence. Balancing humility with confidence moves a leader away from arrogance towards inclusion and sharing the ownership of success. My political leanings are generally left of center and I voted for President Obama because I saw him as the kind of collaborative leader that we needed to reposition the perception of the US around the world. Recently, however, I read a column by a political conservative about the president that raised questions for me. This conservative writer claimed Obama’s language has shifted from “we” to “I” and he pointed out the dangers inherent in that shift. Without more research, I can’t refute at the moment whether Obama’s language is now “I” centered or not. But the language leaders use is critically important and they must pay attention to how they speak about success, because their language can reveal whether they are acting from a place of arrogance or humility.

Principles or Compromise?

Here in Massachusetts, as everyone knows, we lost our senior senator, Ted Kennedy. And now there’s a race to fill his seat. One of those running is our female attorney general, Martha Coakley, who has a strong following among Democratic women. But Coakley just took a stand that could jeopardize her position as a front runner: she said she wouldn’t vote for health care bill approved by the House last Saturday because it restricts federal funding for abortion. I happen to be a strong advocate for choice and was disappointed but not surprised to see that provision in the health care bill and thought it was a compromise that probably had to be made. Coakley’s stand surprised me and it raised a key leadership question. In the long run, what is wiser: holding to your principles or compromising in order to move forward? I’ll be interested to see how the answer unfolds.

Timing and Success

That old saying, “timing is everything,” holds truth. I was recently reminded of this when I read about Gail Collins new book, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present. I also saw her present on The Colbert Report, where she held up pretty well under Stephen Colbert’s funny but unyielding interviewing techniques. In 1998, I wrote Success on Our Own Terms: Tales of Extraordinary, Ordinary Business Women, which focused on women’s definitions of success and strategies women had used in Corporate America to succeed. I also presented my view that women had come quite a distance since 1960 and should feel positive about the progress they had made rather than just focusing on the fact that there weren’t more women at the top of the Fortune 500. At that time, I was pretty heavily criticized by some for making positive statements about women’s experience in the corporate world. So, maybe it was just too soon to say that or maybe Collins is saying it better — either way I hope people read her work and realize the great strides that women have made.

Cooking Her Way to the Top

Last week, while I was on vacation, I went to see the movie Julie and Julia, and couldn't help thinking about Julia's career in terms of her leadership. Like many women of her time, she got a late start but it didn't stop her from coming out at the top of her field even though most leading chefs were men. Julia's leadership characteristic that stood out the most for me was her perseverance: it took her eight years to write her book, but what a breakthrough book it was, laying the foundation for her successful career. I was also struck by another aspect of her career development -- she had the complete support of her husband, so she had someone believing in her and encouraging her. And it also helped that he was literally bringing home the bacon, giving her the time to develop enough to teach others how to fry it!

Successful Execs: Lions or Lambs?

A coaching group I belong to was going to discuss a Wall Street Journal article by George Anders yesterday about the leadership skills that are really important for success, but I couldn't make the conference call, so I thought I'd touch on the topic. A study out of the U of Chicago, led by finance and entrepreneurship professor Steven Kaplan, concluded that some soft skills weren't as "pivotal" in determining success as some harder skills. According to the study, "the traits that matter are persistence, attention to detail, efficiency, analytical skills and setting high standards, and the skills that don't count as much are strong oral communication, teamwork, flexibility, enthusiasm and listening skills." You can read the article to find out more about the research methodology and decide for yourself what you think about the approach. My concern is that this particular research can be misread. A balance of both hard and soft skills are needed in order to be truly effective. You can have great analytical skills and be extremely efficient, but if you can't communicate well and can't build good teams you won't be as successful as you could otherwise be. How one defines and measures success is also critical in determining what skills are critical. So we need to be careful about how we use and interpret research findings and make sure we apply them correctly.

Leadership & Perfection

Welcome to my first blog! I'm going to write about issues that I encounter with my clients with the intent of giving you some things to think about and I'm interested in hearing your comments. In coaching, we ask people about their beliefs because beliefs form the basis for actions and in coaching we're trying to help people perform and behave in ways that are going to help them achieve their goals. Just recently, three highly successful clients talked about their beliefs about perfection in three different ways. The first doesn't believe perfection is attainable but believes it's imperative to strive for it. The second, who faced a disability early in life, learned through experience that not being perfect doesn't get in the way of succeeding and believes one should "never be a perfectionist." The third used to believe in striving for perfection until she had two kids. Now she believes in "being good enough." When she's trying to determine whether to work two more hours on something, she'll ask herself: "Is what I have good enough to have the conversation I need with my client?" If it's not good enough to engage the client in the right way she knows she needs to work on it more. Being able to make the right distinction about when something has the necessary quality to achieve your goals is key. Successful leaders make good distinctions.