As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in our daily workflows, a critical question emerges: Are we just teaching people to use AI, or are we empowering them to think with AI? In a recent article, published in HRD Connect, NLI’s Rachel Cardero, Vice President of Consulting and Product, and Emma Sarro, Senior Director of Research, emphasize the importance of building an AI fluent workforce, and the cognitive foundation needed to get there. AI fluency isn’t a technical skill but a cognitive partnership— the ability to effectively partner with AI. However, creating fluency isn’t as easy as turning on a light switch. Cardero and Sarro emphasize that employees will be at different stages of a fluency continuum: from AI abstainers who avoid it and the AI-ambivalent who feel uncertain, to the AI-engaged who use it for basic tasks. The goal for organizations is an AI-fluent user, who does more than use AI – they partner with AI.  The first step towards AI-fluency is building the right cognitive foundation – fostering a set of core skills that will enable a workforce to embrace their future partnership with AI. This means creating a culture that embraces learning, practices adaptability, and understands the brain’s limitations by mitigating bias. By using these neuroscience-backed principles, leaders can move their teams beyond simple instruction and toward an intuitive, effective, and truly fluent partnership with AI. Read the full article in HRD Connect.

By Chris Weller With the rapid pace of technological change — artificial intelligence, in particular — it can feel like the world is a little less recognizable with each passing day.  It’s up to leaders to help their teams respond to these changes, offering new skills and systems that make workforces more adaptable and resilient, rather than overwhelmed and stuck. Join us at the 2025 NeuroLeadership Summit, where leading scientists and industry practitioners converge to share best practices, new ideas, and helpful strategies for thriving through complexity. On November 12-13, this virtual global event will offer insight into the most critical issues facing leaders today: Upholding accountability amidst constant change. Building new and better habits at scale. Collaborating with AI to enhance — not dull — human thinking. Evolving DEI strategy within organizations. Here’s a handful of session previews to see firsthand what to expect at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit. Register now to secure your tickets, as spots are selling fast. Registration includes full virtual access to both days of the 2025 NeuroLeadership Summit and on-demand recordings of all sessions. NLI Corporate Members receive additional discounts and benefits.  Leadership Today: Thrive Through Complexity By most estimates, change is accelerating year over year. New technologies, systems, strategies, and expectations are replacing existing ways of working in what feels like real time — and it’s all happening faster and faster. Stretched thin and wary of the next shift, what is a burned-out organization to do? This session will explore the challenges leaders and their teams face from a cognitive perspective. What factors weigh most heavily on people? What have we learned in the last decade that can serve us now? How is AI helping or hurting these working conditions? And perhaps most importantly, what can be done to ensure teams can thrive through all this complexity?    What Will Leadership Look Like In 5 Years? As AI becomes everyone’s coworker, it’s essential that leaders upskill their teams to handle AI-assisted tasks. That means helping people move from one end of the AI fluency spectrum to the other — from AI resistors and the AI ambivalent to AI users and AI fluent. Without a solid foundation for how to work with AI, teams risk outsourcing their thinking to the platforms that have been shown to dull our cognition when it should be enhancing it. Attendees of this session will also hear from world-class practitioners who have been using proprietary AI at work and studying its effects. The resulting picture will be a window into the future: how leaders should be thinking about the changing nature of their roles based on the uncertainties of modern work. Toward a Real Science of Habit Activation at Scale When your brain is so stressed it feels like it’s on fire, what are the habits you and your team default to? The answer to that question will tell you what kind of culture you’re building in high-stakes, high-pressure moments — much like those we’re facing today. This session focuses on the science of behavior change across an organization. It introduces core principles from research around social learning, the right way to build habits, at scale, and how AI can help facilitate shared behavior change as well as sustainment. Using AI Towards Better Thinking As generative AI platforms proliferate, we must remain cautious not to hand over the keys to our thinking. GenAI is still prone to mistakes, hallucinations, and bias. Research is also showing that asking GenAI for answers can make us less creative and worse critical thinkers. The trick, as AI makes its way into the workplace, is to use the technology in ways that enhance thinking. That’s what this session will teach attendees. We will explore the science of cognition to explain why AI is so tempting but ultimately a poor substitute for real thought, and introduce key habits that every leader should be focusing on to make sure AI amplifies human cognition and helps teams produce their best results.   Register now to secure your tickets, as spots are selling fast. Registration includes full virtual access to both days of the 2025 NeuroLeadership Summit and on-demand recordings of all sessions. NLI Corporate Members receive additional discounts and benefits. 

By Dr. David Rock Right now, around 1% of managers and leaders in organizations get high quality coaching each year. We believe that number should be 100%, and that AI can get us there.  Yet, for this to become a reality, an AI coach can’t just be there to help you set goals or ask Socratic questions. It needs to be a highly sophisticated system that truly understands humans and human learning, and interacts with people in ways that make them better leaders.  To be clear – this is not the path that the big GenAI providers are on, where the race is on to be the tool that provides answers as fast as possible. For some of us, this feels reminiscent of the search wars, when Google  competed with firms that few young people have heard of, including AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, infoseek and Hotbot. Google won that war by shaving seconds and then milliseconds off of search times. When you’re hungry, a couple fewer seconds for your AI to find you the tastiest thin crust pizza within a 10-minute drive might be compelling, and there’s definitely a role for an AI that focuses on speed in answering everyday or technical questions. However, when it comes to helping managers and leaders be more effective at understanding, motivating and developing their teams, simply giving these folks a quick answer might not do the trick. At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we believe that the best AI tools for managers and leaders will actually be like great leaders themselves. Not just providing answers all the time, but helping people think better for themselves. Both role modelling great leadership, and helping people get smarter at the same time. Think of this as a whole different type of AI. An AI built on a different set of DNA. Still having access to the world’s knowledge, but interfacing with humans in a whole different way. One that solves not for speed, but for the learning and growth of the recipient. Solving not for volume of information, but for how much a person truly “gets” an idea, and is motivated to act on it. This is an AI that truly understands how humans learn and grow, that can read the mental state of people in real time and know just how to support them in that moment.  How should this kind of AI be measured? Not by the speed with which it provides an answer. But by its success rate at conversations that make people better managers and leaders.   Fortunately, we’ve been working on this idea for 26 years. Ready to learn more? Reach out and book a demo of our AI named NILES, and see it in action for yourself.  –> Book a Demo Here

By Emma Sarro, PhD and Laura Cassiday, PhD Maria, a mid-level manager at a tech firm, sits at her desk staring blankly at yet another meeting invite. Lately, her days feel like a blur of back-to-back Zoom calls, shifting priorities, and constant fire drills — with little recognition or clarity from senior leadership. Once energized by leading her team, she now finds herself just going through the motions. The sense of purpose that used to drive her has slowly faded, replaced by a growing sense of detachment and fatigue.  Maria’s experience is becoming the norm. According to the Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, managers are not okay. While overall employee engagement dropped from 23% in 2023 to 21% in 2024, and individual contributor engagement, while low, at 18%, remained steady over the two years, manager engagement saw a steeper decline, falling from 30% in 2023 to 27% in 2024. The trend is especially alarming for young and female managers, who were the most affected, dropping by 5 and 7 percentage points, respectively. All of this occurred over the period of just one year. Manager disengagement should be viewed as an early warning sign for team disengagement. It’s difficult for an individual contributor to care deeply about their work when their manager is just going through the motions — and employee disengagement affects team performance, productivity, and employee retention. Gallup estimates the recent 2% dip in global engagement cost the world economy a staggering $438 billion. To reverse this trend, organizations must focus on re-engaging their managers, which in turn could help drive engagement among the rest of the workforce.  Increase manager training Lack of role preparation may be a key reason for the burnout and disengagement managers are experiencing. In fact, the Gallup report reveals that only 44% of managers worldwide have received management training. Even those who have received training are encountering entirely new situations. At NLI, we’ve found that roughly half of the skills leaders need today are new, such as building AI fluency within their team, while the other half are just harder to practice, such as helping their team make swifter, unbiased decisions.  NLI’s LEAD program was designed to help leaders develop the skills needed to navigate today’s complexities. LEAD provides the essential skills for all leaders, at all levels, using a brain-based framework that helps learners build skills to manage themselves to optimize their own performance, mobilize others to push their team towards high performance, and drive results to make better decisions under pressure and remain agile through change.   Democratize coaching with AI tools The value of coaching lies in the tailored insights it leads managers to—insights that turn into meaningful action. For leaders like Maria, a coach could help her identify the root of her disengagement and reconnect with her purpose. However, coaching can become very expensive when scaled across all managers in an organization. It could cost over $1.2 million per year for 100 managers.  But with dedicated leadership AI tools, every manager could receive coaching in the flow of work, effectively democratizing coaching. For example, an AI coach like NLI’s NILES costs only $30/month per manager, or $36,000 per year for 100 managers. NILES integrates into a manager’s workflow, providing real-time coaching, mentoring, feedback, and role play, all informed by a layer of research-backed “neuro-intelligence” — a specialized neuroscience-based programming that works with your brain’s natural patterns for insight, decision-making, and social interaction. For example, if Maria felt overwhelmed by shifting priorities, NILES could help her structure a team meeting to sync expectations, a foundational habit of proactive accountability, ensuring everyone is aligned and clear.  Establish a feedback culture In many organizations, feedback is a top-down, once-a-year event during a performance review. For managers like Maria, the silence from senior leadership is demoralizing, leaving her to wonder if her work has an impact. This lack of connection is likely a major driver of managers’ disengagement. To remain engaged and aligned with organizational goals, managers need both positive and constructive feedback. Building a true feedback culture requires a top-down shift that reimagines how feedback is given — enabling it to spread throughout the whole organization. When senior leaders regularly model asking the managers under them for feedback, it immediately reduces the inherent status threats of feedback, creating a rewarding and constructive interaction instead. When managers ask for feedback from their direct reports, they signal that feedback isn’t so scary and should actually be sought out. Over time, the manager’s team will become feedback-seeking, too, asking their manager for feedback to get better themselves.   When Maria’s boss asks, “What’s one thing I could be doing to better support you?” it not only makes Maria feel valued but also gives her a model to replicate. This simple act opens up dialogue, builds trust, and helps her feel more connected and effective, co-creating success with her team. Managers are like a canary in the coal mine for the entire company: When they’re disengaged, others soon follow. But it doesn’t have to be this way. By supporting their managers through increased science-backed training, scalable AI coaching, and a robust feedback culture, organizations can reverse this trend. With new leadership insights and tools, busy managers like Maria will rediscover their purpose, more effectively lead their teams, and leave positive impacts on the organization.

By Emma Sarro, PhD   Remember waiting in a teller line to deposit a check? Or balancing a checkbook with a paper statement? For many, those days feel like ancient history. The financial services industry—from banking and insurance to investment management—is undergoing a shift. New technologies, volatile markets, and rapidly changing consumer expectations are reshaping the landscape. While the industry has experienced record profitability, the future is anything but certain. Leaders are grappling with how to integrate AI without losing the human touch, how to navigate profound economic and regulatory uncertainty, and how to defend against escalating cybersecurity threats. Technology is only part of the equation. To thrive in this new era, a critical investment may not be in new software alone, but in a distinct set of skills to get us there. That’s what the NeuroLeadership Institute explored in our latest industry trends report, this time focusing on the financial industry. This in-depth report reveals the four major trends redefining the industry and, more importantly, identifies the essential mindsets and capabilities your workforce must develop to meet these challenges head-on. A glimpse inside the report Our research reveals a complex new reality and key areas of pressure that finance professionals are facing. Changing Consumer Expectations: Today’s customers demand an efficient “hybrid” experience – a blend of 24/7 digital access with human interaction. This requires a workforce that is both tech-fluent and able to connect with others. Regulatory and Economic Uncertainty: With uncertainty around the future of regulations, business models must be ready to evolve. Profitability will be driven by the ability of people to navigate uncertainty, ask for feedback and drive accountability. Generative AI Integration: GenAI offers transformative potential, from personalized client recommendations to risk assessment. Yet, scaling it effectively is a massive challenge, demanding a growth mindset to learn new systems and bias mitigation skills to ensure fairness and accuracy. Escalating Cybersecurity Threats: As the second-most targeted industry for cyberattacks, financial institutions are in a high-stakes battle. Beyond technical defenses, the workforce requires the psychological safety to report errors and the critical thinking skills to identify emerging threats. From impasse to habit Surviving these changes requires more than technical knowledge; it demands a fundamental shift in the cognitive skills your organization builds across teams. Our report details the specific, science-backed habits needed to build a future-ready organization. Capabilities like agility, growth mindset, bias mitigation, and psychological safety are no longer “soft skills,” but essential drivers of performance and innovation. The financial services industry is at a crossroads. The organizations that succeed will be those that invest in their people, building a workforce that can not only grow with the change but also capitalize on it. Discover the key trends, essential mindsets, and neuroscience-backed solutions that will prepare your organization for the future of finance. Download NLI’s Trend and Impact Report: The Changing Face of Finance, today.

By Emma Sarro, PhD The conversation around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has become a minefield. The acronym itself is now so politically charged that many organizations are stepping back, rethinking their strategies, or even eliminating their DEI initiatives altogether. What we’re left with is an eerie silence. Our own research shows that while 65% of organizations plan to continue the work, yet the path forward is anything but clear. This leaves leaders grappling with a critical question: If we cancel the words, does the need for the work actually go away? What happens if we stop the training, disband the teams, and erase the terminology from our corporate vocabulary? In the short term, the impact might be negligible. Relieving already overloaded employees from another mandatory training might even be met with a quiet sense of relief. But over the long term, the effects are likely to be significant and damaging. Why? Because DEI initiatives, when done right, aren’t only about social justice or reaching targets. They’re a direct response to the fundamental, universal nature of the human brain. You can change the label, but you can’t change the neuroscience. Ignoring these core brain processes doesn’t make them disappear; it simply leaves your organization vulnerable to their downsides, impacting everything from profit and innovation to talent retention. There are three foundational concepts about the brain that demonstrate why the work remains a business imperative. If you have a brain, you have bias Many leaders mistakenly believe two things: that mitigating bias is exclusively a “DEI thing,” and that their years of experience allow them to “trust their gut” on important decisions. The truth, however, is if you have a brain, you have bias. Cognitive biases are mental shortcuts our brains use to make sense of the overwhelming amount of information we face daily. These shortcuts evolved to help our ancestors survive, allowing for rapid decisions with limited data. In the modern workplace, however, these same shortcuts can lead to costly mistakes, flawed strategies, and overlooked talent. The problem is, you can’t simply ignore that biases exist. Since these processes are largely unconscious, making people aware of their biases isn’t enough to change their behavior.  Because these biases are engrained into our cognitive systems, mitigating them requires science-backed strategies that focus not on shaming or blaming, but on improving the quality of all decisions, from hiring and promotions to product development and market strategy. NLI’s SEEDS Model® organizes the over 150 cognitive biases scientists have studied, and underpins our solutions and strategies for reducing unconscious bias. If you are not actively including, you are likely unintentionally excluding Let’s imagine you’ve assembled a “dream team” for a critical project. On paper, they have the perfect amount of diversity, with experts from every relevant field. But in meetings, a familiar pattern emerges. A few voices dominate the conversation, innovative ideas are met with polite but dismissive responses, and team members who challenge the consensus are subtly sidelined. The project stalls, along with the team’s collective intelligence. What went wrong? The team had diversity, but it lacked inclusion—a critical distinction.  Neuroscience research reveals that the brain treats social threats, like feeling excluded, similarly to physical threats. When employees feel excluded, their brains trigger a threat response that impairs intelligent thought, reduces problem-solving ability, and stifles self-regulation. The critical takeaway is that if you are not actively including, you are likely unintentionally excluding. Simply walking into a room and talking to only one or two people can send unintended signals of exclusion to others. To counteract this, leaders must be intentional about sending social rewards. NLI’s SCARF® Model— which stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness—provides a powerful framework for understanding the five key domains of social experience that the brain is sensitive to. By intentionally sending positive signals across these domains—for example, by giving people a sense of control, or autonomy, over their work or ensuring processes are transparent and equitable, or fair—leaders can create an environment where everyone feels valued and is able to contribute their best thinking. The Power of Psychological Safety You can have a diverse and inclusive team, but one more crucial element is needed for high performance: psychological safety—the shared belief that it’s okay to take interpersonal risks like asking questions, admitting mistakes, or challenging the status quo without fear of punishment or humiliation. Contrary to popular belief, psychological safety isn’t about being “warm and fuzzy” or avoiding conflict. In fact, the highest-performing teams often experience productive friction—robust healthy debate. They operate with high standards in an environment with low interpersonal threat. A landmark study by Amy Edmondson found that the best-performing nursing teams reported making the most errors. They weren’t actually more mistake-prone; they were simply more willing to talk about their mistakes. This openness created a cycle of learning and continuous improvement that ultimately led to better patient outcomes. At its core, speaking up or challenging another is a risk calculation in the brain. If a past experience—either personal or observed—has taught an employee that challenging a decision leads to embarrassment or career-limiting consequences, their brain will flag that action as a threat, and they’ll choose silence. Creating psychological safety is about intentionally sending signals of social safety that buffer against this perceived risk, making people feel secure enough to be vulnerable and share their unique perspectives. The work remains The labels we use will continue to evolve, but the foundation of the way our brain works is unchanging. Our brains are inherently biased, highly sensitive to social triggers, and evolved to avoid interpersonal risk. The most successful leaders will be those who understand that fostering a culture of better decisions, smarter teams, and healthier debate is not an optional initiative—it is the essential work of modern leadership. To explore the science in greater detail and discover the brain-based frameworks your organization can use to drive performance, download the latest white paper from the NeuroLeadership Institute, DEI: Canceling the words doesn’t cancel the need. To

NLI recently launched an assessment that asks participants to rate their organizations’ leaders on the key behaviors of growth mindset, psychological safety, and accountability (the Leadership GPA). Early results suggest that leaders struggle the most with embracing growth mindset and the least with accountability. Specifically, leaders face challenges in sharing mistakes, encouraging healthy debate, and challenging others without conflict. For the past year, the NeuroLeadership Institute (NLI) has been exploring what we call the Leadership GPA — a simple yet powerful framework built on growth mindset, psychological safety, and accountability. When leaders cultivate these three critical skills, they create the conditions for high performance across teams and organizations. As a research-driven organization, we wanted to know: How do employees perceive their organization’s performance in each of these areas? In late May 2025, we launched NLI’s Leadership GPA Assessment — a five-minute assessment that asks participants to rate how leaders in their organization typically demonstrate behaviors tied to each component of the GPA.  The assessment is still open, but we’ve already obtained some intriguing results. On average, participants rated their organization’s Leadership GPA at 2.61, the equivalent of a B- to C+ on a standard 4.0 scale. While this points to room for overall improvement, a closer look at the individual components reveals where organizations are struggling most. Growth mindset Growth mindset is the belief that skills can be improved over time, rather than being fixed at birth. People who embrace a growth mindset focus on improving rather than proving themselves. They respond more productively to feedback, adapt flexibly to setbacks, and view challenges as opportunities to grow. To our surprise, growth mindset scored the lowest of the three GPA components, with an average of 2.51. This result was unexpected, given that embracing a growth mindset is a well-known driver of beneficial workplace outcomes, and many organizations have invested in strategies to encourage it. NLI’s GROW: The Neuroscience of Growth Mindset is one of our most popular solutions, with numerous success stories from clients who’ve embedded growth mindset behaviors at scale. A closer look at the data points to one habit that challenges leaders the most: “encouraging people to share their mistakes, even when it’s uncomfortable.” This habit received the lowest average score of all growth mindset behaviors (2.38). And it makes sense. Admitting mistakes can feel like a direct threat to our status — our desire to be respected and seen as competent. Most of us would rather showcase our successes and quietly bury our failures. But mistakes are essential to learning, and when leaders share their own missteps, they normalize that discomfort for others. Admitting errors also builds a sense of relatedness with others. In fact, by saying, “I messed up — and here’s what I learned,” leaders often earn more respect, not less. Psychological safety Survey participants scored their leaders slightly higher on psychological safety, with an average score of 2.57. Psychological safety is the shared belief that people can speak up with ideas, concerns, questions, or mistakes without fear of punishment or humiliation. Among the specific habits of psychological safety, leaders struggled the most with “making it clear that robust debate is critical for achieving excellence.” In fact, this particular habit scored the lowest (2.29) of any in the survey. Leaders also found it difficult to “challenge people without creating conflict,” another behavior tied to psychologically safe teams.  A common misconception is that psychological safety means being nice — avoiding tension, smoothing over disagreements, and keeping interactions comfortable. But psychological safety isn’t about avoiding conflict. Teams with true psychological safety aren’t afraid to engage in robust, healthy debate to arrive at the best decisions and outcomes. For leaders, this means creating an environment where everyone feels safe to challenge ideas, question assumptions, or point out problems, with nobody viewing these behaviors as personal attacks.  In collaboration with noted psychological safety expert Dr. Amy Edmondson, NLI developed TEAM: The Neuroscience of Psychological Safety to help organizations establish an environment where discomfort doesn’t derail progress — it empowers it. Accountability We’ve been hearing from clients that many organizations are struggling with accountability, so it was interesting that survey participants rated their leaders the highest in this area, with a score of 2.76. An area for improvement was “reminding people of the purpose of any task” (2.66), an important step for leaders to spark motivation in their employees. While we trust the survey’s accuracy, our client interactions suggest a potential gap between perception and reality when it comes to accountability. Many employees think they and their leaders are being accountable, but are they really? And are they practicing punitive accountability (which relies on fear, blame, and punishment) or proactive accountability (where employees take true ownership of their obligations)? NLI’s newest solution, DELIVER: The Neuroscience of Accountability, equips organizations with three essential habits for building proactive accountability: syncing expectations, driving with purpose, and owning the impact. This approach ensures accountability is not merely a perception but a deeply embedded practice. Boost your organization’s leadership GPA Speaking of perception, another interesting finding from the GPA assessment is that different roles within organizations sometimes rated Leadership GPA differently. For example, founders and co-founders of companies scored their overall Leadership GPA 0.8-0.9 points higher than other roles, such as senior leaders, managers, or independent contributors. This result suggests that the highest-ranking officers in an organization may be overestimating their leaders’ effectiveness. If your organization isn’t making the honor roll just yet, there’s no need to worry. Elevating leadership effectiveness is within reach, and the key is focusing on the right priorities, rather than trying to improve everything all at once. By honing in on the three most critical areas — growth mindset, psychological safety, and accountability — leaders can strengthen their skills where improvement is needed most. Over time, these habits will become deeply ingrained, transforming their organization’s leadership and entire culture. About the GPA Assessment: The assessment includes 12 questions (four each from the areas of growth mindset, psychological safety, and accountability)

A common challenge for organizations is getting people to take responsibility for their work instead of deferring or shifting blame, a critical element in cultures of accountability. A recent study suggests that our sense of responsibility, and the brain activity that supports it, can emerge from having a sense of control or agency in our work, as opposed to merely following orders.  These results reveal a tangible way for leaders to foster a sense of responsibility for all individuals, even in hierarchical organizations.  If you’re a leader, how many times have you seen the following scenario play out? You give an otherwise dedicated team member an important task, only for them to work slowly, deliver subpar results, and then shrug their shoulders or shift blame. You’re confused. Aren’t they a high performer? Why don’t they take responsibility? Recent research offers a possibility for what might be going on. In a newly published brain imaging study, researchers showed that the act of merely following someone else’s orders, or not having ownership of our decisions, reduces our sense of responsibility for the actions that follow. In other words, how responsible we feel, stems from having a “stake in the game,” or some degree of ownership in the work.  This study builds on a growing body of work into how accountability happens in the workplace. Taking responsibility for the work done and the impact made is one of the characteristics of accountability, a concept that, while not new to the organizational landscape, is a current challenge facing many. While 91% of managers and employees say accountability is important at work, 97% of managers (as shared in a recent NLI Leadership Think Tank) say they struggle to hold their teams accountable. Everyone knows it matters, but almost no one feels confident implementing accountability.  The challenge is that in this new era of working, the formal systems organizations have historically relied on, may not work like they used to, primarily because we have learned that there are better ways to create accountability and now we need to revise the systems. For example, the common idea that holding employees accountable for their actions with performance evaluations, employment contracts, or disciplinary procedures is an effective means to help them improve, reach performance standards, and regulate their behavior, lacks one critical component — the individual’s belief or perception of being accountable. So, it may not be as simple as sending a list of tasks to a team member and expecting results. That’s because people won’t choose to be more responsible just because we tell them to. They need to feel responsible first. A sense of control fosters responsibility in the brain Research has suggested that there are several factors which will increase the likelihood someone will take responsibility for their actions or decisions. One of these factors is whether we believe we have a sense of agency or control over our actions. Today, few managers and employees report having such control. Only 21% of employees feel their performance metrics — which often define accountability — are within their control. And managers also claim they have “limited to no” agency or control to hold others accountable.   Prior research has shown that when we lose our sense of control, such as when we’re obeying orders or being told to do something, this immediately reduces our perception of responsibility. We feel less responsible for an outcome if someone else, especially with a higher status or rank, told us to do it. This poses a major challenge to organizations, especially those that are structured hierarchically. If individuals, whether it’s employees or managers, feel a lack of agency or control, they will also feel less responsible for their actions and shift blame to others. A recent study further explored this question by looking to see what happens in the brain when we don’t have a sense of control over decisions, especially when being faced with immoral or difficult decisions. Published in Cerebral Cortex Journal, the study tested a sense of agency by examining both free and coerced choices. Participants were either given free choice to inflict a mild shock to another individual, which added a factor of morality to the decision, or coerced to follow the test giver’s orders to inflict the shock.  As expected, participants felt less responsible for their actions when they were merely “following orders” than those that had “free choice” over their actions. Functional magnetic resonance imaging supported the behavioral impact. Researchers found that activity within the frontal gyrus, precuneus, and lateral occipital cortes, regions linked to our sense of control and decision-making, differed across the groups.  When individuals had “free choice” over their decisions, these brain areas were more highly engaged — people felt a sense of control and seemingly took a more active role in their decision, measured through the time it took to make a decision and engagement of brain areas that are associated with conscious decision-making. This fostered their sense of responsibility, and aligns with earlier work showing a similar effect — having a sense of control makes people feel “fully responsible” for their actions. On the other hand, when individuals were merely “following orders,” these brain areas were quiet and people acted almost immediately with no time to consider their actions — they did not actively consider their decisions as measured through a lack of engagement in decision making brain regions. This lack of brain activity acts to distance people, mentally, from the decision and responsibility for the outcomes, and aligns with work showing that participants report “not being responsible” when not having a choice.  Creating accountability through ownership These results suggest that getting to responsibility begins with a sense of agency. If leaders want their teams to be more accountable, they first need to increase their teams’ sense of control or ownership of their work. Any decision made towards their goals will then be made with a felt sense of responsibility, and they will be more likely to take that responsibility when