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If you have a brain, you have bias. Some biases create bigger blind spots for decision-making, however. We’re seeing that a lot now as organizations try to redefine work and the employer-employee relationship.
In recent weeks, we’ve examined the progression of the workplace as we know it. As organizations work to establish balance, combat burnout, and continue scaling toward the future, it has become increasingly clear it will take more than policies. Leaders are now being challenged to go beyond the surface and resonate with their employees on a human level.
Empathy is commonly used as a blanket term, but the neuroscience behind it reflects a multi-faceted structure of related emotions. So how do we process these feelings? What practical steps can we take to exercise them in both professional and personal spheres?
This week, Dr. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh of USC and Dr. David Rock discuss the neuroscience behind empathy and how to approach weaving it into the framework of organizational development during this new age of work.
It’s incumbent on leaders to mitigate discontent. Here are three sustainable strategies based on science to help you retain your workers.
Resignations and job burnout are at a fever pitch. Here are three things managers and employees can do to make it through, according to science.
Dr. David Rock, CEO and Co-Founder of NeuroLeadership Institute, provides Hive with neuroscience-backed methods to help successfully approach difficult conversations at work.
People want–and expect– more from their relationship with work, whether it’s purpose, autonomy or status. As we navigate this new era of hybrid work, and look to understand what’s driving people to leave their jobs, we’re beginning to gain insight on a macro level of resignation trends. For one, the data show resignations have been on the rise for years now. Here’s an initial glimpse into the state of discontent among workers. Up Next: Sustainable strategies for companies to manage the state of discontent.
The initial challenges of 2020 have continued into 2021 for many. With pandemic-related deaths, massive job loss, and burnout on the rise- work was deprioritized on the scale of importance. As news coverage of civil unrest, political polarization, and major events became normal, we as a society were challenged to reflect beyond the scope of our 9-5 life.
Fast forward and now we’re seeing the outcomes of this shift in perspective: “The Great Resignation”. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly four million Americans quit their jobs in July 2021 alone. The resignation rate in the U.S. is now at a two-decade high, with more than 11 million jobs open. One recent study found that 95% of workers would consider a job change. Harvard Business Review noted that employees between the ages of 30 and 45 have had the greatest jump in resignation rates, with an average increase of more than 20% between 2020 and 2021.
This reflects more than just “The Great Resignation”. This is a state of discontent. Join us for this episode, as we dive deeper into what is taking place in the workforce and the science behind it.
A sense of control, or the power to decide, is a key human need. Here are several ways leaders can increase workers’ sense of autonomy and maximize employee engagement and performance.
Employers have continued to fluctuate between work policies, throughout the pandemic. Repeatedly shifting strategic courses and still lacking clarity on how to effectively approach change for their teams. Many organizations, like some of you listening, have not physically seen each other in up to 22 months. Considering this isolation paired with the heightened frequency of current events taking place, it can feel chaotic.
This places a large amount of onus on leaders to take responsibility for the well-being of their teams. How do they keep teams connected when they are physically distanced? What’s the science behind connection? Why do we crave it so much? How valuable are stories in the new manager-employee contract?
That’s the focus of Season 6, Episode 3 of Your Brain At Work: How can we keep teams and people connected in times of chaos?
Leaders are reeling from the impacts of the great resignation—but there’s more to our workforce woes: a widespread state of discontent.
Systemic change at scale takes time, effort, and an evidence-based approach. This executive order is a golden opportunity to follow the science, experiment with novel approaches, and follow the data about what works.
As work – and our connection to work – keeps shifting, many popular thought pieces and research are rooted in the same foundational question: What does a manager need to do now? How have managerial roles evolved as a result of the pandemic and remote/hybrid models? One of the major ways is a shift from “surveillance” focus – i.e. “I value having strong oversight of my teams and what they’re working on,” to prioritizing focus on “outcomes”, which is aligned to achieving key goals. This is a massive adjustment for some managers and organizations- and adaptation can prove even more challenging.
Humans love stories, and live their lives through them, from Netflix to work discussions. But what do we know about storytelling and the brain, why does it resonate, and why should it be a bigger factor at work?
Diversity training can feel performative, and elicit groans from those asked to attend. But it absolutely can be impactful, and that’s through a mix of both delivery and measurement.
In this Season 6 Premiere episode of Your Brain at Work LIVE, our panel reviews the President’s recent Executive Order on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility that continues to drive positive change in the federal workspace and the organizations they impact. We examine some of the key points within the order through the lens of neuroscience and identify potential pitfalls that can snag even the most well-meaning leaders in their efforts.
In this article from Toptal, Dr. David Rock (CEO and Co-Founder of NeuroLeadership Institute) explains distance bias and some of the challenges organizations will face when implementing remote and hybrid work.
What does your brain look like on goals? What’s happening? How could the process be better?
As companies figure out how to implement vaccination mandates, brain science can help leaders develop strategies for managing employee reactions. Mandates feel like a violation of autonomy, which is one of the five most important intrinsic drivers of threat and reward in the brain. To help people feel less threatened, managers can try to offer another form of autonomy — for example, with the vaccine, this may mean allowing employees to choose when, where, or how they receive the shot. Another way to address the threat is to try to trigger one of the brain’s reward drivers. For example, the jarring nature of reduced autonomy (“Why am I mandated to do something?”) can be partially offset by increasing feelings of relatedness between employees (“I haven’t felt this close to my team in a while.”) Managers can also take steps to make employees feel greater levels of certainty, another of the brain’s reward drivers. While it’s difficult to provide absolute certainty when dealing with a mutating virus, transparency and communication can help provide clarity.
Leaders who aim to improve themselves and their teams traditionally embrace management methods and HR principles. But they’re often missing a critical tool: a deeper understanding of the human brain. David Rock, CEO and co-founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, a global neuroscience-backed consultancy that advises over half of the Fortune 100 companies, including Microsoft and Adobe, on leadership strategies, management skills, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, defines this tool as “neuroleadership.” The Ladders interviewed him to get the scoop on what exactly neuroleadership is and how you can use it to become a better leader, improve your team and organization and drive more success.
If you’re trying to differentiate some of our learning and habit activation products based on your current needs, here’s (almost) all of our product explainer videos in one place.
In this article from EBN, NLI’s Senior Director of Neuroscience Research, Dr. Kamila Sip, explains the benefits that a 4-day workweek can offer toward mental health and productivity.
A landing place for some of the big themes around work as of late 2021.
President Biden has continued his series of executive orders, the latest one focusing on DEIA. Here are some brain-based actions agencies can take.
There are valid brain-based reasons for hybrid concerns, but responding with surveillance might be more costly than you think.
NLI has worked for years to develop “sticky” acronyms to help people understand the brain science behind performance, learning, motivation, feedback, and dealing with bias. Here’s a brief summation of that work.
A primer on the importance of insights and how to generate more of them.
Our newest product, FLEX, is designed to help executive leaders and front-line managers thrive in a hybrid world, and create a world of fairness and autonomy for their teams. Here’s some of the origin story.
Reports are coming due on how government agencies are advancing equity issues, and there’s a reinvigorated spirit around DEI topics in the government sector. How can government maximize this moment?
We talk often about the logistics of returning employees to offices, which is no doubt important. But what do managers need to do in order to manage the EMOTIONS of the moment?
As talent becomes increasingly global 18 months into the pandemic, more and more teams are having to achieve goals without ever having the pleasure of meeting in-person. How does that all work?
If you allow your employees the space to be autonomous and drive some of their own decisions and approaches to work, it doesn’t so much matter where they’re physically sitting to do that work.
There’s a growing argument, and bodies of research from some places, that “work from home” destroys innovation. In reality, it often does exactly the opposite.
Welcome to the Season 5 finale of Your Brain at Work Live. Performance management is a huge topic throughout work in general, but it’s faded somewhat recently due to COVID, hybrid approaches, and other concerns of leaders. We come back and revisit performance management as part of the talent ecosystem in this season finale, with David Rock, Marshall Bergmann, and Christy Pruitt-Haynes.
In this Fast Company article, Dr. David Rock (CEO and Co-Founder of NeuroLeadership Institute) provides some insight on how to handle feelings of jealousy brought on by a work situation.
One prevailing debate around remote and hybrid work is that virtual work is necessarily WORSE than any in-person work. But this doesn’t have to be true. Much can be achieved virtually. Here’s a road map.
Many companies were ready for a hybrid work model to start up this summer and fall. There were still big questions, but we were headed that way. Then a few variants emerged, and we entered into a larger vaccination discussion, and now some of these dates have been pushed back, often into January 2022 for some big brands. But — this is good news for leaders! It gives you more time to navigate the landscape. In this podcast, three NLI experts talk about how to navigate the world of hybrid work, including how to account for your real estate position.
A look at the differences between performative allyship and authentic allyship.
Given the scale of the workforce migration, individual employees’ reasons for leaving are pretty varied, but they generally come down to three main factors.
With tensions, anxiety, and burnout on the rise, de-escalation has rapidly become an essential skill for managers in the workplace.
Unconscious bias is a huge driver of work outcomes. While we’ve known this for generations, only recently has it become a bigger discussion in management theory and the training space. In this episode of Your Brain at Work Live, our own Janet Stovall sits down with NYU’s inaugural senior vice president for global inclusion and strategic innovation, Dr. Lisa Coleman, and Dr. Natalie Byfield, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at St. John’s University. The three discuss bias as an impediment to innovation, bias as a cultural concern, and ways of overcoming the inherent challenges of bias.
COVID most assuredly is not “over,” and the fall might be an even worse time for some communities. Time will tell on COVID’s various impacts on work, but here’s some of what we know now.
How can we de-escalate the situations in our everyday lives?
People have lots of theories about what the “new world of work” will look like. Maybe in reality it’s just about managers learning how to structure better, insight-laden conversations.
How could companies start doing better around diversity and inclusion — but for real this time?
Research has shown that diverse companies are more innovative and perform better. But strategies typically used to create inclusive work environments haven’t always been effective and often make things worse. Experts believe that the future of diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace will be about creating habits that help mitigate some of our most basic unconscious biases. And getting there requires some uncomfortable conversations. (Source: Bloomberg)
For behavior change to occur, new learning must be easily recalled and employed when it’s needed, like “stop, drop and roll.”
We’ve talked about de-escalation in the past, mainly in the context of its application with law enforcement. But as the world attempts to reopen, and we’re constantly bombarded with images and videos of situations that need to be de-escalated — think about airlines, as one starting place — we wanted to revisit the topic. In this episode, we discuss the neuroscience of de-escalation, and day-to-day strategies for bringing down the boil on a situation, with in-house experts Dr. Joy VerPlanck (Senior Insight Strategist, NLI), Dr. David Rock (CEO & Co-Founder, NLI), and Brian Uridge (Deputy Director Division of Public Safety & Security, University of Michigan Medicine).
What three scientific elements should we focus on to create more inclusive Australian workplaces for the differently-abled?
In this episode of Your Brain at Work, senior Neuroleadership Institute researcher Michaela Simpson and NLI’s Director of DEI Practice Paulette Gerkovich are joined by two distinguished guests: Elizabeth Nelson, the director of diversity and inclusion at Thomson Reuters, and Jennifer Amara, the VP of Global Talent at Otis Worldwide. This knowledgeable foursome of women walks through what works — and what doesn’t — about current approaches to diversity, equity, and inclusion on a global scale.
In this episode of Your Brain at Work, Dr. David Rock, the CEO and Co-founder of the Neuroleadership Institute is joined by two esteemed guests: Jonathan Haidt, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and co-author of the best-seller The Coddling of the American Mind, and Alison Taylor, the Executive Director of Ethical Systems. The three shed light on the core divisions in America, how those divisions seep into professional discourse, and most importantly, what we can do to bridge divides. When the trio gets into strategies for bridging the divides we have, it’s less about deleting Facebook from your phone and more about what decades of brain science and social science research have taught us about practicing empathy, seeing others, and listening to opposing viewpoints.
After a year working from home, employees emboldened with a sense of independence are demanding fairness and autonomy in the workplace, and companies are taking note. One strategy long embraced by Buenos Aires-based software company 10Pines has employees deciding what co-workers get paid. Though fairly unique, it’s just one template for how radical transparency is increasingly being used to attract the best talent.
When we think of diversity as just numbers and percentages — binary do’s and don’ts — we might satisfy a grumble, but we miss out on the goodness. When you hear someone discussing the value of diversity, it’s a safe bet that they’re talking about the value of inclusion.
To get more people vaccinated, organizations need to fight back against falsehoods and build a narrative that is simple, sticky, and surprising.
How can we equip organizational leaders to handle tense situations and keep their teams productive? De-escalation could be the key managerial skill of 2021.
To affect change, changing language around privilege can strengthen the voice that’s speaking and improve the outcome with the listener.
The current narrative of hybrid work gives leaders little to work with. Really, all arguments against hybrid work boils down to these four main myths.
In this episode of Your Brain at Work, Dr. David Rock, the CEO and Co-founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute is joined by Dr. Jason Mitchell, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Together, they explore the concept of in-group and out-group, the effects it has on the brain and behavior, and what we can do about it to mitigate the negative effects and accentuate the positive. The two scientists unpack how we can leverage that knowledge to make interactions more positive and effective, and to make organizations more human.
The United States Congress has passed a bill declaring Juneteenth a federal holiday. The bill’s passage marks the first time a new federal holiday has been established since Congress approved Martin Luther King Jr. day in 1983. More importantly, Juneteenth marks and commemorates emancipation of Black Americans. Now, organizations across the country are asking what they can and should do to mark the occasion. In this episode, an esteemed panel discusses Juneteenth from a historical perspective, how it resonates and moves communities today, and where the conversation is going in the future. They explore what meaningful ways can companies, leaders, and society-at-large deploy efforts and resources to create a more just, diverse, and equitable future.
Hiring for culture fit could be damaging your organization. Instead, you should look for candidates that can add to your culture.
In this article from Le Monde, Dr. David Rock (CEO and Co-Founder of NeuroLeadership Institute) comments on how employees have been traumatized from the pandemic.
At the start of the pandemic, when many US companies were implementing remote work policies, many leaders feared that workplace culture would wither without in-person interactions. But, to the amazement and relief of many, that wasn’t necessarily true. Why? Because your culture was never your building—it’s something more. In this episode of Your Brain at Work, we unpack the science and explore the data at the intersections of culture and hybrid work. Our panel, including Lisa McGregor, the Global Lead of Workplace Space Strategies at Jacobs, and Perri Mathews, the Manager of Culture Transformation and Change at Blue Cross & Blue Shield of North Carolina, shares how hybrid work settings can actually be a culture accelerator, if we follow the science.
Juneteenth has been officially recognized as a federal holiday by U.S. Here’s a list of resources to enrich your understanding of this important holiday.
In This Human Resource Executive article, Dr. David Rock (CEO and Co-Founder of Neuroleadership Institute) shares some of the reward and autonomy solutions given to General Mills for their high-stressed workers.
Dr. David Rock (CEO and Co-Founder of NeuroLeadership Institute) provides insight to People Equation on the cognitive biases that prevent some leaders from seeing the opportunity aligned with hybrid working.
The workplace is shaped by how people interact with other people. That’s where allies come in.
With the world on the verge of returning to the office (or not), it’s important to remember that your culture was never your building.
Psychological research can help us better direct diverse teams to the right places, and at the right time, to make the most of early wins.
Despite widespread and increasing reports of job burnout in the past year, the concept of burnout is often misunderstood or overlooked—to the detriment of both individuals and organizations. Dr. Kamila Sip, the Senior Director of Neuroscience Research at the Neuroleadership Institute, recently joined the HR Works Podcast to explore the concept through the lens of neuroscience. In the episode, she explores the causes of job burnout, sheds light on common misconceptions about burnout, and shares how organizations can prevent and alleviate job burnout. Kamila explains that while the concept of job burnout is not new—it was declared an occupational phenomenon by the World Health Organization back in 2019— for many, the experience of burnout was amplified and intensified by the massive amount of uncertainty we experienced in 2020. When the pandemic struck, and people moved from desks and offices to kitchen counters and converted bedrooms, many lost a sense of security in their jobs, their finances, and their health. As month rolled into month, and the pandemic did not recede, neither did the stress. In other words, we went from feeling stressed sometimes to feeling stressed all of the time. While the psychological toll of the pandemic is a huge contributor to stress and anxiety, it also magnified the workplace challenges in ways that exposed the causes of job burnout that are distinct from being generally overworked or stretched too thin. This is because the real causes of job burnout are more rooted in organizational culture and expectations than in the individuals’ ability to manage the stress of life. Kamila explains that job burnout, like all stress phenomena, affects how we make decisions, how we regulate our emotions, and how we interact with others (all critically important to work). She also unpacks the role and importance of having our psychological needs met, and how by meeting those needs, organizations can reduce job burnout and increase a healthy performance, even in the face of a crisis. To learn more about burnout and what organizations can do to prevent it, listen to the full episode of the HR Works Podcast here.
Northwest Permanente Chief People Officer T. Ruth Chang, MD, MPH. discusses her plans for implementing a new organizational curriculum which was developed by NeuroLeadership Institute.
If leaders want to make the right decisions when it comes to hybrid work, it’s important to consider the question through the lens of neuroscience.
In this article from The Philadelphia Inquirer, Dr. David Rock (Co-Founder and CEO of NeuroLeadership Institute) discusses how leaders can best handle employee stress when returning to the office.
In this article from Fast Company, Dr. David Rock (CEO and Co-Founder of NeuroLeadership Institute) provide guidance on how to manage stress related to going back to the office post-pandemic.
After more than a year of uncertainty, a large portion of the U.S. is poised to return to the office in the coming months. As employees return, organizations and employees are renegotiating how, when, and where they’ll work. This migration is a once-in-a-century opportunity to build a better normal, but it won’t come without its challenges. To help leaders capitalize on this opportunity, and avoid the pitfalls, we kick off Season 5 of Your Brain at Work with a look at hybrid work. Dr. David Rock, NLI’s CEO and Co-Founder, is joined by Liane Hornsey, Executive Vice President & Chief People Officer at Palo Alto Networks, to share insights that will help leaders make the most of their people’s time and talent. Together, they explore what it means to “solve for autonomy, and manage for fairness;” the big concerns organizations have about hybrid work (and why they may be overhyped); and the skills managers will need to lead and succeed in a hybrid world.
By understanding brain science and valuing people, your organization can unlock the unexpected benefits of the hybrid workplace.
With our opportunities for face-to-face interaction virtually nil, organizations have to rethink learning—and that’s a good thing.
In this article from Axios Future, Dr. David Rock (Co-Founder and CEO of NeuroLeadership Institute) provides insight on the productivity of a 4-day work week.
Before you can launch any initiative, you’ll need your leaders’ buy-in. So we’ve compiled a list of our most foundational pieces on allyship to help you make the case to your organization.
With much of the U.S. poised to return to the office in the coming months, organizations are renegotiating how, when, and where people work.
Despite the anxiety of the pandemic and drastic changes at work, many studies show that the majority of both employers and employees reported positive effects from a year of working from home.
We want to believe all managers are now “resilience coaches”, but we have to clear a few hurdles before we get there. Here’s how.
Increasingly, equity is finding its way into conversations, organizations, and acronyms across the world. But there’s a lot of noise, and many misconceptions, about what equity means and how it applies to organizations. As a result, many business leaders aren’t quite sure how to define, develop, or deploy the “E” in DE&I. In Season 4’s final episode, our panel helps you reduce some of the noise by following the science. NLI’s Janet Stovall, Senior Client Advisor, is joined by Dr. Michaela Simpson, Senior Researcher, and Dr. Dominic Packer, Professor of Psychology, Lehigh University. Together they provide science-informed, applicable guidance to help solve systemic inequity and increase equity.
We’ve all had to become practitioners of resilience in the past year. In that time, some myths and misconceptions have arisen. Here’s what the science says.
In this episode of Your Brain at Work we continue our discussion of equity. This time, we explore what’s happening in our brains when we’re at an advantage, at a disadvantage, and when we seek to restore equity to a situation (or don’t). NLI Senior Client Advisor Janet Stovall is joined by Senior Researcher, Dr. Michaela Simpson; and University of Pennsylvania Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Brad Mattan. Together, they discuss the neuroscience of power, inclusion, perspective taking, empathy, and allyship. The panel sheds light on the skills employees need to increase equity, and how organizations can leverage science to build them.
Organizations are using allyship to promote an inclusive culture. We want to learn more about ways in which organizations make it a reality.
Many workers won’t be returning to an in-office situation anytime soon. We know the biases baked into telework; now’s our chance to mitigate them.
Many business leaders aren’t quite sure how to define, develop, or deploy the “E” in DE&I. Here’s what the science says.
In recent months we’ve seen much debate, some productive and some not, on the concept of equity. So we, as we often do at the NeuroLeadership Institute, have looked at equity through the lens of neuroscience. In this episode of Your Brain at Work, Janet Stovall, Senior Client Strategist; Jeanine Stewart; Senior Consultant and Facilitator; and Dr. David Rock, Co-founder and CEO unpack the concept of equity. They explain why equity is different from equality (and why that matters), how allyship can increase equity in the workplace, and why equity rounds out diversity and inclusion in the modern corporate landscape. Throughout the discussion, they debunk common misconceptions and offer clarifying science.
Research shows that letting employees unplug can pay off. So maybe instead of embracing employee engagement models, we should disengage.
The NeuroLeadership Institute (NLI), a cognitive science-based research consultancy dedicated to making organizations more human since 1998, today announced the launch of its groundbreaking solution, ALLY – The Neuroscience of Advocating for Others. ALLY is the first science-based behavior change program focused on helping organizations identify inequity, increase equity, and drive systematic change.
The NeuroLeadership Institute (NLI), a cognitive science-based research consultancy dedicated to making organizations more human since 1998, today announced the launch of its groundbreaking solution, ALLY – The Neuroscience of Advocating for Others. ALLY is the first science-based behavior change program focused on helping organizations identify inequity, increase equity, and drive systematic change.
In Thrive’s series about the “Five Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Leader During Turbulent Times”, Dr. David Rock (Co-founder & CEO of NeuroLeadership Institute) provides five most important things a business leader should do to lead effectively during uncertain and turbulent times.
A few times every year, a major company is in the crosshairs of a larger work culture and burnout debate. It’s been Goldman Sachs many a time before, and it appears to be them again—13 first-year analysts in Goldman’s investment banking unit surveyed themselves about their work hours, which can reach 110 per week, and then organized those concerns into a detailed PowerPoint presentation that has since spilled onto social media. The report even includes bar charts showing the analysts’ deterioration from job stress.
Up to 98% of people have the potential to become allies. To reach that potential, we need to understand what makes a person an ally.
In this episode of Your Brain at Work, Dr. David Rock welcomes Kristina Morton; Vice President Human Resources, Supply Chain, at General Mills. At General Mills, their mission is to feed the world. Hard enough on a good day, but how about during a global pandemic? Their challenges were multifaceted and complex, but throughout, factory workers went above and beyond to meet the goals of the organization. Rewards were obviously in order. So leaders at General Mills experimented with autonomy and rewards to say thanks. Here’s their story (and the science behind it).
For governments everywhere, agility is essential. But unfortunately it’s not the norm. Growth mindset can help.
People started talking about “moonshots” back in 1949. Back then, the phrase quite literally meant to shoot for the moon—with a spacecraft, that is (eg. the Apollo missions). Since then, the term has become shorthand for an audacious vision paired with an ambitious goal. This type of thinking in the organizational context, popularized by pioneering organizations like Microsoft, Apple, Google and SpaceX, has driven innovation for decades and been the source of countless technological breakthroughs. So it has us thinking: What’s the moonshot for leadership? What do the effective leaders of the future look like? And how do we help today’s leaders get there? In his latest article on Forbes, Dr. David Rock, Co-founder and CEO of the NeuroLeadership Institute, reflects on those questions. David explores the key insights that leaders should embrace and act upon right now to set themselves up for success in the future. Throughout, he explains how science should inform and transform how we think about leadership. Some of the insights David unpacks include: How to leverage the moment to do big things Why leaders should care about humans at levels you never imagined How to embrace hybrid work and autonomy And why leaders should follow the science, experiment, and follow the data To read the full article click here, or to learn more about NLI’s approach to leadership click here.
How does one become an ally? Ultimately, it’s a set of habits that we practice daily. Here’s how you can create and cultivate those habits.
There are millions of people that have tasted remote work and won’t easily let it go, and further, they’re expecting it at this point. And alternatively, there are others that would prefer to return to the office. We find ourselves on the precipice of yet another very important decision for many organizations. How much autonomy should we give our people about their work environments? We probably don’t have a choice but to face it head-on. In this episode Senior Client Strategist at NLI, Rob Ollander-Krane and Senior Director of Neuroscience Research and Dr. Kamila Sip will do just that.
Adam Mendler interviewed CEO and Co-Founder of NeuroLeadership Institute, Dr. David Rock, to gain a better understanding of the science behind leadership.
Leadership needs a grand commitment. General Motors (GM), a Fast Company Most Innovative Company, recently announced it will sell only zero-emission vehicles by 2035. The move sparked lots of discussion, largely positive, and other industries—i.e. healthcare—declared they “need their own Mary Barra,” a reference to the GM CEO and her leadership.
We’re adding our voice to the chorus of COVID-at-1 stories, through the prism of organizational learnings and brain science.
Last December 156,000 people lost jobs due to the pandemic—and all of them were women. Not just a high percentage of them. All of them. This could be the biggest backward step for women’s representation in the workplace we’ve ever seen. While there are many factors at play, there is one hidden culprit that has an outsized impact—gender bias. In this episode NLI Senior Consultant Deb Campbell facilitates a panel discussion with Francine Rosado-Cruz; Chief Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Officer, Davis Polk & Wardwell; Janet Stovall, Senior Client Strategist at NLI; and Elizabeth Haines, Professor and Social Scientist at William Paterson University. Together they unpack the research about gender bias, how it shows up in the workplace, and how organizations can put us back on the road to gender parity.
Dr. David Rock (Co-founder and CEO of NeuroLeadership Institute) interviews with Authority Magazine about his personal experiences and how leaders can navigate through challenging times.
For this episode we invited three leaders from very different companies to reveal their approaches to lifting inclusion. NLI’s VP of Client Experience, Katherine Milan leads the discussion with Romita Grover, Head of Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging in the Card Division at Capital One, Lynn Hare, Director of Global Talent Development at Akamai, and Jon Suber, Supplier Diversity & Development Manager at Freddie Mac. Together, they review how their organizations structured inclusion programs, what obstacles they encountered, what they learned along the way, and what wisdom they can share with organizations looking to create similar outcomes.
As we progress through our careers, we may feel that we’re not qualified for our role-a tendency known as imposter syndrome. Fortunately, there’s a cure.
“One year of COVID” are the hot takes of the moment, from “Sorrow and stamina, defiance and despair” to numerical breakdowns to seemingly never-ending partisan bickering, and all points in between. We are going to add our voice to the chorus of COVID-at-1 stories, hopefully not in a nails on chalkboard fashion, but through the prism of organizational learnings, culture shifts, and most importantly, brain science.
In this article from Business Insider, Dr. David Rock (Co-founder and CEO of NeuroLeadership Institute) provides insight on how leaders can manage their stress levels using neuroscience.
In this episode David welcomes renowned neuroscientist and author of Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. Dr. Barrett and David walk us through the latest research and insights about how the brain (the physical organ) and the mind (the human consciousness that thinks, feels, and acts) interact and inform our behaviour. Together, they unpack the neural mechanisms that explain our behavior and how this understanding of the brain can impact how we mitigate bias, increase empathy and inclusion, both in ourselves and others.
A new era of corporate leadership is upon us. Now is the time to reinvent your approach to leadership development. Here’s how.
As we move into the second calendar year of the pandemic, organizations are still trying to combat the unparalleled feelings of uncertainty and anxiety among their employees. The high levels of stress employees are experiencing can lead to reduced cognitive capacity, resulting in diminished productivity. Our research shows that organizations have tried all sorts of strategies to address the problem, but they may be missing a more obvious strategy—fairness. In the early stages of the pandemic, the NeuroLeadership Institute polled 688 US employees from various roles and industries. Through our research, we aimed to understand the psychological impact the pandemic had on workers, and what their leaders can do about it. Our findings suggested that employees felt a pronounced need for decisions to be made fairly. We explored this finding, and others, in our recent Idea Report. We also provide steps organizations can take to increase feelings of fairness and mitigate the stress caused by the pandemic. Here’s how. The science behind fairness At NLI, we use the SCARF® model to define the five domains of social threat and reward (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness). Based on this model, we studied the elements of SCARF that helped employees feel confident in their organization’s ability to survive the pandemic. We found that one of the core psychological needs that led to confidence in employees was fairness. People prefer fairness as opposed to having situations tilted in one party’s favor—that’s no surprise. But, did you know that the perception of being treated unfairly actually causes feelings of disgust? We can all recall a time when we’ve felt we were treated unfairly at work. We feel slighted because we don’t understand how performance objectives were assessed or know the thought process behind a promotion we didn’t receive. Yet, only 52% of employees find that in their workplace, explanations regarding decisions were sufficient during the pandemic, and only 37% of that group found their workplace transparent about it in the first place. Interestingly, top leaders are significantly more likely to agree that their organization is transparent – compared to all other employees. This is probably due to the goal-oriented—rather than people-oriented—perspective that leaders often have. Leaders discount the value of communicating how and why decisions are made to achieve specific goals. These mismatches in perspective, and in turn communication, can create tension between employees and leadership. Creating fairness through transparency The good news is that leaders can take the extra step to be as transparent as possible about the decision making process to minimize the distress. One way to do so would be to schedule a town hall meeting between leadership and all employees. Allow room for questions ranging from the playful to serious inquiries about the business, policy, and key decisions. This combination of certainty and fairness is deeply rewarding for the brain, and it will motivate employees to achieve the productivity leaders want. Organizations should create their goals with a prosocial bent; that means making decisions with employees’ and their well-being in mind. Instead of assuming how your employees feel about a particular decision, simply ask. It’s as simple as pulling them aside for a one-on-one conversation, explaining your perspective on the matter, and asking for their input. Doing so helps leaders become more accountable to their teams, seek others’ perspectives, and heighten their attention to detail. Being fair and transparent can go a long way to mitigate anxiety at work during turbulent times, but you can do much more than that. You can actually use this opportunity to make changes that will serve you long after the pandemic is over. This is just one area where your team needs support for their psychological needs. You can gain further insight by reading our full idea report at the link below. [action hash= “638a5f77-c66e-49e6-b610-592c6dc17ae6”]
Decades of research have made it clear that diverse teams are smarter and more innovative than homogeneous teams. But there are a few stubborn cognitive quirks that get in the way of building and fostering diversity in organizations. In this episode of Your Brain at Work, NLI CEO Dr. David Rock is joined by Associate Professor of Psychology at Columbia University, Dr. Valerie Purdie-Greenaway, and NLI Senior Consultant Dr. Paulette Gerkovich to discuss the compelling, and science-backed, business case for diversity, how to build diversity in teams, and why despite feeling less comfortable, diverse teams perform better.
Are you part of an organization that allows you to bring your authentic self to work? How does power and privilege impact your ability to do so? And does your organization support the authenticity of all of its employees? In this episode, Dr. David Rock is joined by best-selling author and renowned expert on covering, Kenji Yoshino, Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of Law. David and Kenji unpack these questions, exploring the concepts of power, privilege, inclusion, diversity, and allyship in the process. Listen to learn how individuals and organizations can create systemic solutions to these challenges.
By understanding our minds’ limits, we can use science-backed strategies to embed habits that are easy to recall and apply.
This week we tap the mind of Martin Whitaker, CEO of JUST Capital. In a meeting of CEOs Dr. David Rock and Martin explore how JUST lifts the voice of the American public to identify the issues that matter most when it comes to just business behavior. They identify the specific qualities of leading companies that supported their workers, customers, and communities through the pandemic and ongoing racial injustices. Martin also shares how JUST Capital is addressing systemic challenges at scale to create an economy that serves all Americans.
Organizations face new and growing talent challenges. Regenerative practices hold powerful insight on how we can grow people better.
Creating a culture that maps to the modern landscape of diversity, equity and inclusion requires a scientific approach. Here’s what science taught us: forcing people into DE&I training doesn’t work. In this episode, NLI’s co-founder and CEO Dr. David Rock, and consultants Camille Inge and Dr. Paulette Gerkovich reveals the real key to behavior change. Listen in as they review the research helping us to understand what truly works.
By understanding and employing the science of spacing, we can tweak programs to make a dramatic difference in the impact of learning.
Let’s Start a Conversation Read the Full Case Study KEY INDUSTRY Financial Services PRACTICE AREA Diversity, Equity & Inclusion PRODUCT Trusted as the Bias Mitigation Partner To Some of the World’s Most Impactful Organizations Case Studies by Practice Area Across industries, we make organizations more human and higher performing through science. These case studies show the change we can co-create. Diversity, Equity & InclusionTake inspiration from firms that mitigate bias and create equitable cultures.Accelerate Inclusion Culture & LeadershipExplore how organizations transform their culture, and shift mindsets at scale.Transform Leadership Talent & PerformanceLearn how companies harness feedback to improve employee retention, engagement and development.Optimize Performance Want to Find the best solution for you today? Commit to Change Connect with NeuroLeadership experts to explore how you can transform your organization at impact, speed, and scale. Scroll To Top
As coronavirus cases and deaths spiked around the world, so did an equally pervasive, but less observable ailment—anxiety. The effects of anxiety—reduced productivity and a lack of focus to name just two—have been felt widely among the global workforce, causing leaders to rightly ask, What can be done to stem the tide and restore calm to employees? We asked the same question. Specifically, we asked a host of questions of 688 survey participants and reviewed the relevant scientific literature. Through our research, we sought to understand the extent of the pandemic’s rippling cognitive and emotional effects and what leaders can do to alleviate them, cultivate well being, and instill confidence in their workforces. Our findings are compiled in our recent Idea Report, “The Mind in Crisis: Understanding employees’ needs in a changed workplace.” Among the most interesting and important findings is that employees who felt they were part of a team were significantly less anxious than those who didn’t. Moreover, there are things leaders can do to cultivate that camaraderie and reduce anxiety. Here’s how. The science and power of relatedness To feel a part of a team is to feel valued and heard, or in a word, included. At NLI, we use the SCARF® model, which defines five key domains of social threat and reward (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness), to understand how we can intentionally include others on a daily basis. Specifically, we can understand the feeling of being part of a team through the lens of relatedness. Relatedness is our innate need to belong to groups that offer us safety, shelter, and acceptance, and it’s been shown to be an important factor of a person’s ability to thrive, both in general and in the workplace, especially in times of crisis. We all know this intuitively from experience—humans have a natural reflex action to come together in a crisis. When we gather with friends and family in the wake of a crisis, we balance out the lack of certainty and feelings of having no control with the reward of being with others we trust. We create relatedness. We face a crisis now, but our physical isolation from other people may threaten our basic need for belonging and companionship, depriving us of our relatedness and exacerbating our anxiety. Therefore, cultivating a sense of organizational and interpersonal connectedness is crucial to helping your remote employees feel less isolated and less anxious. Organizations can cultivate relatedness by holding online all-hands meetings, or regular virtual morning coffee breaks or happy hours, where people stop work and just chat for 30 minutes. At a firm NLI partners with, people are creating relatedness by encouraging folks to change their backgrounds when on video, and then sharing what their background means to them—perhaps a photo from a vacation, or just a beautiful scene. Try this at 4:45 pm every day: Invite your team to a virtual group hangout to share what they have made progress on. Learn more This is just one of the findings of our latest research on the effects of the pandemic. Read about the other insights from NLI’s Idea Report, “The Mind in Crisis: Understanding employees’ needs in a changed workplace,” by clicking the link below and grabbing your copy today. [action hash= “638a5f77-c66e-49e6-b610-592c6dc17ae6”]
Let’s Start a Conversation Read the Full Case Study KEY INDUSTRY Financial Services PRACTICE AREA Diversity, Equity & Inclusion PRODUCT Trusted as the Bias Mitigation Partner To Some of the World’s Most Impactful Organizations Case Studies by Practice Area Across industries, we make organizations more human and higher performing through science. These case studies show the change we can co-create. Diversity, Equity & InclusionTake inspiration from firms that mitigate bias and create equitable cultures.Accelerate Inclusion Culture & LeadershipExplore how organizations transform their culture, and shift mindsets at scale.Transform Leadership Talent & PerformanceLearn how companies harness feedback to improve employee retention, engagement and development.Optimize Performance Want to Find the best solution for you today? Commit to Change Connect with NeuroLeadership experts to explore how you can transform your organization at impact, speed, and scale. Scroll To Top
Let’s Start a Conversation Read the Full Case Study KEY INDUSTRY Healthcare PRACTICE AREA Performance PRODUCT Trusted as the Bias Mitigation Partner To Some of the World’s Most Impactful Organizations Case Studies by Practice Area Across industries, we make organizations more human and higher performing through science. These case studies show the change we can co-create. Diversity, Equity & InclusionTake inspiration from firms that mitigate bias and create equitable cultures.Accelerate Inclusion Culture & LeadershipExplore how organizations transform their culture, and shift mindsets at scale.Transform Leadership Talent & PerformanceLearn how companies harness feedback to improve employee retention, engagement and development.Optimize Performance Want to Find the best solution for you today? Commit to Change Connect with NeuroLeadership experts to explore how you can transform your organization at impact, speed, and scale. Scroll To Top
Let’s Start a Conversation Read the Full Case Study KEY INDUSTRY Technology PRACTICE AREA Diversity, Equity & Inclusion PRODUCT Trusted as the Bias Mitigation Partner To Some of the World’s Most Impactful Organizations Case Studies by Practice Area Across industries, we make organizations more human and higher performing through science. These case studies show the change we can co-create. Diversity, Equity & InclusionTake inspiration from firms that mitigate bias and create equitable cultures.Accelerate Inclusion Culture & LeadershipExplore how organizations transform their culture, and shift mindsets at scale.Transform Leadership Talent & PerformanceLearn how companies harness feedback to improve employee retention, engagement and development.Optimize Performance Want to Find the best solution for you today? Commit to Change Connect with NeuroLeadership experts to explore how you can transform your organization at impact, speed, and scale. Scroll To Top
Let’s Start a Conversation Read the Full Case Study KEY INDUSTRY Financial Services PRACTICE AREA Culture & Leadership PRODUCT Trusted as the CULTURE CHANGE Partner To Some of the World’s Most Impactful Organizations Case Studies by Practice Area Across industries, we make organizations more human and higher performing through science. These case studies show the change we can co-create. Diversity, Equity & InclusionTake inspiration from firms that mitigate bias and create equitable cultures.Accelerate Inclusion Culture & LeadershipExplore how organizations transform their culture, and shift mindsets at scale.Transform Leadership Talent & PerformanceLearn how companies harness feedback to improve employee retention, engagement and development.Optimize Performance Want to Find the best solution for you today? Commit to Change Connect with NeuroLeadership experts to explore how you can transform your organization at impact, speed, and scale. Scroll To Top
Let’s Start a Conversation Read the Full Case Study KEY INDUSTRY Financial Services PRACTICE AREA Talent & Performance PRODUCT Trusted as the CULTURE TRANSFORMATION Partner To Some of the World’s Most Impactful Organizations Case Studies by Practice Area Across industries, we make organizations more human and higher performing through science. These case studies show the change we can co-create. Diversity, Equity & InclusionTake inspiration from firms that mitigate bias and create equitable cultures.Accelerate Inclusion Culture & LeadershipExplore how organizations transform their culture, and shift mindsets at scale.Transform Leadership Talent & PerformanceLearn how companies harness feedback to improve employee retention, engagement and development.Optimize Performance Want to Find the best solution for you today? Commit to Change Connect with NeuroLeadership experts to explore how you can transform your organization at impact, speed, and scale. Scroll To Top
In the Season 4 premiere, our panel of experts discuss the forces of change that swept organizations in 2020, and how we can channel the momentum they unleashed into creating more human organizations in 2021. NLI’s co-founder and CEO, Dr. David Rock is joined by Director of Industry Research, Andrea Derler and Senior Vice President of Corporate Solutions, Marshall Bergmann. Together, they explore the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead and the directions organizations can (and should) go in.
Because anxiety has real implications for productivity, organizations have to address it before anything else.
In 1971, a Yale psychologist borrowed a chilling concept from the novel “1984” to label a new phenomenon of human behavior.
Ann Schulte, Procter & Gamble’s Global Leader of Learning and Leadership Development, discusses how she turned to NeuroLeadership Institute (founded by Dr. David Rock) to develop a program that developed team morale.
Leaders can use insights derived from science to manage their teams’ cognitive capacity, ultimately making them smarter, happier, and more effective.
The pandemic has played havoc with our mental health, and a significant factor in our malaise is that we’re missing our people—terribly. We long for friends, family and colleagues. We are hardwired for connection, and with the need for social distancing and the reality of being away from the workplace—and everything else—for such a long period of time, we are struggling.
Stress can be thought of simply as heightened attention to the negative. Using a growth mindset can help with reducing stress in the moment.
At NLI we believe that now is perfect time to build a more flexible, continuous, and people-focused performance management system. Here’s how.
What better way to ring in 2021 than with a new perspective on your own potential? Growth mindset can help unlock skills you once thought were unattainable.
The extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic have given new weight to the end-of-year break, as the line between work and home has blurred more than ever for many workers. Some companies are trying to encourage their employees to disconnect from their jobs more than usual this year, as holiday routines and connections have been upended for many. Jim Mathis runs the small ad agency, Adwerx, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He’d normally have a full calendar during the holidays: the company party, visits to extended family and planning for a new year staff retreat. But this is 2020. “There’s just this lingering cloud over everyone that is just getting hard on folks,” he said. He’s encouraged his seven employees to take extra time off this week and next – they have unlimited vacation. “Definitely recharge your batteries,” he said. “We all need to do that. And this year, that’s been stressful, we probably need it more than normal.” Sheila Ryan is the Chief People Officer at Clear Capital appraisal services in Truckee, California. During this darker-than-usual end of the year, she’s trained managers to identify potential signs of burnout among their 600 employees. “You look for changes in behavior – were they really participatory and vocal in your meetings and now they’re being more quiet?” she said. “Are they getting more slouchy and turning their camera off a lot more?” If so, managers at her company have been reminding staff of mental health resources like the Employee Assistance Program and encouraging staff to take time off. Ryan said more people at her company have taken vacation days this holiday season than usual. Breaks are important for cognitive function, said David Rock, co-founder and CEO of the NeuroLeadership Institute, which applies neuroscience to work. “With the brain you need to literally let networks rest for a while for them to regenerate and come back energized,” he said. The brain gets tired out by repetitive stress, like constantly worrying about a pandemic, or thinking about work at all hours of the day, he said. “One thing we know about fitness is you don’t do three hours of repetition on the same muscle without stopping,” he said. But even with time off, pulling our brains out of work is easier said than done these days, said Jaclyn Jensen, who teaches organizational psychology at DePaul University. Because millions of workers have now combined their home with their workplace, “your mind is always at work, even if you are not actually sitting in front of your computer working,” she said. Finding a new routine during time off can help rebuild those boundaries, she said: spending time outside, reading or scheduling those things you don’t have time for during a busy work week. And by all means, stay away from email. “Several days ago, in anticipation of the holiday I did take my email off of my phone, and it is freeing,” she said. So much so, she might even leave it that way after the holidays are over. This article originally appeared on Marketplace.org.
What can you count on coming your way in 2021? More ambiguity, uncertainty and change! Hooray! As a leader, your challenge is to increase your capacity in the face of it all, because traditional approaches to leadership development aren’t keeping pace with the kinds of complexity we now face. Currently, fewer than 18% of leaders have the qualities of mind to optimally lead in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environments (Hall & Rowland, 2016). Fortunately, many bright people have been working on this very agenda over the past decade or so. What are they cooking up for us for 2021?
We close Season 3 of Your Brain at Work with our two performance gurus, Barbara Steel, the head of our performance practice, and Rob Ollander-Krane, a Senior Client Advisor at NLI who will review some of the biggest trends of 2020. From the underrated—but absolutely vital— check-in conversation, to the role bias plays in performance management, and performance management’s impact on broader talent strategy, we look back on the trends and lessons of 2020, and look ahead to what organizations should prioritize in 2021.
Diversity Equity & Inclusion strategy will continue to be a top priority for organizations in 2021. They’ll enter the new year with more momentum than perhaps ever before, but that momentum needs to be channelled into real, impactful change. In other words, we need to do things right and right now. In this episode of Your Brain at Work, we look back at tectonic shifts that took place in 2020, and how, armed with that knowledge, organizations can follow the pathways to real change.
“Don’t dismiss a good idea simply because you don’t like the source.” The brain science behind the twelve words that changed my life.
We’re busier than ever, but less able to get our own work done. Here’s how science says we can make the most of our days.
When tech giant Google fired a prominent AI researcher last week, it was not a great PR moment for the company. Will it also bring a legal headache?
If you weren’t among the 2,400 attendees at our virtual Summit this year, we missed you, but don’t sweat it. This week on Your Brain at Work, we revisit our most insightful sessions from our three-day annual conference—all in one episode. Our senior NLI team shares how to implement large scale change initiatives, how to create impactful and scalable virtual learning programs, why organizations should strive to be regenerative—not just restorative, how to develop the leaders of tomorrow, how to build a culture of allyship, among many other things.
Leadership will be critical in the year to come, as you navigate uncertainty, fierce competition and resource constraints. One way to get your organization ready for these challenges is to establish leadership principles for your organization.
Here we are — eight months into our COVID-19 pandemic. So many changes have taken place in our outer world. Yet, it’s our inner worlds that face the task of processing all of this….
If they want workers to be more vigilant, fear doesn’t work. Fortunately, there are alternatives.
Heightened uncertainty can have a devastating impact on the performance and mental health of employees, triggering a threat response in the brain that interferes with rational thinking, collaborating and solving problems. By understanding the core psychological needs of employees, leaders can focus their efforts on the strategies that will have the greatest impact on engagement and performance.
Experts say that times of great change should be seen as opportunities to help organizations form new habits.
This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make organizations more human and build a better normal. Here’s how.
Change can be scary and tiring, but it also represents an amazing (and fleeting) opportunity to build a better world of work. Here’s how.
Giving and receiving better feedback requires us to kick some old habits and adopt a new mindset. Here’s how science can help.
Many organizations are wondering how to address the chasm between right and left, and what many consider right and wrong. In this week’s Your Brain at Work, NLI’s Dr. David Rock and Dr. Kamila Sip welcome Dr. Peter Coleman (Professor of Psychology and Education, Columbia University) for a frank and informative conversation that traces the history of polarization in America, explores conflict in the brain, and outlines the steps organizations can take to successfully bridge the gap.
So, you’ve come to the conclusion that we need to modify our approach to performance management. Luckily, we have the science to show you how.
Human beings enjoy cohesion so much that we are often afraid to say anything to disturb it. Diversity can help.
Bias affects the way we communicate, often obscuring our feelings and intentions. Science offers a better way to communicate.
It’s hard to be cognitively effective during a crisis. Research shows that a few key shifts in mindset can help us stay focused and productive.
Holli Martinez leads the DE&I efforts at T-Mobile, and she’s on a mission—to make DE&I not just a priority, but a reality. This week on Your Brain at Work, Holli joins NLI’s Head of Diversity & Inclusion Ester Neznanova to discuss the pressing need for DE&I strategies that truly shift behaviors, they explore the power of culture, and they explain how organizations should approach creating lasting change in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
This year has been unlike any other, that’s why we designed a Summit unlike any we’ve ever had. Join us, and these distinguished scientists, at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit.
A funny thing about providing feedback—once you start providing your thoughts to others, you will begin receiving their thoughts on you. It’s a natural human reaction that when you suggest someone can do something better, they will have something for you, as well.
Celebrating differences in teams may sound well-intentioned, but research shows it pays to build inclusion through celebrating similarities.
Performance reviews are loaded with cognitive biases that cloud the reviewer’s judgment and possibly put employees on the wrong career path.
In this week’s episode, NLI Co-founder and CEO Dr. David Rock is joined by Senior Researcher Michaela Simpson. Together they unpack the importance and power of mindset. They discuss the research that suggests we can cultivate adaptive mindsets not just individually, but at scale, and explain the habits that can help us thrive through difficult times.
This year has been unlike any other, that’s why we designed a Summit unlike any we’ve ever had. Join us, and these distinguished scientists, at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit.
In this article from Tech Target, NeuroLeadership Institute experts provides insight on how to focus on shared goals to diffuse tensions at work.
While examining the leadership style of Scott Kirby (CEO of United Airlines) during a challenging time for airlines, Inc. interviews Dr. David Rock (Co-founder and CEO of NeuroLeadership Institute) for his thoughts in leadership development.
This week, our panel includes VP of Research, Practices, and Consulting Khalil Smith, DE&I Practice Lead Ester Neznanova, and Senior Consultant Camille Inge. Together, these NLI experts explore the nuances between racism and bias, discuss strategies used to detect and mitigate bias, and explain how you can build an anti-biased organization where better systems enable smarter decision-making.
Organizations with cultures of collaboration, innovation, and integrity are the most successful. Here’s why, and how you can make yours one.
Whether it’s on the front-lines of a crisis, or the conference room, opportunities for escalation exist all around us. Science can help us de-escalate.
With DE&I are at the forefront of everyone’s mind, we’ve curated the resources to help leaders understand, and act on, the science.
In this week’s episode, NLI Co-founder and CEO Dr. David Rock is joined by Diversity & Inclusion Practice Lead Ester Neznanova, and Senior Researcher Michaela Simpson to discuss how science can inform strategy in DE&I. Together, they explore strategies used to engage leaders and spark change. They share NLI’s latest thinking and best practices, including how to activate emotional buy-in, the importance of accentuating benefits, and the role of explaining the mechanisms of change.
Unlocking the power of a diverse organization requires creating a sense of inclusion. These three action-oriented ideas can help offer a roadmap.
In this article from CNBC, Dr. David Rock (Co-founder and CEO of NeuroLeadership Institute) provides some ways to reduce work burnout, especially for executives who are under more pressure than usual.
These days, our beleaguered brains could use some help. So we’ve collected our most insightful reads on how you can stay focused day to day.
With much of the focus of Your Brain at Work on the behavior of large populations, we decided to change gears with something more personal for a bonus series we’re calling “From the Field.”
Our producer Gabriel Berezin stumbled onto an inspiring story that shows the positive impact we can have on each other in quick, simple interactions. In academic circles it’s known as prosocial behavior, in layman’s terms it’s the familiar desire to help others. In this case, it was a bit of guidance for an ambitious young person of color from an experienced sales leader during a serendipitous Uber ride. Meet Josh and Kendrick to get a glimpse of what it looks like to lend a helping hand to those around you, and how that gesture can have a butterfly effect.
In this week’s episode, NLI Co-founder and CEO Dr. David Rock is joined by Senior Vice President of Client Experience Katherine Milan to discuss the science of learning. Together, they unpack the latest research around memory and habit formation, discuss how to make learning more social, identify the five biggest mistakes organizations are making when transitioning learning to a virtual format, and reveal the five ways you can avoid those pitfalls and design better learning experiences. Hint: it’s by following the science.
Your organization is facing challenges that were unimaginable a few months ago. That makes this the perfect time to build a better normal, and to attend the NLI Summit.
This article from MILO Range provides thought on how to de-escalate police training using neuroscience as delivered by NeuroLeadership Institute.
Only about a third of US employees qualify as “engaged.” It’s up to management to create the habits that can boost that figure.
This week, our panel of experts includes NLI’s Head of Performance Barbara Steeel, Senior Client Strategist, Rob Ollander-Krane, and CEO and Co-Founder Dr. David Rock. Together, they discuss the latest trends and research in performance management; they share illuminating insights on giving, and receiving, feedback; and they reflect on the six critical conversations employees and managers should be having to perform at their best.
In this article from Chief Executive, Dr. David Rock (Co-founder and CEO of NeuroLeadership Institute) discusses how to use the SCARF module to activate EQ (emotional intelligence) in leadership.
This year has turned ‘conventional wisdom’ on its head. Join us at the 2020 Summit to learn what science says about building a better normal.
Right now many leaders are asking how they can turn their companies anti-racist—that is, supporting an anti-racist policy through their actions, or expressing an anti-racist idea. It’s an important question, and we should all embrace the intent behind the inquiry.
Joe Smarro, one of the two police officers featured in the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary, “Ernie & Joe, Crisis Cops,” is helping create a more human society. In the season three premiere of YBAW, Joe joins NLI CEO and Co-founder Dr. David Rock, Senor Director of Neuroscience Research Dr. Kamila Sip, and facilitator Davie Floyd to discuss bringing science-backed de-escalation training to police officers. Together, the panel unpacks how the science of social threat and reward can help us better understand and communicate with each other to reach positive outcomes. And the benefits extend far beyond front-line workers to organizations of all sizes, and individuals of all backgrounds.
In a world that seems divided over any topic you can think of, a bit of laughter can bridge even the widest gaps. You already knew that intuitively; now learn some of the science to validate it.
Building anti-racism and bias mitigation into the systems and processes of an organization might be one of the more effective and sustainable ways to dismantle systemic racism and ensure equal opportunities and fair processes.
If leaders can make their organization a psychologically safe place to speak up, they can tap into a wellspring of new ideas from otherwise quiet folks.
Uncertainty can spark new opportunities to reimagine culture. Learn to build a better normal with strategies from today’s leading scientists and executives.
This week, our panel of experts includes NLI’s Head of Consulting and Research Khalil Smith, Senior Consultant Paulette Gerkovich, and Senior Vice President of Corporate Solutions Marshall Bergmann. Together they discuss the latest research on the importance of taking bold action; they share illuminating and inspiring case studies from organizations who have embraced acting boldly; and they reflect on the series as a whole to offer leaders the best strategies to show up in the best way possible for the people who matter most.
This article from the BBC explores the implementation of DE&I programs within organizations, and Dr. David Rock (Co-founder and CEO of NeuroLeadership Institute) discusses how to do so successfully.
Speaking up is essential to share ideas, question decisions, and challenge behaviors. Here are a few big ideas that can help any leader raise quiet voices.
In this article from SHRM, NeuroLeadership Institute Practice Lead, Barbara Steele, explains that employers should examine their benefit programs to determine whether or not it meets the expectations of employees and job candidates.
Along with Dr. Kamila Sip, NLI’s Senior Director of Neuroscience Research, and Khalil Smith, Head of Research and Consulting at NLI, this episode features the insights of Dr. Dominic Packer, social psychologist at Lehigh University. The group discusses how we determine who’s “one of us,” the consequences of doing so, and how we can expand our perceived boundaries to create larger ingroups.
Colleges play an important role in bringing diverse groups together. As such, they should make it a priority to create a sense of allyship on campus.
Inclusion is proven to be good for business, but it’s also been shown to afford employees a host of psychological and physical benefits.
There’s a cost to regarding yourself through a fixed mindset. Adopting a growth mindset can help you meet today’s challenges.
In this article from Forbes, Mika Liss (COO of NeuroLeadership Institute) discusses how accountability acts as a social motivator and generates stronger results.
We’re not out of the woods yet, and won’t be for a while. So how do we thrive amidst all this? Research suggests there are two things to focus on.
Among the tips for starting a new job provided in this article from TechRepublic, are some thoughts from a brain science perspective from NeuroLeadership Institute COO, Mika Liss.
Understanding the nuances between allyship and inclusion is important to helping your team act in everyone’s best interest, and correct past imbalances.
In a discussion on listening deeply, host Barbara Steel, Head of NLI’s Performance Practice, is joined by Paulette Gerkovich, a Senior Consultant at NLI, and Dr. Michaela Simpson, one of NLI’s Senior Scientists. Together they talk through what listening circles can look like in organizations, the science of psychological safety and perspective taking, and the potential pitfalls of getting it wrong.
Jamil Zaki, Stanford Professor of Psychology and the author of “The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World” joins NLI’s Head of Consulting and Practices, Khalil Smith. Jamil shares some of his biggest findings from studying empathy, and offers fascinating insights that anybody can use to build the muscle of empathy in their personal and professional relationships and create a better, kinder world.
Hiring is a critical process for organizations. That’s why building, or rebuilding, the hiring process takes careful thought. Here’s what the research says.
Deb Bubb, IBM’s Chief Leadership, Learning, and Inclusion Officer, is bringing her work home in an inspiring and transformative way. Here’s how.
An organization’s leadership model will serve as an effective guide for decision-making and team engagement when it is “sticky,” has meaning, and people can easily grasp how the model links back to organizational objectives.
Lindsay-Rae McIntyre, Chief Diversity Officer at Microsoft, sits down with with NLI CEO and Co-Founder Dr. David Rock and NLI Head of Research and Consulting, Khalil Smith, for a discussion on allyship. Learn how Microsoft has been working for the past two years to develop a culture of allyship and how leaders can develop tools to make allyship come alive in their organizations.
We all need to strike the right adaptive mindset amid this crisis. The Stockdale paradox can teach us how to balance realism with optimism.
High levels of stress and anxiety can affect your ability to focus. Science shows us how can you manage stress, maintain focus, and stay productive.
While the world of work has changed dramatically since its initial publication, the science and substance of the book have become even more relevant.
With the world on lockdown, organizations everywhere have had to rethink how they operate. But in the midst of the crisis, some have discovered something unexpected: productivity has gone up, not down. A crisis like a global pandemic naturally triggers extreme anxiety and stress, but it also unleashes tremendous energy and motivation. If leaders keep threat levels low, they can harness that sense of urgency to achieve work results that would normally seem impossible.
Do your employees feel comfortable speaking up in a constructive manner? Or do they fly blind with disastrous consequences?
This crisis’ effects are physical and psychological. Here are the everyday psychological habits to keep your mind healthy and stay productive.
When governments issued lockdown orders earlier this year, organizations everywhere scrambled to move their learning programs online. Since then, a team at the NeuroLeadership Institute has conducted over 20 learning audits to assess how larger companies handled the transition. Unfortunately, our conversations revealed that most organizations took in-person learning programs, already poor at driving behavior change, and made them worse, not better.
Chris Boruff, Director of Operations at the financial services firm Morningstar, sits down with NLI Co-Founder and CEO Dr. David Rock and NLI’s Director of Industry Research, Andrea Derler, to discuss growth mindset—what it is, how it works, and and how Morningstar has made the most of the COVID-19 crisis to transform the entire organization’s approach to learning, feedback, and growth.
Face to face with a crisis, it’s seldom clear where to focus our attention. NLI has assembled frequently asked questions about what leaders should do.
In this article from HR Dive, Dr. David Rock (Co-founder and CEO of NeuroLeadership Institute) discusses the brain-based model of SCARF, along with some other strategies to de-escalate conflict.
Leaders who practice optimal inclusion—that is, deploying the right people for the right jobs—can create more efficient, effective teams.
The data say leaders need to get more intentional about cultivating diverse talent. The science of allyship and inclusion can show us how.
Unconscious bias lives in everyone. For leaders, it’s exceedingly important to learn to mitigate that bias before it negatively impacts decision-making.
For over two years, Microsoft has been on a journey of cultivating allyship in its leaders and employees, and CDO Lindsay-Rae McIntyre has led the charge.
The only constant in life is change, as they say. But you can’t expect your behaviors to change just because you really want them to. The same goes for leaders who want to create behavior change in their team members. Early excitement fades over time, and soon we settle back into our old ways.
Suzanne, together with NLI’s Khali Smith and Dr. David Rock, explore the many ways Splunk has designed and deployed a diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy. The conversation also delves into Splunk’s thoughtful response to the ongoing human rights movement and calls for racial justice.
IBM, Procter & Gamble, and Netflix reacted quickly to crisis. In doing so they showed that successful organizations put humans first for good reason.
Here’s how organizations can be more actionable and purposeful about helping employees grow, through feedback, while the world works from home.
A recent Wall Street Journal article put Google’s diversity struggles on full display: Googlers of all ideologies and political leanings are finding it difficult to reconcile their personal beliefs with those of their colleagues. Googlers For Animals are clashing with Black Googler Network. Conservatives At Google say their preferred candidates get unfairly smeared at work. And Sex-positive Googlers take issue with Google Drive staff removing explicit images from the platform. Google grapples with this kind of infighting in part because Google encourages people to bring their full selves to work. The policy may be noble on its face, but as our client work has found, complete inclusivity often leads to clashes over conflicting viewpoints. Everyone is saying something different, so no one is getting heard. The solution we propose for optimizing inclusion is developing a shared language. The psychology of inclusion We know from the research that diversity makes inclusion harder — no matter if you’re talking about gender, ethnicity, or belief. Teams with more differences must exert greater effort to help others feel like they belong. Too often, well-intentioned companies start groups to celebrate these differences, such as those focused on women or minority ethnic groups. Studies have shown this only makes things worse. One 2015 review found that efforts to celebrate differences can lead non-dominant members to feel uncomfortably aware of their group identities. They feel more marginalized, not less. The way to make people feel more in-group is to celebrate similarities. Colleagues feel like they belong when they are reminded of what everyone has in common, such as a shared sales target or project objective. Psychologists call these “superordinate goals,” and they’ve been shown to improve cohesion and reduce conflict. This is where shared language comes in. If coworkers are united around similar goals, they can begin to adopt specific vocabularies for talking about those goals. By using similar phrases, they can ensure mutual understanding. Shared language must be brain-friendly Unfortunately, typical D&I mantras are too exhaustive to add any real value for companies. In our own work, we rely on the science of memory to help clients build a handful of short, sticky phrases that are easy to recall and share in daily conversation. The phrases have the added benefit of getting people to automatically think in terms of the team’s goals — a process known as “unconscious priming.” In matters of bias, for example, having a shared language equips people to call out biases in real-time. If someone notices a coworker hiring only people of their same gender, race, and age, they can ask the person if there might be a similarity bias at play. Asking questions and using the same language allows teams to broach big issues in a non-threatening way. Tips for your organization To get the most out of shared language, explain your thinking to create clarity. People won’t always agree with decisions, but at least they’ll understand and respect them. Tell stories to pass on cultural cues about ideal behaviors and show how inclusion can get misunderstood. Generating empathy helps align people to the company’s goals, without telling people to sacrifice who they are as a person when coming to work. SEE ALSO: 5 Habits for Holding Less-Biased Meetings
This article from Vogue Business focuses on how luxury retailers are working to become more inclusive, including Tiffany & Co., who partnered with NeuroLeadership Institute to develop bias mitigation strategies.
Back in the pre-COVID-19 days, Mitchell Spearman didn’t talk to his staff much about their feelings. As senior director of principal gifts for the University of Texas at Austin, he helped set goals for his team of fundraisers, assisted them in meeting those goals and celebrated their successes when they did. Continue Reading on LA Times
Twin crises have renewed our appreciation for open and honest communication, and especially for those who speak up when it matters most.
Sephora is making concerted efforts to halt discrimination at its stores and within its corporate offices as the retail industry continues to experience a reckoning for a history of racist behavior. Continue Reading
Bias and inclusion may appear together in D&I conversations, but from a scientific standpoint, they are undeniably different.
Priorities aren’t enough to make lasting changes to diversity and inclusion. Leaders must also focus on building the right habits and systems.
Any business leader will tell you the right team is essential for fostering innovation and success. But is talent development an art or a science? Increasingly, it’s appearing the answer can be found in science. And believe it or not, most leaders find that comforting, says Katherine King, CEO of corporate consultancy Invisible Culture, which helps companies develop the skills to compete in fast-changing industries and create cultures that promote healthy work habits. Continue Reading on Boston Globe
As interest in allyship swells, so does the risk for misinterpretation. We’ve combed through the research and presented these myths about allyship.
Treating coronavirus patients in one of the busiest emergency rooms in Manhattan, Dr. Jason Hill wore the same disposable respirator mask for up to four shifts in a row. He’d take the mask home from Columbia University Medical Center, his coffee-flavored breath clinging to its fibers. Then he’d bake it in an oven to kill any viral hitchhikers. A half-hour at 140 degrees. For months as the virus filled hospitals in New York and across the nation, doctors, nurses and other medical workers risked their lives in similar ways – sharing protective gear, reusing masks or going without – simply because there weren’t enough to go around. Continue reading on USA Today
Employees who are empowered to speak up and offer feedback to their superiors are more likely to offer ideas on how to improve the business.
We’ve written before on the importance of creating priorities, habits, and systems (PHS) when it comes to large-scale culture change. But with so many organizations taking a renewed—or perhaps unprecedented—interest in reshaping their D&I efforts to boost inclusion, mitigate bias, and become more human overall, we felt compelled to revisit the model and explain the underlying science. Because when it comes to addressing systemic racism, you can’t do it just by making it a priority.
Recently, our social media feeds have been plastered with companies announcing their support of the Black Lives Matter movement and other racial justice initiatives. Some of those announcements, from companies like Nike and Ben & Jerry’s, have been hailed widely. Others have been met with sharp criticism. What differentiates the two groups is a historic catalog of action and commitment from one group—and an assumed “here one day, gone the next” mentality from the other. “The intent of the messages is appropriate, and yet it needs to be backed up with action, commitment, and sustainability. It’s like a friend who only sends you a message once a year on your birthday; are they really a friend?” said Khalil Smith, NLI’s Vice President of Consulting and Practices, in a recent interview. Because Nike and Ben & Jerry’s have consistently advocated for the cause of racial justice, their statements align with what we know about their brands, and ring true when received by the public at large. Contrast that to companies who are entering the conversation for the first time. As Khalil explains, “If the only time you’re talking about race or equity is when something horrific breaks through the news cycle and you’re sending out a message at the same time as everyone else, that’s when it seems disingenuous.” Now it’s time for companies to back up their commitments with real, sustained action. They need to go beyond just wading into the conversation, and do the work of implementing solutions. They need to be the type of friend who does more than just wish you a happy birthday. To read the full interview with Khalil, click here. [action hash= “828b54ca-f297-476c-82f1-7ac98cbba097”]
At a time when the noise of the world seems to drown out any sense of clarity, Lynne Oldham, Chief People Officer at Zoom, and Tracey Grabowski, CHRO at Procter & Gamble remind us how to follow what’s essential—not just in the services they offer, but in how they’ve cultivated a calming, yet innovative, spirit through intense disruption, and in so doing, set an example for other leaders to follow.
About 3 weeks ago, the emails started. Companies sent out emails to thousands of subscribers asking for forgiveness and pledging support for Black communities. The emails came suddenly and in spurts. Yet, things still felt the same, but with a cluttered inbox. Are there more strategic ways companies can respond during times of crisis, especially when it comes to diversity issues. What if silence is golden? Where a company or organization can admit they don’t have an answer, and they are open to listening during a time of crisis. Continue Reading on Forbes
I&D initiatives should build upon other each other in meaningful and coherent ways, like movies in a shared universe. We call it the “Marvel Model.”
You wouldn’t expect to find Buzz Lightyear at Monsters University. It just wouldn’t happen. The miniature space explorer and the institution of higher learning for mythical creatures exist in two separate universes.
While many people have started going back into the office, talent leaders should stay mindful of those still at home—and how to cater to both groups.
While employees are returning to workplaces across the country, sadly, a majority of them are still worried they may end up losing their jobs because of the novel coronavirus.
Leaders may understand why inclusion matters, but still fail to put it into practice for their organization. Research from NLI can offer some strategies.
Recently, many organizations have had to make major changes to their operations overnight. Here’s a strategy to sustain the energy of this moment.
A panel of NLI experts, including CEO and Co-Founder Dr. David Rock, VP of Consulting and Research Khalil Smith, and Head of D&I Ester Neznanova, walk us through the science and importance of listening deeply, uniting widely, and acting boldly. Along the way they address challenges leaders have been facing and offer science-based solutions to keep teams feeling heard, included, and empowered to effect change.
Sony Pictures Entertainment Chairman and CEO Tony Vinciquerra shared with employees today details about the studio’s racial equity and inclusion initiative program, Sony Pictures Action. Continue Reading on Deadline
Growth mindset isn’t just a “nice-to-have.” It’s a business imperative for helping employees thrive through change and disruption.
Leaders have a role to play in helping people sustain the new pace of work and avoid burning out. Research from NLI can help organizations understand the limits of our minds, and how to work within them.
In recent months, over the course of the COVID-19 crisis, I’ve been talking with hundreds of leaders about how they see the road ahead, and how they’re using that vision to build a better normal. This crisis has no doubt saddled us with tremendous challenges and setbacks. But it’s also provided us the rare opportunity to reimagine our organizations and make them fundamentally better.
I have the fortune of knowing and working with incredible people of all backgrounds and ethnicities. And as a black leader who has held senior-level positions, I am frequently being asked about this moment in history. Given what I’m being asked by my non-black friends and peers, and what I’m being told by my black friends and peers, it seems as if we could benefit from making a few things known.
NLI’s research has identified three key business reasons for organizations to start seriously trying to adopt a growth mindset.
Diversity without inclusion can lead to a revolving door of talent, which means leaders should focus on uniting teams around shared goals.
About one-third of Americans have exhibited signs of anxiety or depression in the wake of Covid-19, according to the Census Bureau, and your employees are likely no exception. They’re looking to you as a business leader for guidance. But the context has never been more confusing, and the stakes have never been higher. Looking for a road map, I talked recently with Dr. David Rock, who has a doctoral degree in neuroleadership and who teaches Fortune 100 companies to lead employees according to principles of neuroscience. Continue Reading on Inc.
As Chief Human Resources Officer, it’s Tracy Keogh’s job to take care of people at HP, a firm known and lauded for its culture of innovation and authentic humanity. At HP, they’ve made it their mission to help people stay positive, engaged, and productive in the face of this crisis. More than that, they did it fast and with the brain in mind. Here’s how. Continue Reading on Forbes
With employees working longer hours than usual, leaders may wonder if they should move to a four-day workweek. Here’s what brain science says.
Shawna Erdmann, SVP of Learning at Comcast, and Melanie Davis, CLO at Ford, work for companies that have embraced growth mindset over the past few months, shifting from one set of expectations and roles, into brand-new operations. Their stories show how keeping an open mind benefits not just individuals as they work to adapt, but entire organizations looking to transform.
In moments of disruption, there’s an opportunity to shift our mindset to find deeper meaning in our work. Brain science can show us how.
The idea of a four-day workweek received a boost from New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern last week, when she encouraged companies to try it out as a way of stimulating domestic tourism over longer weekends. A shortened workweek in a post-COVID-19 world raises some interesting points. Like pretty much all companies, the social media app Buffer has been struggling with higher than usual stress and anxiety among its employees over the last several months. Continue Reading on Marketplace
As the world limps toward recovery, many news headlines seem to suggest we should accept this reality as our “new normal,” as if the story is all bad and out of our control. The truth is, while the pandemic and resulting economic impact are certainly outside our grasp, how we respond to crisis isn’t—especially at the level of each organization, and what we decide to do next. Continue Reading on Forbes
Change is hard, especially for large-scale transformation efforts. NLI wants to hear from you about your experience with change and disruption.
Jyoti Mehra, CHRO of Gilead Sciences, and Doug Shupinski, Head of Leadership Development at Merck are today’s guests. The discussion focuses on how Gilead is creating a culture of empathy, through leadership forums and developing a common language, and how Merck is meeting people where they are to keep learning and development going strong.
Mindset dictates the way we think about goals and determines how we interpret successes and failures. A growth mindset can help us thrive through crisis.
Coronavirus poses an extraordinary threat to our sense of control. The solution is to give employees autonomy wherever possible.
Bob Johansen, distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future, and Amy Edmondson, Harvard professor and expert on psychological safety discuss what we can do today—for ourselves and for others—so that tomorrow, and the days after that, we’ll all be in the best position to stay healthy and successful.
We’re all trying to keep up with big changes. Here’s how Morningstar’s approach to crisis management is keeping its workforce engaged, happy, and healthy.
It feels like we’ve weathered an enormous storm in recent weeks. Seemingly without warning, forces beyond our control displaced us from our offices and cut us off from our colleagues, friends, and families. Now we find ourselves in an unfamiliar landscape, stripped of its familiar guideposts and riddled with new obstacles. With no clear vision of the road ahead, many organizations have had to forge their own paths. Continue Reading on Forbes
Brian Kropp, Group Vice President at Gartner, and Deb Bubb, Head of Leadership, Learning, and Inclusion at IBM, discuss the growing importance of inclusive habits at work: respecting people’s capacity to get things done, the challenges of playing multiple roles, and helping teams see that they really are in this together.
If you haven’t already seen the letter from CEO Brian Chesky to his team at Airbnb, addressing the impending layoffs, you likely will very soon. It’s already starting to be shared broadly, and based on my time studying and working with businesses, I would forecast that it will become either a bar for how layoffs are measured in the time of COVID-19, or, more hopefully, a blueprint. Continue Reading on Forbes
Social interaction significantly contributes to mental health—taking it away jeopardizes our stability. To stay connected, we to need bring back the personal.
When global companies centralize their global HR function, members of the HR team are asked to improve employee experience, rather than improve processes.
Amy Schultz, Director of Organizational Effectiveness & Learning at DTE Energy, and Rebecca Port, VP of Talent at Netflix, represent two essential services during a crisis—perhaps in their own way. In this episode, Amy and Rebecca touch on their approach to giving employees a sense of certainty, autonomy, and relatedness in the way leaders focus their teams.
Science tells us that people need simple, easy-to-use tools to think and work effectively. Here’s how that science can guide behavior change at your organization.
Diversity & inclusion isn’t a “nice to have” during a crisis. It’s how organizations ensure the best ideas help solve the most pressing problems.
Learn the essential habits for leading inclusive virtual meetings and keep your team engaged, collaborative, and innovative in the process.
Tracy Keogh, CHRO at HP, and Dean Carter, Head of Finance, Legal, and HR at Patagonia, are dealing with different challenges at their organizations these days. But what you’ll hear from each leader echoes the same point: During a crisis, it’s people—not business goals or numbers—that need to come first.
Dr. David Rock (Co-founder and CEO of NeuroLeadership Institute) provides CNBC Magazine with 3 simple ways to combat stress during a challenging time.
With a large number of employees working remotely due to the coronavirus outbreak, many are having trouble adjusting to the new reality, especially when there is uncertainty around the duration of the crisis. The pandemic has spawned a mental health crisis that business leaders need to reconcile with. Dr. David Rock, founder and CEO of NeuroLeadership Institute, a science-based leadership development company, has studied the way our brains react to trauma, and his team is working with several businesses to develop strategies that support employees. Continue Reading on Forbes
If the saying goes that first we make our habits, and then our habits make us, in times of crisis we had better make sure we form the right habits as early as possible. Our organizations and the livelihoods of our employees could be at stake if we don’t. Continue Reading on ATD
Consider a different perspective on current events: By “befriending the naysayer,” we can better navigate the pandemic, personally and professionally.
As we learn what change initiatives actually look and feel like, we want to share the themes and questions from our research to help you work through them.
California-based electric scooter rental company Bird recently laid off 30% of its workforce at once over a live Zoom conference call, due to the financial impact of the coronavirus on the business. It is reportedly the fastest start-up to have achieved a $1 billion valuation, also known as “unicorn” status, but its business has been ground to a halt by lockdown measures due to the pandemic. Continue Reading on CNBC
Performance conversations are a critical moment for leaders to help their team members feel supported and keep engagement steady.
Continue Reading on Forbes
High levels of stress and anxiety can affect your ability to focus. Science shows us how you can manage the threat, maintain focus, and stay productive.
With many employees working from home full-time, developing these five habits to mitigate distance bias is critical to good decision-making.
On this week’s episode of Rough Translation, Dr. David Rock (Co-founder and CEO of NeuroLeadership Institute) explains distance bias and provides some solutions to keep people connected.
Continue Reading on Forbes
Amid the CV-19 crisis, work relationships can be complex. The science of social threat and reward can help us understand and fulfill our partners’ needs.
Continue Reading on Quartz
Science can help us understand what leaders should do to navigate the uncertainty surrounding the corona virus crisis. Join Dr. David Rock to learn how.
Continue Reading on Forbes
Science can help us understand the data about the corona virus, what leaders should do to address the threat, and how to navigate these uncertain times.
Toxic cultures don’t stem from a lack of ping pong tables or free snacks. They stem from a poor set of priorities, habits, and systems.
Working remotely may be the new normal for the foreseeable future. Learn how you can make working remotely more brain-friendly, productive, and inclusive.
The NeuroLeadership Institute is looking to interview people who have led organizational change efforts within their companies for an upcoming project.
We can learn a lot from the failed speaking-up moments from ill-fated flights like the Challenger. Learn how to help your team speak up when it matters.
Leaders who offer flexible work arrangements increase the diversity of their hiring pool, new data suggest. They may also build greater inclusion.
Continue Reading on Forbes
Range is critical for not only individuals, but teams too. Learn how cultivating collective range can help your team defeat groupthink.
A distance bias occurs when we prioritize what’s closer in space or time than what’s farther away. Here’s how to mitigate the bias to prioritize better.
The culmination of the NFL season gives us a good opportunity to think about what great coaches can teach us about great leadership.
Continue Reading on Forbes
Ann Schulte is encouraging mindset and learning agility at Procter & Gamble to tackle challenges and disruption.
A major theme at the 2019 NeuroLeadership Summit, regenerative leadership is a set of practices that uplift employees, rather than deplete or sustain them.
Speaking up does more than just elevate new voices. It creates a richer, more creative network of ideas within an organization.
Building a leadership model is a bit like building a house. Both require coherence, the structural integrity that holds elements together.
Individual contributors all the way up to CEOs are curious where to start when it comes to diversity and inclusion. Here’s the brain-based answer.
At the 2019 NeuroLeadership Summit, we caught up with psychologist Dr. Valerie Purdie Greenaway to discuss what it looks like to scale social learning.
Continue Reading on Forbes
Even the most memorable leadership models won’t lead to behavior change if employees don’t find the model to be meaningful and relevant to their job.
While the Net Promoter Score is a widely touted figure in learning and development, a more useful measurement focuses on actual behavior change.
Let’s Start a Conversation Read the Full Case Study KEY INDUSTRY Financial Services PRACTICE AREA Culture & Leadership PRODUCT Trusted as the Bias Mitigation Partner To Some of the World’s Most Impactful Organizations Case Studies by Practice Area Across industries, we make organizations more human and higher performing through science. These case studies show the change we can co-create. Diversity, Equity & InclusionTake inspiration from firms that mitigate bias and create equitable cultures.Accelerate Inclusion Culture & LeadershipExplore how organizations transform their culture, and shift mindsets at scale.Transform Leadership Talent & PerformanceLearn how companies harness feedback to improve employee retention, engagement and development.Optimize Performance Want to Find the best solution for you today? Commit to Change Connect with NeuroLeadership experts to explore how you can transform your organization at impact, speed, and scale. Scroll To Top
The NeuroLeadership Institute’s new “Idea Report” highlights the importance of leadership models being “sticky” in the brain. Now think: Is yours?
How do you bring your organization’s purpose to life? By relying on the science of memory and motivation to go essential, rather than exhaustive.
Where most companies’ leadership models are exhaustive, Microsoft’s leadership principles contain just six words, split into three phrases.
Change will always feel slightly uncomfortable. The trick is using your mindset to interpret the change as an opportunity to grow.
The NeuroLeadership Institute’s latest Idea Report, “Building Brain-Friendly Leadership Models,” finds every effective model satisfies three key criteria.
As organizations strive to become more human-centric, leaders will need to confront their own abilities to share organizational truths through storytelling.
To create a culture of empathy, leaders should recognize that empathy isnt a single trait. Its a suite of skills to practice over time.
A major concept discussed at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit was growth mindset, a critical tool for boosting teams’ performance.
Cigna, a global leader in healthcare services, has embraced growth mindset to transform both its agility and its approach to performance management.
Day 2 at the 2019 NeuroLeadership Summit focuses on the capacity of the human brain, how to humanize performance management, and scaling learning.
The opening session of the 2019 NeuroLeadership Summit focuses on the human: how to recognize the need for humanity and building cultures that value humans.
For the past few years, Microsoft has been embarking on a journey to diversify its workforce and increase feelings of inclusion company-wide.
Arianna Huffington, Founder and CEO of Thrive Global, explains on the Your Brain at Work podcast what “thrive time” is all about.
Modern working life is overrun with distractions, obligations, and burnout. Arianna Huffington, author and CEO of Thrive Global, has made it her mission to infuse more humanity into how work gets done. In this week’s episode, Arianna sits down with Dr. David Rock, NLI Co-Founder and CEO, to explore the problem of being “always on” and offer leaders strategies to make their own organizations more human.
Microsoft’s growth mindset has helped the organization develop into one of the most valuable companies in the world. Here’s how they did it.
It’s one of the most common missteps leaders make in expanding their talent pool: creating diversity without inclusion. Here’s why both matter.
Powerful people are revered for their visionary thinking and ability to inspire. But research also reveals the more dangerous, negative effects of power.
Dr. Mona Weiss studies why some people speak up at work, and others keep quiet. Here she presents leaders with some advice to raise quiet voices.
The most dangerous sound in any organization is silence. And yet, for many of us, speaking up is one of the hardest things to do at work. In this week’s episode, Assistant Professor of Management and Diversity at the Free University of Berlin Dr. Mona Weiss discusses her research around “employee voice.” She explains why personality alone can’t explain why some people keep quiet and why others make themselves heard, and offers research-backed tips to get everyone more engaged.
As detailed in our new white paper, “Growth Mindset: Case Study Collection,” the Telenor case study illustrates how companies of any age and size can adapt.
Diversity goes far beyond the mere notion of quotas. It’s how modern teams raise their collective intelligence and make smarter decisions.
Performance management can drum up some pretty intense emotions. Fortunately, leaders can use neuroscience to make it more effective.
Mastercard CIO Randall Tucker knows how to talk about diversity and inclusion so that people will listen. And it starts with a focus on business strategy.
No one wants to be told they need fixing, and yet this is the impression so many diversity and inclusion programs leave on employees. According to Randall Tucker, Chief Inclusion Officer at Mastercard, the smarter way to gain people’s buy-in is to frame D&I as an extension of an organization’s business goals. That way, Randall says, leaders can help people see D&I as a tool for building their skills, not correcting their flaws.
Growth mindset comes alive in a number of organizations, and a new NLI white paper showcases four of those success stories.
Leaders who cultivate an organizational growth mindset can focus their attention in a number of areas, all of them beneficial for overall team health.
For the last few years, Microsoft has been on a transformational feedback journey in which people stop giving feedback and instead start asking for it.
Whenever we learn something new, our instincts may lead us to internalize dangerous myths and mistakes. Continue reading on Thrive Global
This year’s NeuroLeadership Summit takes place November 19-20, but consider this your early opportunity to meet the Summit scientists today.
It’s among the most heart-stopping questions a person can receive at work: Can I give you some feedback? But research shows it doesn’t have to be so dread-inducing. Done right, feedback can spark transformation. On this week’s episode, Liz Friedman, Senior Director of Global Performance & Development at Microsoft, shares how America’s most valuable company is learning to make self-improvement an active effort through smarter feedback.
Performance management has been in flux for the last decade, and now NLI wants to hear from you about your experiences with the PM process.
In order to create more diverse and inclusive cultures, leaders need to learn how to change behaviors, rather than focus on changing beliefs.
Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management at the London School of Business, says everyone should ask themselves two questions related to the work they do.
Lynda Gratton believes the human experience is fundamentally shifting. It’s moving away from the three-stage life of education, career, and retirement, and instead moving into what she calls a “multi-stage life,” whereby people learn, work, and relax over many decades, well into old age. On this episode, discover how Lynda sees the future playing out in discussion with NLI’s Co-Founder and CEO, Dr. David Rock.
The question of how to launch a transformation can seem too big to tackle, but with a brain-friendly approach, there are a few first principles to follow.
It’s hard to know when we’ve assembled just the right people for just the right jobs. That’s where the idea of “thoughtful exclusion” comes into play.
Award-winning journalist Soledad O’Brien discusses the power of storytelling in helping leaders build inclusion throughout their teams.
The growing wisdom to “kill performance ratings” actually follows from an even larger observation about traditional performance management.
No one likes to feel like a number. And yet, so many organizations use rigid, ratings-based approaches for tracking employees’ performance. Rob Ollander-Krane, Director of Talent Planning and Performance at Gap Inc., has for years decided to take his teams in a different direction — namely, by killing performance ratings. In this episode, discover how Rob’s bold decision has ushered in a brand-new world of work.
More than 200 CEOs have agreed to put societal values ahead of profits. Here’s why brain science says this is a move in the right direction.
Deb Bubb, IBM’s Chief Leadership and Learning Officer, believes the AI revolution doesn’t necessarily mean job loss, just a great need for reskilling.
To help employees learn new skills, IBM knows those people need to feel connected to their work. Which is why for the past few years, Deb Bubb, IBM’s Chief Leadership and Learning Officer, has sought to create more tight-knit communities within the company. That means more women. More people of color. And more cohesion overall. Listen in as Deb shares her progress and philosophies in adapting to this reskilling revolution.
Dean Carter, CHRO at Patagonia, discusses how taking a “regenerative” approach to performance management truly gets the best out of people.
Whether it’s sharing an idea or challenging someone else’s behavior, speaking up at work is fraught with feelings of threat.
For thousands of years, humans have used storytelling to share their truths and connect with others. And yet, as so many of today’s organizations continue to diversify, leaders still struggle to include a range of perspectives, even for critical decisions. Award-winning journalist Soledad O’Brien shares her thoughts on our collective need to get a bit more personal.
Patagonia, the clothing company beloved for its mountain-ready apparel, has a vision for changing not just everything about human resources, but about how we do business — and it might just save us all. Dean Carter, Patagonia’s CHRO, joins us to discuss the fascinating crossovers between agriculture and human-centered management.
In organizations around the world, leaders face urgent issues: a crisis in employee engagement, the need to make workforces more diverse, and the challenge of making workplaces feel human in an era of increasing dependence on technology. At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we believe brain science can help provide solutions.
FD Wilder, recently retired after 38 years as the Global Head of Innovation at P&G, believes the fastest learner prevails in the end. In this episode, FD shares the approach Procter & Gamble has taken in this new fight for consumer dollars to develop the products that millions of people use every day.
Getting feedback doesn’t have to feel like an attack on your performance. With a growth mindset, feedback can become the useful tool it’s meant to be.
By using growth mindset, we can give performance reviews that are more accurate, less threatening, and support our team members to develop and succeed.
This year’s NeuroLeadership Summit will feature scientists doing research around teamwork, learning, motivation, and more.
A keynote session at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit explores the social domains that can either motivate us to perform or cause us to recede in threat.
A recent poll suggests that HR leaders may see manager capabilities as a major obstacle in performance management, but they say the solution lies elsewhere.
Author and speaker Douglas Rushkoff will give the opening keynote address at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit, speaking on why we should keep teams human.
Research has shown that leaders can improve multiple aspects of performance management by helping their teams to build a growth mindset.
Meaningful learning can’t occur when our brains are flooded with information. That’s why creating coherence in corporate learning content is so important.
The theme of this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit is “A More Human Organization.” Read more to learn what makes a refocus on people so vital.
Research suggests there are three key components that help teams achieve lasting behavior change: priorities, habits, and systems.
Growth mindset is instrumental for creating the right performance management, as it builds resilience in people and helps them embrace challenges.
Microsoft’s culture change journey has been marked by a persistent focus on going simple and establishing its essential leadership principles.
When leaders create the “conditions for insight,” as NLI calls them, they’re able to unlock the greatest creative potential from their teams.
There are two key habits leaders can build in their cultures to promote speaking up: minimizing a threat state in speakers and those being spoken to.
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Leadership models tend to be exhaustive, rather than essential, which makes them harder to put to use. Research suggests three key habits to focus on.
Reframing a common question around transformation may help leaders reduce the sense of threat often provoked by major change.
When the right people come together, teams can think and act more efficiently. At NLI, we call this balance “optimal inclusion.”
In many organizations, performance management conversations happen maybe four times a year. NLI knows how to make them a regular part of work life.
A key aspect of organizational transformation involves leaders getting buy-in from their teams. But leadership doesn’t come without followership.
The AGES Model helps organizations take a new approach to learning efforts, turning mandatory events into meaningful experiences.
Humans may instinctively resist change, since it threatens our current stability, but research suggests there are ways to reframe change as a positive.
Here’s how leaders create an environment in which both extroverts and introverts feel comfortable sharing their ideas in meetings.
Transformation is on just about every leader’s mind, but not every organization is equipped to handle major change. Science can help.
Every meeting contains some mixture of extroverts and introverts — people who speak up and those who keep quiet. Here’s how to raise quiet voices.
Scientific research suggests there are three key habits around quality conversations that leaders can build to improve employee engagement and retention.
As part of a research project, NLI wants to hear from talent leaders about the leadership models they’ve helped build in their organization.
Emails, texts, chats, and spur-of-the-moment conversations are all common distractions at work. Research suggests it’s hurting organizations’ bottom lines.
Insights, those eureka moments where you suddenly see the world totally different, don’t happen when most people may expect them.
As corporations and governments grow ever more reliant on artificial intelligence to help them make decisions, algorithms have more and more power to influence our lives. We rely on algorithms to help us decide who gets hired, who gets a bank loan or mortgage, and who’s granted parole. And when we think about AI — deep learning and neural networks, circuit boards and code — we like to imagine it as neutral and objective, free from the imperfections of human brains. Computers don’t make mistakes, and the very idea of bias is a uniquely human failing. Right? It’s true that our ancient primate brains, evolved for tribal warfare and adapted for life on the savannah, are riddled with systematic errors of judgment and perception that bias our decisions. As we like to say at the NeuroLeadership Institute: “If you have a brain, you have bias.” But the reality is that algorithms, since they’re designed by humans, are far from neutral and impartial. On the contrary, algorithms have frequently been shown to have disparate impact on groups that are already socially disadvantaged — a phenomenon known as “algorithmic bias.” Just as a lack of dissenting voices in a group discussion can lead to groupthink, as we highlighted in our recent white paper, a lack of diversity in a dataset can lead to algorithmic bias. We can think of this phenomenon as a kind of “digital groupthink.” Consider the below examples of digital groupthink gone wrong: 1. Medical Malpractice Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence in which a computer infers rules from a data set it’s given. But data sets themselves can be biased, which means the resulting algorithm may duplicate or even amplify whatever human bias already existed. The Google semantic analysis tool word2vec can correctly answer questions like “sister is to woman as brother is to what?” (Answer: man.) But when Google researchers had the system practice using articles from Google News and asked it the question, “Father is to doctor as mother is to what?” the algorithm answered “nurse.” Based on the articles in the news, the algorithm inferred that “father + medical = doctor” and “mother + medical profession = nurse.” The inference was valid based on the dataset it studied, but it exposes a societal bias we should address, not perpetuate. 2. Saving Face In recent years, several companies have developed machine learning technology to identify faces in photographs. Unfortunately, studies show that these systems don’t recognize dark-skinned faces as well as light-skinned ones — a serious problem now that facial recognition is used not just in consumer electronics, but also in law enforcement agencies like the FBI. In a study of commercial facial recognition systems from IBM, Microsoft, and a Chinese company called Face++, MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini found that the systems were better at classifying white faces than darker ones, and more accurate for men’s faces than for women’s. IBM’s system, the Watson Visual Recognition service, got white male faces wrong just 0.3% of the time. Compare that to 34.7% for black women. Buolamwini’s study promptly went viral and IBM, to its credit, responded swiftly, retraining its system with a fresh dataset and improving its recognition rates tenfold in a matter of weeks. 3. Boy Scouts Amazon has long been known as a pioneer of technological efficiency. It has found innovative ways to automate everything from warehouse logistics to merchandise pricing. But last year, when the company attempted to streamline its process for recruiting top talent, it discovered a clear case of algorithmic bias. Amazon had developed a recruiting engine, powered by machine learning, that assigned candidates a rating of one star to five stars. But the algorithm had been trained by observing patterns in resumes submitted to Amazon over a ten-year period. And since the tech industry has been male-dominated, the most qualified and experienced resumes submitted during that period tended to come from men. As a result, the hiring tool began to penalize resumes contained the word “women’s,” as in “captain of the women’s chess club.” To its credit, Amazon quickly detected the gender bias in its algorithm, and the engine was never used to evaluate job candidates. It’s tempting to think that artificial intelligence will remove bias from our future decision-making. But so long as humans have a role to play in designing and programming the way AI “thinks,” there will always be the possibility that bias — and groupthink — will be baked in. To learn more about eradicating groupthink in your organization, download “The Business Case: How Diversity Defeats Groupthink.”
A great deal of research makes it clear that identity diversity matters just as much as cognitive diversity in creating effective teams.
Conventional wisdom says leaders must prepare for specific change events. The reality is change is constant, so adaptability is key.
Groupthink bubbles up when dissenting voices keep quiet. Leaders can improve group decision-making when they work to raise those quiet voices.
Groupthink isn’t invisible. If leaders know how to spot groupthink in their team meetings, they can take concrete steps to make sure it doesn’t crop up.
The Bay of Pigs Invasion, a political move widely viewed as a textbook case of failed decision-making, has helped psychologists study major organizations.
With a continued focus on growth and key leadership principles, HP has managed to dominate its market and see huge gains in engagement.
What causes groupthink? One major factor is the tendency people have in meetings to rush toward consensus, just so the meeting can end earlier.
Exhaustive lists of leadership principles burden the brain, making them hard to remember and nearly impossible to weave into the larger culture.
Groupthink is what happens when team members stop thinking independently, don’t speak up, and race toward consensus. But leaders can still avoid it.
Whether someone speaks up at work or keeps quiet often comes down to their sense of social threat or reward, which leaders play a crucial role in creating.
A focus on growth mindset and building unity through conversations and bias mitigation have helped Nokia create lasting culture change.
Establishing the right priorities are important to create long-lasting change, but leaders also need to implement the right habits and systems.
Our brains crave certainty and loathe uncertainty, both of which make thinking about even the near future extremely difficult.
A shift in mindset — from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset — is the first step leaders need to take in their organization to help kickstart culture change.
Research shows some leaders take growth mindset and run in all sorts of directions with it. To understand why, we can look to the science of learning.
At NLI, we like to say “If you have a brain, you’re biased.” Ever since November 2017, the technology company Splunk has taken that insight to heart.
Changing a culture can feel like just about the toughest job a leader has. It’s hard enough getting yourself to act differently — how could you possibly change the behavior of hundreds or thousands of people? From both our research and extensive client work, helping companies like Microsoft and HP transform their cultures, the NeuroLeadership Institute is confident that all leaders are capable of effecting great change. The key is to follow the science — to know how to shift people’s mindsets to adopt new habits for the long haul. Our latest white paper, “The NLI Guide: How Culture Change Really Happens,” delves into just that topic. The report provides a two-step process that begins with building a growth mindset — that is, the pursuit of always improving, not proving, yourself — and following NLI’s method of Priorities, Habits, and Systems to cement culture change. Every Thursday for the next seven weeks, we’ll be publishing insights from the white paper on this blog, as part of our latest Master Class series. (Catch the last Master Class series, on growth mindset, here.) Table of Contents Week 2: The First Step Toward Culture Change Is a Shift in Mindset Week 3: Leaders Need More Than Buy-In to Create Culture Change Week 4: CASE STUDY: Nokia Turns Two Cultures into One Week 5: How Microsoft Changed Its Culture by Going Simple Week 6: CASE STUDY: HP Embraces Growth Mindset and Kickstarts Culture Change Together, the posts will serve as a handy reference guide for the essential science (and implementation) of culture change. The conventional wisdom around transformation is flawed. It assumes awareness of the challenge or goal is enough. But once you’ve gotten buy-in, then what? NLI’s approach to culture change helps organizations answer that question, so they can make a lasting, scalable impact — and they can do it weeks, not years. [action hash=”1c967ecd-f614-4b3d-a6f1-a14c6ec523bc”]
The research has made it clear: Creating a culture of feedback is the most critical driver of positive organizational and financial outcomes.
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Leaders typically think of growth mindset in terms of performance, personal growth, career development, and skills improvement. But the concept also can be crucial to driving diversity and inclusion efforts. The key: Whether you believe you are capable of improvement often determines whether you think other people are capable of change. That, in turn, shapes how you view your team as a whole. At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we define growth mindset as the dual belief that skills can be improved over time, and that improving those skills is the goal of the work people do. We recently explored this concept in a white paper featuring growth-mindset case studies from five leading global organizations. What science says Research has found a number of benefits to building a growth mindset culture, specifically around inclusion. For instance, growth mindset can reduce stereotyping. Researchers have found that whether or not you think people are fixed or mutable in who they are shapes how many stereotypical judgments people make. If you use a growth mindset, you are more likely to attribute stereotype traits to environmental forces, rather than inborn traits. When making judgments, a growth mindset also helps people gather more information before coming to conclusions. In one study, those with a fixed mindset needed less context before making a decision, potentially leading to undesired or unforeseen outcomes. Growth mindset doesn’t just help people doing the stereotyping; it also helps people on the receiving end. Consider the idea of “stereotype threat.” It’s when members of a certain group do poorly on a task because they’re told they’re not “supposed” to excel. A body of research has shown that growth mindset can reduce the effects of stereotype threat, enabling people to perform closer to their true potential. The business case For organizations, the implication here is that cultivating a growth mindset culture can help drive down biased behavior and create stronger teams. Leaders who help their employees see failures as learning opportunities, and threats as new and exciting challenges, can also help those employees see others’ shortcomings not as signs of personal failings, but merely as a product of being human. When employees start accepting diverse team members as generally well-intentioned, though perhaps fallible, they can move from a culture of competition to one of true and inclusive collaboration. This article is the twelfth and final installment in NLI’s series, Growth Mindset: The Master Class, a 12-week campaign to help leaders see how the world’s largest organizations are putting growth mindset to use. [action hash=”cd97f93c-1daf-4547-8f7c-44b6f2a77b77″]
Let’s Start a Conversation Read the Full Case Study KEY INDUSTRY Financial Services PRACTICE AREA Diversity, Equity & Inclusion PRODUCT Trusted as the Diversity, equity and inclusion Partner To Some of the World’s Most Impactful Organizations Case Studies by Practice Area Across industries, we make organizations more human and higher performing through science. These case studies show the change we can co-create. Diversity, Equity & InclusionTake inspiration from firms that mitigate bias and create equitable cultures.Accelerate Inclusion Culture & LeadershipExplore how organizations transform their culture, and shift mindsets at scale.Transform Leadership Talent & PerformanceLearn how companies harness feedback to improve employee retention, engagement and development.Optimize Performance Want to Find the best solution for you today? Commit to Change Connect with NeuroLeadership experts to explore how you can transform your organization at impact, speed, and scale. Scroll To Top
The beloved author H.P. Lovecraft has been famously quoted as saying that “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Lovecraft was no neuroscientist or business expert, but in this era of constant change, his sentiment rings true. Organizations face technological advances like never before, creating an ever-growing gap between existing and required skills. At NLI, we believe even the most fearful leader can take solace in the science of perspective-taking, insight, and effective execution, in order to lead a transformation in their organization. Here are three brain-based strategies all leaders can employ. [action hash=”1c967ecd-f614-4b3d-a6f1-a14c6ec523bc”] 1) Use SCARF® to practice perspective-taking Taking others’ perspectives offers many benefits, including seeing new possibilities with clients, colleagues, and even competitors. Perspective-taking facilitates social understanding and increases willingness to engage with others, build relationships, increases perceived leadership capability, and decreases stereotyping. Perspective-taking hinges on three processes: understanding that others possess mental states, realizing those mental states are not identical to our own, and overcoming the self-focused bias of our own perspective. Leaders can use the SCARF® Model — a way of grouping five domains of social threat and reward — to facilitate understanding of others’ motivation and social behavior. Specifically, they should explicitly ask for others’ perspectives, consciously take the perspective of those they seek to understand, and purposefully set aside time to practice. 2) Accelerate breakthroughs by creating the conditions for insight Innovation requires creative thinking, which neuroscience research suggests often derives from moments of insight. Research also shows that there is a reliable series of events that precede emergence of an insight — meaning that it’s not random; it follows a process. Threat and noise reduce the likelihood of insight generation, while a positive mood and relaxed state increase the chance of insight. Leaders can approach team processes with insight in mind by noticing when people tend to have the deepest insights and creating those conditions in daily processes. For example, leaving mornings — when people tend to have the most insights — free for private, quiet work. And allow people to have a few quiet minutes to reflect during a meeting rather than all working aloud. 3) Create extreme clarity for faster execution Uncertainty creates threat, flatlines creativity, impairs decision making, and ultimately diminishes productivity. When people feel threatened, their instinct is to be as careful as possible, often to the point of excess. For instance, role uncertainty breeds indecision and a pathological need for consensus to ensure that everyone is in agreement, which impedes swift progress. To mitigate threat and promote efficiency, leaders should create extreme clarity and set clear expectations in the areas that matter most. These include roles, process, and determining what “good” looks like. Creating extreme clarity in all five SCARFⓇ domains generates a sense of perceived control, which is fundamentally rewarding. Individuals and teams are more motivated to work together and accomplish goals with alacrity through transformation. Indeed, approaching transformation with the right strategies is like folding a paper airplane. Done right, you can make that flat piece of paper soar. [action hash=”1c967ecd-f614-4b3d-a6f1-a14c6ec523bc”]
Across all of our industry research into growth mindset, one question keeps popping up for leaders: If we’re so focused on growth, can we still focus on results? We’ve heard the concern voiced in a number of different ways in discussions with organizations putting growth mindset to use, which we’ve featured in our latest white paper, “Impact Report: Growth Mindset Supports Organizations Through Disruption.” The paper showcases how firms make growth mindset come to life and drive lasting change. In short, the answer is yes. How to measure progress and results We define growth mindset as the belief that skills can be improved with persistent effort; they are not set in stone, or fixed. A Growth Mindset Culture is one where most, if not all, employees demonstrate that attitude in their shared everyday habits. They embrace failure. They take risks. They learn to get better. Fortunately, growth mindset makes room for an emphasis on learning and checking progress over time, because it’s not about comparing two different employees or teams to one another; it’s about comparing one employee or team to themselves. One way to do all that and still ensure you’re moving in the right direction is to perform a bit of mental contrasting. The technique involves holding in your mind’s eye the memories of the past or the vision of the desired future, and contrasting them with the present reality. When leaders contrast where they are to where they were, or where they’d like to go, they can evaluate the fruits of their growth mindset. They can ask themselves questions such as, How much have we grown? Are we growing in the right ways? What else still needs attention? In fact, it’s crucial that leaders encourage their teams to focus on results and learnings, since growth requires two endpoints. A team may never hit certain ideals, but by measuring achievement against specific objectives, leaders can know the growth mindset is working. In other words, growth mindset isn’t important just for its own sake. At some point, everyone still needs to stop and see how far they’ve come. This article is the tenth installment in NLI’s series, Growth Mindset: The Master Class, a 12-week campaign to help leaders see how the world’s largest organizations are putting growth mindset to use. [action hash=”cd97f93c-1daf-4547-8f7c-44b6f2a77b77″]
When collecting data on learning sessions, the net promoter score is the default for many organizations. But there are numerous flaws with the approach.
Leaders are constantly wondering how to create or strengthen their culture. So as part of its ongoing NLI Guide series, the NeuroLeadership Institute has released its latest white paper, “How Culture Change Really Happens.” In simple, everyday language, the guide makes a compelling case that leaders should be pursuing two lower-level objectives in order to produce — and sustain — culture change. Without both elements, teams may start working more efficiently, but the behavior is bound to subside. NLI’s approach to culture change starts with growth mindset. Leaders must help their employees understand that mistakes happen, and that failure is inevitable. What matters is whether people see those setbacks as reasons to give up, or to persist. Once people start embracing challenges as opportunities, rather than as threats, NLI believes the next step is PHS: priorities, habits, and systems. Leaders often make the mistake of thinking awareness of a goal is enough motivation to achieve it. But willpower is fleeting, so it’s important to create the habits that support a change, and the systems that reinforce those habits. We define culture as shared everyday habits. With a growth mindset and a focus on priorities, habits, and systems, leaders should have no trouble building the desired shared everyday habits in their own organization. [action hash=”1c967ecd-f614-4b3d-a6f1-a14c6ec523bc”]
By now, most leaders understand that organizational growth mindset is a transformative tool for talent development. The belief that others can develop their abilities — and the ability to help them do so — are powerful ways to help employees become more resilient, more nimble, and more innovative. But actually putting all that into practice within an organization is more difficult than it sounds. As we recently learned in our industry research project — an endeavor we captured in a new white paper, “Growth Mindset Culture” — leaders are finding that two main obstacles keep getting in the way. Here’s what they’re about and how to address them. Obstacle #1: An imperfect understanding of growth mindset When it comes to cultivating growth mindset within an organization, it’s not enough for leaders to simply tell employees to have a growth mindset. Nor should leaders simply declare that they themselves have a growth mindset when the reality is that many leaders don’t fully understand it. For leaders to really embody growth mindset, they need to ask themselves: Do they truly believe in their own need to grow, and not just that of their employees? The best way to promote growth mindset throughout an organization, we’ve found, is for leaders to embody growth mindset themselves. Our research showed that leadership buy-in was critical for the success of growth-mindset initiatives. To assess their own understanding, leaders should ask themselves three questions: Do I believe that everyone in their organization has the capacity to grow? Do I believe there’s talent everywhere in the organization — talent that should be fostered and acknowledged as it emerges? Am I open about my own mistakes, and the lessons I draw from those mistakes? Only when leaders understand these principles fully, deeply, and accurately can they truly serve as models of growth mindset for their employees. Obstacle #2: Policies that don’t reflect a true commitment to growth Once leaders begin to master the principles of growth mindset, they can turn their attention to disseminating it throughout the organization. But fostering a culture of growth mindset requires more than just sending out a few emails or running a training workshop. It also means revising practices, policies, and systems throughout the organization to make sure they value not just performance, but learning, growth, and progress over time. Unfortunately, many organizations that claim to value growth mindset treat their employees in a way that doesn’t value their growth — for instance, firing an employee who makes a mistake rather than treating it as an opportunity to learn and grow. When this happens, it signals that the organization may be overvaluing performance relative to growth. The key to creating a supportive environment is communication. Employees and managers should speak frequently in a constructive evaluation process. They should discuss what they’re really happy with, what can still be improved, and how to collaborate on getting there. Ultimately, organizations that truly care about employees’ growth and development know that making mistakes is inevitable — and they foster an environment where mistakes are seen not as indictments of worth or ability, but as opportunities for growth and improvement. This article is the ninth installment in NLI’s new series, Growth Mindset: The Master Class, a 12-week campaign to help leaders see how the world’s largest organizations are putting growth mindset to use.
The key to addressing toxic behavior might be the third person in the room. A new study of more than 6,000 college students suggests a major way to reduce toxic behavior is through bystander training — that is, equipping people who witness instances of assault, or possible warning signs, to quickly intervene. People who underwent training intended to act and actually did more much often than those who weren’t trained. The finding bolsters what the NeuroLeadership Institute has found with respect to “employee voice,” or the extent to which employees feel empowered to make constructive, challenging upward communication like calling out harassment or other toxic behaviors. Multiplied across an entire organization, cultures of speaking up may hold the power stamp out toxic behavior, creating a cultural impact that goes beyond compliance training. Bystanders play a crucial role Good-faith arguments that recipients of toxic behavior should speak up themselves make sense in theory, but for many who experience assault, bullying, or harassment firsthand, the pain and confusion is much too paralyzing. In turn, negative feelings get internalized, and toxic behaviors may go unchecked. The new study, led by Clemson University sociologist Heather Hensman Kettrey and published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, suggests an alternate path toward safer and healthier work environments. Kettrey found that training programs designed to encourage witnesses of sexual assault or predatory behavior to intervene had a meaningful effect on bystander behavior. Program participants both intended to take more action and did take more action in the months following the training — two times more often, on average — than students who hadn’t gotten trained. “These findings are especially important considering that research indicates that traditional sexual assault programs, which target the behavior of potential victims or of potential perpetrators, are not particularly effective at preventing assault,” Kettrey writes in The Conversation. “Thus, the power to prevent sexual assault may lie in the hands of bystanders.” The importance of focusing on culture When lower-status people feel targeted by higher-status people, fears of retribution or other social threats prevent them from speaking up. Bystanders don’t necessarily fit into the same power dynamic, enabling them to act as neutral advocates on behalf of the lower-status employee. It’s in leaders’ interest, in other words, to create better bystanders and cultivate a culture of speaking up. To do this, leaders need to instill the right day-to-day habits across their organizations. For instance, they can create clear if-then plans to give employees a sense of certainty if an ambiguous situation may arise. Rather than sit idly by, worrying if they’ll get punished for speaking out, a bystander can turn to the if-then plan everyone agreed upon. This kind of intervention is different from the norm because it goes beyond compliance. It gives leaders behavioral tools to enable all employees to speak up early and often. In cultures of speaking up, employees value consequences. Bad actors can’t slip under the radar because warning signs get reported long before they reach a boiling point. “We, as a society, should strive to become better bystanders by noticing the warning signs of a potential assault, knowing strategies to intervene, and remembering that we have a collective responsibility to prevent sexual assault,” Kettrey writes. The same is true in the workplace. Teams composed of better bystanders create a common good in the larger culture, which enables everyone to feel free and safe to get their best work done.
Just because leaders have made growth a near universal priority, doesn’t mean that they necessarily know how to implement growth mindset. New data from the NeuroLeadership Institute makes that gap clearer than ever. Results from a recent survey* showed a whopping 48% of people, when asked about the top obstacle for kickstarting growth mindset in their organizations, said it was the uncertainty of how to put growth mindset into action. Interpreting the data To us, this result indicates that leaders still feel they lack the tools to build a “growth mindset culture,” or one in which employees embrace failure and see challenges as opportunities, not threats. It also suggests that people feel uncertain about the business case for growth mindset in organizations. Alternatively, they may feel unsure how to get others to care about its potential relevance to performance. All these doubts may accompany the ever-present misunderstandings and old myths around what growth mindset is and is not. Equally telling, our survey showed that 25% of respondents felt existing systems discourage growth mindset from taking shape. This highlighted for us the importance of creating work and talent processes in a way that support, not oppose, a growth-mindset approach. For example, if your talent management approach worships innate talent and drives a highly competitive environment, employees may try to nip growth mindset initiatives in the bud fairly quickly. Where to look for growth mindset The good news is that just 16% of respondents said their senior leaders simply didn’t see the value in growth mindset. Any talent practitioner who ever had to convince top leaders of the need for talent development initiatives know that this is rare. Getting full executive buy in can difficult, and maintaining it even more so. We assume that high-profile leaders such as Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO and avid growth mindset supporter, lead the way by valuing the science behind growth mindset as a performance and engagement driver. To help leaders grasp the science and current application of growth mindset and equip them to make shifts in their own organizations, we captured more such findings from our industry research in our recent Idea Report, “Growth Mindset Culture,” as well as in NLI’s 12-week blog series “Growth Mindset: The Master Class.” Check out either to better understand how growth mindset advocates are make it work in their organizations.
One of the key findings from NLI’s research into growth mindset — the belief that skills can be improved, and aren’t set in stone — is that organizations adopt certain principles to match their existing culture and suit their future needs. Still, even when leaders “make their own meanings,” as we say, they may face difficulty in accepting failures as learning opportunities and seeing challenges as chances for growth. Since no one tells you that building a growth mindset can be so uncomfortable, here are four steps to help you stay on course. 1. Get familiar with the feeling of fear Growth mindset is riddled with uncertainty, one of the key social threats found in the SCARF® Model, a way of organizing unique domains of threat and reward. When we feel highly uncertain, our attention narrows and our cognitive function suffers. When developing a growth mindset in a particular area, it’s important to identify moments of fearfulness to recognize which thoughts may be holding us back. Creating this self-awareness lets people determine whether they really are in tough situation or just new to something. 2. Know you will get frustrated, and that’s okay Developing a growth mindset doesn’t mean that all learning will come easy, and that you will feel great all the time. The key to building growth mindset is to recognize that setbacks are inevitable, and also temporary. Learning requires a willingness to figure out how to make progress and move forward despite initial frustrations. Sometimes the best remedy to a challenge is rethinking your approach. Taking a break to let past insights marinate can help re-energize you to tackle the problem again. 3. Monitor your progress in order to make adjustments Embracing your ability to grow, develop, and stretch will take practice, and a focus on measuring progress over time. It helps to look at what you’ve learned and where you have room to get even better. As we’ve written before, getting to a state of regular, specific feedback one of the best ways to develop a growth mindset. That means being willing to confront weak spots, concocting ways to adjust, and testing those solutions as soon as possible. 4. Share what you’ve learned and what it took to get there One of the most powerful ways to embrace the discomfort of developing a growth mindset is to share your journey and learning with others. As the G and E in the AGES model for learning suggest, generation and emotion are key to learning. We learn best when we can turn ideas into concrete writing or discussion, and create new energy around it. Sharing your wins and failures may create greater intrinsic reward, which research has shown is extremely motivating. And who knows, you may gain a Growth Mindset Partner as you share your story. This article is the eighth installment in NLI’s series, Growth Mindset: The Master Class, a 12-week campaign to help leaders see how the world’s largest organizations are putting growth mindset to use. [action hash=”cd97f93c-1daf-4547-8f7c-44b6f2a77b77″]
As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has put it, leaders should be striving for an organization full of “learn-it-alls,” not “know-it-alls.”
The NeuroLeadership Institute is set to launch a new journal article, “Debunking Gender Myths: The Science of Gender & Performance.” It’s our deep dive into what the research says about how being a woman or a man shapes the way you lead and succeed. In order to broaden the conversation around this incredibly important issue, we are holding a short discussion on Facebook Live on December 4 at 12pm ET with NLI Chief Science Officer, Dr. Heidi Grant. It’ll be an opportunity to ask questions about men and women at work and discover the latest insights emerging from the research literature. To get the conversation going, please submit a question below and we’ll consider it for our on-air discussion. Create your own user feedback survey
Growth mindset means people believe they can get better through practice, not that anyone can become an expert at anything.
Growth mindset, the research indicates, can help leaders adapt to the automation of labor and other forms of the AI revolution.
If you feel stuck, you may have a fixed mindset about growth mindset itself. Here’s how to shift your thinking if you catch yourself using a fixed mindset.
Jam-packed meetings and overflowing project teams don’t do anyone any favors. They cause delays, create confusion, and generally make organizations less effective. At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we view this as a product of over-inclusion — not in the strategic sense, like for hiring, but for more tactical matters. It’s what happens when well-meaning leaders involve more people than necessary to avoid certain people feeling left out. But what leaders really need, according to the brain science, is to learn the tactical habit of “thoughtful exclusion.” We recently explored the concept of thoughtful exclusion for HBR, in a piece titled “How to Gracefully Exclude Coworkers from Meetings, Emails, and Projects.” It makes three basic prescriptions, which we’ve summarized below. Manage cognitive overload Research has found that 3% to 5% of employees at a given organization drive the bulk of collaboration. In turn, they also tend to be the most prone to burnout. Leaders can begin practicing thoughtful exclusion by identifying these employees, and then strategically limiting their involvement in projects and meetings. The technique affirms to people that their input is valued, but also makes clear that not every project deserves the same level of attention. Consider the social brain Humans seek out potential threats and rewards at nearly all times, even in social situations. This means the act of excluding others is intensely emotional (as those who have been left out know firsthand). Specifically, people may feel a threat to their relatedness, or the sense that they belong in a certain group. With the right language, leaders can actively minimize employees’ threat response. For instance, instead of casually mentioning to someone that they are no longer needed on a project, leaders can provide the surrounding context and reasoning for the decision. They can say things like, “I know you’ve already got a lot on your plate, and I’d like to keep you off this meeting so you can stay focused. What do you think?” This is the “thoughtful” component of thoughtful exclusion. It communicates a leader has an awareness of others, and when employees sense that awareness, they don’t feel as threatened. Set the right expectations Addressing people’s social needs is partly a matter of addressing their cognitive needs. The science has made it clear that there’s a great cost to defying a person’s expectations. When our brains think one thing will happen, but then something else happens, the brain uses much more energy to process that new information. Leaders can use this insight to better communicate about particular projects. They can give people strong rewards of certainty and fairness — two other domains of social reward or threat — by being transparent about their decision-making. Each person who enters the meeting will know why they, and everyone else, is there. And everyone who doesn’t get invited will know why, too. When leaders harness the science to get their teams on the same page, they can avoid the pains of politeness and assemble the right talent for each project. As a result, organizations as a whole can start doing more with less.
It’s easy to get overly conclusive when talking about growth mindset, or the belief that abilities can be improved over time. We may say, “Oh, I totally have a fixed mindset,” or “After all these years, I finally have a growth mindset.” But the truth is, that’s inherently a fixed-mindset way of viewing the concept, since it presumes that the mindset itself is set in stone. In reality, people don’t have a fixed or growth mindset; rather, they use a combination of the two depending on the situation. The NeuroLeadership Institute has caught this subtle difference many times over during various industry research projects, most recently culminating in our white paper “Impact Report: Growth Mindset Supports Organizations Through Disruption.” The paper features five case studies from companies making growth mindset come to life and driving lasting change. This variety made it clear that fixed and growth mindsets weren’t “switches” that people turned on or off. They were more like dimmers, capable of being dialed up or down depending on the context. How to actually think about growth mindset Think about your own life. Let’s say you like to cook and sing; maybe you’re learning a foreign language, too. At work you’ve just been promoted and now you oversee a larger team than you did in your previous role. It’s quite possible —probable, even — that you approach each of these domains with a different mindset about your abilities. Perhaps you relish the chance to try new recipes in the kitchen, and add more French to your vocabulary — classic growth mindset. At the same time, you feel like your singing chops aren’t good enough and leadership skills have hit a ceiling, each possibly indicating a fixed mindset. All those scenarios make it impossible to fairly say you have a fixed or growth mindset, because you’re using both all the time. NLI’s research over the past several months made it clear that leaders should go easy on themselves when developing a growth mindset, since the skill itself is something new to nurture. The key is to recognize when thoughts become self-limiting, and then actively work to move toward growth. If leaders can make this mental shift, past research suggests, they’ll be better at instilling growth mindset in their direct reports. In time, they can even create what NLI calls a Growth Mindset Culture — a confluence of growth mindset across an organization, each employee finding more value in getting better as opposed to being the best. This article is the fourth installment in NLI’s series, Growth Mindset: The Master Class, a 12-week campaign to help leaders see how the world’s largest organizations are putting growth mindset to use. [action hash=”cd97f93c-1daf-4547-8f7c-44b6f2a77b77″]
Author and professional poker player Maria Konnikova explained at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit how leaders can make smarter decisions.
[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” overlay_color=”” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” padding_top=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” padding_right=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”no” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=””][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””] [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”no” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=””][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””] You and about 20 of your coworkers are sitting around a crowded conference room table, discussing the details of some project. Some people are fighting for attention, trying to get a word in. Others won’t stop talking. Others have tuned the meeting out, retreating to their laptops or phones. At the end of the meeting, the only real outcome is the decision to schedule a follow-up meeting with a smaller group — a group that can actually make some decisions and execute on them. Continue Reading on Harvard Business Review [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
Management transparency has been shown to boost employee engagement, performance, and creativity. But how does transparency drive employee experience?
Change is the only constant, the old adage goes, which might explain why today’s organizations are so focused on adaptation. After spending several months interviewing 20 global organizations about growth mindset, the NeuroLeadership Institute has identified six business reasons an org might look to put the concept to use, which we’ve summarized below. (Note: Percentages may not add up to 100% due to rounding.) [action hash=”7b17478f-7c52-499f-9fd4-7a4d4b69cfa1″] 1. Digital transformation (38% of sample) The most popular reason an org might focus on growth mindset was to stay agile in the face of technological uncertainty. Big data and artificial intelligence are rapidly becoming commonplace, and organizations of all kinds — mid-tier companies and corporations alike — are looking to keep talent ready to change on a dime. 2. Business improvement (19% of sample) Some organizations used growth mindset to introduce leaner methodologies into their work streams, restructure teams, or implement new business strategies. These orgs wanted to be more agile, too, but focused more on improving internal operations than adapting to market forces. 3. Growing up (13% of sample) Growth mindset meant just that to some organizations: growth. Maturity stood out as a major reason for organizations that were smaller and looking to expand quickly and sustainably. Financial pressures, internal turmoil, and other setbacks often accompanied these efforts. 4. Reinvention (13% of sample) Organizations focused more on pivoting in some form used growth mindset to change their culture, rebound from financial troubles, and shift gears after a shakeup in leadership. Among these organizations, especially, growth mindset represented a way to see challenges as opportunities, not threats. 5. Performance management transformation (13% of sample) For some organizations, growth mindset was instrumental in overhauling the way they interviewed and hired candidates, and evaluated employees. Instead of asking employees to prove their worth, orgs can use growth mindset to see the value in improvement over time. 6. Quality enhancement (6% of sample) The university in our sample was the lone organization to use growth mindset for accreditation. It saw the concept as the means to enhance the quality of its program for the benefit of current and future students. Parting shots Why one organization might embrace digital transformation over reinvention is a product of the industry and size of each enterprise. A major takeaway from our research is that organizations mold growth-mindset efforts to fit their needs. What works for one might not always work for all, so look for the process in your org that may need growth mindset the most. This article is the third installment in NLI’s new series, Growth Mindset: The Master Class, a 12-week campaign to help leaders see how the world’s largest organizations are putting growth mindset to use. [action hash=”7b17478f-7c52-499f-9fd4-7a4d4b69cfa1″]
In-depth interviews with organizations about growth mindset revealed a fascinating collection of goals, use cases, obstacles, and outcomes.
When Peter Mende-Siedlecki was visiting a loved one in the hospital recently, he noticed something strange by the person’s bed. It was a set of statements, designed to remind the hospital staff of three things. “Please call me _____.” “What I would like you to know about me is _____.” “What I value/love most is _____.” For Mende-Siedlecki, a psychologist at the University of Delaware who’s spent a career studying empathy and spoke at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit, this was a fantastic discovery. In just three prompts, the hospital engaged in expert individuation, or the psychological practice of seeing people as unique, distinct beings. We can think of it as the opposite of stereotyping. In the workplace, individuation matters because empathy matters. Every day, teams collaborate based on overlapping strengths and weaknesses, constantly keeping others in mind. We sense people’s needs, they sense ours, and everyone adjusts accordingly. The trouble is, science has repeatedly shown that empathy is a scarce resource; our brains don’t want to spend it willy-nilly. This leads to unfortunate observations like “One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic,” and the all-too-human habit of “compassion collapse” in the face of mass tragedy, where the brain apparently has an easier time caring about one than many. Individuation, Mende-Siedlecki’s research has found, works as a kind of shortcut to empathy. If we can remember that the people around us feel pain, stress, joy, and all the other things we too feel, maybe we can escape some of the habits that hold us back. Teams don’t necessarily need to mimic the hospital’s prompts to reap the benefits of individuation. Instead, they can model themselves after the behaviors of society’s master networkers — namely, asking one another about aspects of their personal lives, such as where they’re from, who their family is, and how they stay busy, just to name a few. The practice also helps build what Stanford University psychologist Leor Hackel calls “reciprocity.” Hackel, also a speaker at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit, has found in his research that “paying it forward” through charitable actions or words, builds compassion in people. Creating empathic teams is valuable for leaders because NLI’s own research has found that collective intelligence — even of the emotional kind — is critical for team function. It’s not enough to have a star player, in other words. The best teams are smarter, more creative, and generally higher-functioning because the whole is greater the sum of its parts. It’s an ironic, humanistic takeaway: The more you help employees see each other as individuals, the stronger your entire team will be.
One of the most well-established psychological concepts, growth mindset, has exploded among leadership. But how do you cultivate growth mindset culture?
Organizations often justify a toxic environment and masculinity contest culture with the mentality of “how we do business here.”
Employees that have their social needs met are more likely to feel engaged in their jobs and less likely to look for greener pastures elsewhere.
The future is coming, and getting ready for it isn’t just a matter of more refined thinking, but broadened experiences. This how the US Army War College helps service people prepare for the future, explained Major General John S. Kem at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit. “What are the gaps for you to be more ready for uncertainty in five to ten years?” he asked. In a military context, according to Kem, it’s partly a matter of taking a tank commander and teaching them to bring diplomacy and economics into their decision-making. In organizations, it means that if you want to become a CEO but you’ve spent your career in marketing, you’re going to have to move into operations or another role to round out your perspective. In other words, it’s all about curing blind spots. At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we put this in terms of experience bias, or the assumption that if you believe something or an experience happened to you, then that must be the only way it could be. But if you go out and seek new experiences, then you’ll work toward escaping that bias. As Kem explains, however, it’s not just a matter of being able to “project into your next job,” but gathering the experiences that will expand our perspectives — and, in turn, be more prepared for uncertainty. That’s a major lesson for managing your own career or designing a talent strategy. It also, we must say, smells a lot like growth mindset: knowing that you can’t possibly know what you need to know from where you are, take the steps to address your blind spots, especially by embracing other disciplines. For more, watch the NeuroLeadership Summit livestream, broadcasting Thursday and Friday.
Facts are facts — except that they’re not. In a session on idea propagation and influence at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit, Wil Cunningham, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, explained that getting through to people is about more than simply getting things right. What we really need to focus on, he says, are assumptions about the world that they have about how things work. “We treat the world as facts,” he said, “without understanding the structure of belief system the fact operates in.” If we want to reach someone, the research indicates that there are different conceptual gatekeepers to get by. You can convince someone if they think a fact will better their wellbeing. That’s step one. Next, you have to satisfy what’s technically called “the expressive function,” or how a new fact fits within their sense of self and existing web of knowledge. That’s because Cunningham says a lot of the “facts” that we’re trying to impress upon one another are social facts, a concept identified by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim a century ago. Social facts are true to the extent that everybody in a group agrees that they’re true, like that cash has a monetary value rather than being illustrated scraps of paper. “We sometimes hold beliefs to signify the groups we belong to,” Cunningham said. So if you’re pitching someone on a social fact — like that your product solves a common pain point — and it doesn’t blend with their sense of self and group identity, there’s a good chance they’ll reject it. The whole latticework of facts, preferences, and assumptions they’ve long internalized won’t mesh with the new information or argument. If you pass that self-belief test, then you can actually add new fact to their personal web of knowledge, Cunningham says. The takeaway: Get to know your audience — and what they believe about the world — and describe things in those terms, not necessarily your own. That way, you can actually influence people and add insight to their lives. For more, watch the NeuroLeadership Summit livestream, broadcasting Thursday and Friday.
It’s tempting to blame toxic work cultures on an unknowable set of factors, but often the answer is much simpler. In an article for Fast Company, author Meghan E. Butler, partner at Frame+Function, noted that toxic workplace cultures are consistently the product of poor leadership. Specifically, toxic behavior often stems from leaders missing (or ignoring) key warning signs in how teams function. Perhaps they see aggressive work styles as signs of passion, or label cases of bullying as harmless fun. Meanwhile, employees get hurt and the culture turns toxic. Understanding SCARF As Butler points out, there are five key social domains that demand leaders’ attention: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. We call it the SCARF Model. It relies on the widespread neuroscience finding that social threats register in the brain in a similar way as physical threats: Cognitive function suffers and people’s quality of work declines. Toxic behavior can affect any SCARF domain, or several in combination. For instance, it’s threatening to a person’s status when their co-worker openly calls out a recent mistake in a team meeting. And it damages people’s sense of fairness and relatedness (or sense of belonging) when a manager plays favorites by assigning projects only to certain people. Leaders who stay aware of these domains can actively take steps to fix them, in turn creating more psychological safety at work. That means bestowing employees not with social threats, but rewards. Here are examples for each SCARF domain: Status — Leaders can celebrate employees’ contributions to the wider team, and they can celebrate team wins to the larger department or organization. Certainty — Before starting a meeting, leaders can lay out the agenda and clarify the goals he or she wishes to achieve by the end. Autonomy — Leaders can raise employees’ sense of control and ownership over their work by delegating projects across the team, rather than hoarding information and keeping people out of the loop. Relatedness — Inclusive leaders help their employees recognize shared goals, such as hitting sales targets or wrapping a big project. (Contrary to popular belief, highlighting differences may only further divide people.) Fairness — Leaders can create a sense of equality by mitigating biases, such as seeking diverse opinions around the office to reduce what psychologists call “experience bias.” The takeaway Ultimately, toxic cultures form when leaders practice the same unhelpful behaviors over and over again. These actions are seldom intentionally destructive, but unless leaders actively try to develop the correct habits — and create psychological safety for everyone — social threats are bound to arise. As Butler notes, “All of these signs can generally be whittled down to one key factor: Fear. And fear corrodes mental health and productivity.”
Adaptation requires flexibility, both in mind and behavior. Batia Wiesenfeld knows this firsthand. As the Andre J.L. Koo Professor of Management at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Wiesenfeld has made a career out of looking at the ways employees can change their thinking to max out their productivity, especially when in a state of flux. We recently chatted with Wiesenfeld, a speaker at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit, about the cutting-edge blend of business and science. NLI: What early interests did you have that led you to your long-term research on organizational change? Batia Wiesenfeld: What has been an abiding interest for me is how people adapt to the challenges of organizational life, having witnessed people who failed to adapt and whose lives were ruined. A friend’s father committed suicide because of a loss of meaning and identity after he was laid off, so there can be serious consequences when you get challenged at work. Work is so important, especially in America. It’s so important given our modern society and how we think about other people. It’s replacing the role of community. It’s replacing the role that family used to play. Now, work is where we feel like we get support, where we define our identity. We often disclose more to people we work with than our family members. So there are these extraordinary challenges and I’m interested to know how people respond to them. That’s what brought me to look at organizational change. I started out with research about things like self-esteem, self-identity, where there is a lot of emotion. And over time, I’ve started to be more and more interested in cognition. NLI: What is your research showing you now? BW: What I’ve realized is that the brain is still so much more in flux than any part of us. At some point, we’ve grown up, we’re not changing, we look the same, but our brains are still changing. Our brain tries to understand the world and adapt to it using mental representations that can range from being very abstract to very concrete. And even that — just thinking about things abstractly or concretely — is an adaptation. If you’re trying to jump beyond the here and now, or think far into the future, you have to be more abstract because the details of the here and now are like tethers that pull you down. They prevent you from making that jump, so even those mental representations are adaptations. On the other hand, all of the concrete details are incredibly helpful for getting things done. When I think of making a presentation today, instead of “I have to present at the Neuroleadership Summit in October,” I can think very abstractly, “Why do I want to do this?” As the Summit date gets closer my thinking gets very concrete. The ability to move in this agile way between more abstract and more concrete thinking is crucial to being able to adapt to our context. In my current research, I’m looking at things like how leaders and followers in organizations that are going through a change have to collaborate because they come in to the change with very different mental representations. The leaders of the organization think big picture, broad vision, way in the future. The followers — the folks who are having to carry this stuff out — they’re thinking about specifics and they’re often somewhat fearful. There has to be collaboration to get the best of both. So I’m seeing that the way we represent our world is so crucial to this phenomenon of adaptation that I’ve been studying for so long. NLI: Where do you see research in this space going in the near future? BW: One is recognizing this confluence of the body and the mind and being much more informed by physiology — neuroscience reflects physiology. It is giving us new insight and we are starting to understand how we can draw from those insights and allow them to inform what we really care about, which are behaviors, especially social behaviors. How are people interacting with one another when they’ve got to get a job done? So now we’re able to see connections. We can draw a line from social behaviors all the way back to the physiological. I see social science and natural science coming together. Data and the ability to process it is part of what’s changing organizations. We have access to so much more information, so much data, and we’re able to do so much more with it such as using it to build theory. I think we used to start from theory and only use data to test it. People are really interested in understanding the future of work, how work is changing, the work experience, and organizations. All of those are changing largely because of technology, and technology is also changing the way we study those things. Vivian Giang contributed reporting for this article. [action hash=”6cd538cd-54dd-4b69-a152-d85ebcd24518″]
Leaders naturally want their employees to bounce back from failures and strive toward improvement — the hallmarks of a growth mindset. But how to cultivate that reality is seldom easy or obvious. Our research at the NeuroLeadership Institute finds better feedback conversations mark the smartest place to start. We define growth mindset as the dual belief that employees’ skills can be improved and that improving those skills is the point of the work people do. The trouble many companies run into, however, is getting people to seek out improvement. Growth mindset is uncomfortable. It requires people to confront their weaknesses, which may feel like personal shortcomings. Regular feedback conversations, in which people ask for feedback rather than give it unsolicited, may help people see challenges as opportunities, not threats. Real lessons from fake negotiations NLI recently published a study that included 62 people from a major consultancy, who were asked to engage in a mock negotiation. Each negotiation was one on one. Researchers behind the study hooked subjects up to heart rate monitors. During the negotiation and in feedback conversations afterward, the heart rate monitors tracked people’s physiological responses. Findings indicated that feedback-givers were just as stressed out as askers. However, those givers who were asked for feedback showed less heart-rate reactivity than givers made to give feedback unprompted. We draw a lot of conclusions from the study. In terms of growth mindset, the biggest one is that asker-led feedback conversations are a lower-stress way for teams to discuss performance. If leaders can encourage team members to ask for explicit feedback on a regular basis, we contend that employees will gradually begin to view critiques as less threatening. They’ll focus less on failures and more on growth. They’ll welcome challenges, not shy away from them. Start small to go broad Leaders play a crucial role in modeling this behavior. According to NYU psychologist Tessa West, an NLI senior scientist and the study’s lead author, it’s still threatening to start asking for feedback. So leaders can use small-stakes questions to get people thinking in terms of improvement, rather than pure wins or losses. For instance, a manager can ask her team what they thought of her eye contact during the last meeting. Performed over and over again, across departments, asking for feedback could hold the power to send a growth mindset rippling across an entire organization. And it all begins with the decision to ask the right questions. [action hash=”6cd538cd-54dd-4b69-a152-d85ebcd24518″]
Due to the effects of bias, managers may be conducting performance reviews in such a way that sets employees on unwanted career paths for years.
Art Markman is a renaissance man of psychological science: He holds a professorship at the University of Texas-Austin, where he’s also the director of the program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations. He co-hosts the podcast Two Guys On Your Head. He’s authored many books, including Smart Change: Five Tools to Create New and Sustainable Habits in Yourself and Others. And he’s also a panelist on the Networking and Building Alliances session at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit in October. We recently spoke with Art to learn about how immersing himself in motivation and decision science has shaped his life, and came away with some practice advice on how to get more good stuff done in our own lives. NeuroLeadership Institute: How has being in this field change the way you make decisions in your everyday life? Art Markman: There’s a lot of things I’ve done as a result of knowing more. Some of them have been pretty straight-forward. So for example, in my mid-30s I took up the saxophone because there’s all this data that suggests if you look at people’s regrets, the thing that old people regret more than anything else is not the dumb things they did but the important things they didn’t do. And so, I always recommend to people, periodically project yourself mentally to the end of your life and look back and ask yourself, is there anything I wish I would’ve done? And at some point, I thought, “Gosh I always wanted to learn to play a saxophone and I didn’t.” So about a week after that, I went out and found a teacher and bought a saxophone and learned to play. I think I also am better at seeing different sides of situations that I’m involved in. For example, there are broad tendencies to look at other people’s behaviors and assume that it’s being driven by their characteristics, their traits, and individual goals rather than the situation that they’re in. Whereas with our own life, we pay a lot of attention to, “Oh I was forced to do this in this situation.” So I think I’ve become more tolerant of things other people have done by routinely asking myself, “Well, what’s the situation? Did they do this just because they didn’t have a choice? As a result, should I be trying to focus on how to help, how to make that situation better rather than chastising them for some kind of fundamental limitation that they themselves have?” I spend a lot of time writing about behavior change. And so in my own life, like if I want to lose weight, I’m more effective at that because I understand how motivation works. I run this program. I have a staff of 6 people. I have 35 faculty who I work with and I feel like I can work more effectively with people because I have a better understanding of what factors influence behavior change and so we can set up what we do in ways that get people to do things a little bit different, not a manipulative way, but sharing a vision people can get on board with and also structuring a plan where people not only think this is a vision they can be a part of but also something that they can accomplish. NLI: I read somewhere that you lost 40 pounds — how did you do that, and how did your study on motivation help you achieve your goal? When it comes to weight loss, people think to themselves, “I don’t feel right. I don’t look right.” For me, I didn’t like the way I looked and felt anymore. I think that, for one thing, the formula for weight loss is not a carefully guarded secret. Everyone wants some special diet, but at the end of the day, if you’re going to engage in some kind of weight loss activity, you’ve got to burn more calories than you take in and you have to do that consistently. Then the question is, how do you structure your world to facilitate getting more exercise and eating less? It turns out the eating less is probably more important than the exercise. Because you can work really hard, but if you eat too much, you will overwhelm any amount of calories that you burned. There’s a great quote from Jack LaLanne that I love to use, and it’s “The best exercise is pushing yourself away from the table.” But I think what’s important is to structure that environment. One of the things I did was that I became a vegetarian when I wanted to lose weight in part because I figured, rather than just trying to do less than what I was already doing, I thought, “If I completely change the diet that I’m eating, then I have a chance to institute a new set of behaviors.” NLI: You broke the frame, so you’d have to keep paying attention. AM: That was one piece of it. One piece of it was planning a little bit better. If I cooked too much food, then putting the rest away in advance. Some of it was figuring out what to do when I’m faced with a buffet where you want to throw everything onto your plate. It’s really helpful sometime to find dessert plates that are lying around somewhere. They’re smaller plates so you put less stuff on your plate, and then you eat less. So I think there are a lot of ways of messing around with your environment that can help. When I made the decision to lose weight, I let everybody know. People don’t like to do that, because if they fail, it’s embarrassing. But actually when you let everybody know, then they help you. Maybe they choose not to have an ice cream right in front of you. Or they’re a little more sensitive to how they dole food out in front of you if you’re having lunch with them or something. You
Think back to your last feedback conversation at work — how did it go? Chances are, you and your partner felt uneasy, maybe even threatened. The reason is hardly a mystery. Feedback conversations as they exist today activate a deep-seated threat response in the human brain. Even if it’s just a chat, our brains want us to flee. According to a recent article in the NeuroLeadership Journal, research may be able to fix this broken aspect of professional life. In a study led by NYU psychologist and NLI senior scientist Tessa West, 62 participants at a major consultancy engaged in a mock one-on-one negotiation over the price of a biotechnology plant. Then they gave each other feedback on the other’s performance. Heart rate monitors listened all the while. In follow-up analyses, West and her colleague, fellow NYU psychologist Kate Thorson, discovered that giving feedback and receiving feedback were equally anxiety-producing. This was big news: It signaled managers, too, feel the pain of criticism. Even bigger news, however, was that people who responded to a request for feedback — rather than give feedback unprompted, as per typical conversations — experienced significantly lower heart rate reactivity and reported feeling much less anxious. According to West, asking for feedback is better for long-term improvement because it gives people more control over the conversation and certainty in what will be discussed. If people can start small, she says, the initial pain of inviting criticism will eventually lose its sting. “When you ask for feedback, you’re licensing people to be critical of you,” West recently told NLI for Strategy+Business. “It may feel a little more uncomfortable, but you’re going to get honest, more constructive feedback.” Leaders can use the new study as a tool to create more of a growth mindset at work. If everyone begins seeking out ways to improve, instead of shying away from them, entire organizations can adapt more quickly and edge out the competition.
Jay Van Bavel is a social neuroscientist who studies unconscious bias, group identity, and cooperation, specializing in understanding the neural mechanisms by which a sense of belonging to a group influence our thoughts and behavior. His most recent study found that increasing a group’s sense of common identity leads to greater cooperation, coordination, and collective intelligence — all topics he will be discussing at the upcoming NeuroLeadership Summit. We reached him at his lab at New York University, where he is Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science and an affiliate at the Stern School of Business. He is also editor-in-chief of the NeuroLeadership Journal and serves as one of our senior scientists. NLI: What are you working on that’s most exciting to you right now? Jay Van Bavel: I’m working on how to understand group coordination and cooperation. We’ve found that when you build a sense of common identity in a group, that leads to greater cooperation, and people are willing to sacrifice more to make the group succeed. They’re also more collectively intelligent. NLI: Can you define collective intelligence? JVB: Groups that perform better than the sum of their parts are considered collectively intelligent. Great groups outperform groups that might have a smarter person or a higher average intelligence. They’re really good at problem-solving tasks and creativity tasks. What’s going is that they’re communicating very well, making sure everybody’s insights are considered. This allows them to brainstorm and come up with different ways to solve the problem. NLI: Can you tell me how group identity fits into your recent study? JVB: We measured group identity and found that groups with the most pride and common connection to their team perform best at cooperation games. In one condition, we tell people they’re all competing against each other and the best individual is going to win. When we do that, they don’t work well together. Their performance isn’t very good. But when we tell people they’re working as a team to compete with other teams, it’s in that condition that they work best with the group they’re with and cooperate the most. Those teams end up having the best problem-solving. NLI: You’ve designed these tasks where cooperating increases the team’s performance as a whole. Is that the kind of task that best reflects what people typically have to do in organizations in the real world? Are business tasks generally tasks where a group cooperating is does better than individuals working independently and solo? JVB: Yes. In science, the best papers are driven by teams of great people working together. Even though we have this notion of Einstein, that’s not how science works. The most impactful science is done by teams, not by a single genius. In Hollywood, Pixar is famous for having these incredible creative teams that go off and do their bits and then come back and share knowledge and give each other critical feedback. Some tasks, like sales, are individualistic — you have people out in the field knocking on doors or making calls one-on-one. NLI: Yes! And salespeople need support, too. JVB: Most work nowadays — especially really complex high-impact work or creative work — is done in groups or teams. NLI: What can organizations do to increase cooperation in their teams? JVB: There’s a couple of things. One, they need to build a common sense of identity on teams that are working together. What we’ve found is that (A) you can measure it, so you can see which teams already have that kind of identity. And (B), you can manipulate it — managers and leaders can be empowered to create that sense of identity. Research has found that diverse teams benefit the most from having a group identity, because it helps them get on the same page and put aside their differences. Then they can use their different insights to solve a problem together, without the conflict that normally would come from that — and without breaking into a bunch of individuals. NLI: How can organizations create a culture of cooperation? JVB: Cooperation is hard. It takes a lot of prefrontal cortex activity to overcome your impulse to be selfish and instead engage in cooperation. We found that people who have damaged their prefrontal cortex can’t do it. That same logic probably also applies if you’re distracted — it might make cooperation hard. But if you’re working with a group of cooperative people — if you’re in a cooperative team or an organization with a cooperative culture — all of a sudden cooperation becomes easy. It no longer requires your lateral prefrontal cortex, your working memory, or executive function — and it seems to feel good. Once you turn the corner and create a culture of cooperation, people get a reward signal when they make decisions to cooperate, so it becomes easier. It doesn’t require as much self-control and regulation, and they can do it without thinking. We’ve looked at data from around the world from thousands of people, and we’ve found that in places where cooperation is common, people do it automatically. Whereas if they’re coming from places where cooperation is not common, like Manhattan, then it’s hard for them, and it takes them longer to come to the decision to cooperate. NLI: What are people responding to exactly? Is it the norms of the group they’re in? JVB: Yup, exactly. Norms. Of course, some people pick up on norms and other people don’t. This really only applies to people who are paying attention to the norms around them. When the norms are good, they cooperate. NLI: So how can an organization create a norm of cooperation? JVB: Several things. First, they can hire cooperators. Hire people who are cooperative and don’t hire people with sharp elbows. Second, promote and reward people — especially in public ways — who show that they value cooperation and collaboration. Third, leadership can send signals by being role models. If you put people in a group with somebody
Everyone knows the pain of feeling left out, but fewer discuss the dread of needlessly being left in. This is what we at the NeuroLeadership Institute call over-inclusion, and the downsides are massive. In the rightful pursuit of lifting up diverse voices and opinions in recent years, leaders have started over-correcting. In order to reach a happy middle ground, they must pay attention not just to moments of exclusion, but over-inclusion — cc’ing more people than necessary in emails, jam-packing meeting rooms, and creating multi-armed project teams. According to our research, the way to create that efficiency is through a careful process of expectation matching. Swinging into the danger zone At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we think of inclusion as a pendulum. It can swing from under-inclusion, where people fail to loop in the right team members in meetings, projects, and emails; to optimal inclusion, where the right people know the right info at the right time; to over-inclusion, where people sit in meetings wondering “What am I doing here?” We recently discussed this phenomenon in a Quartz article entitled “It’s possible (and dangerous) to be over-inclusive.” Most people know from personal experience that over-inclusion is possible. But the science of why it’s dangerous is perhaps less well-known. Research has shown that humans naturally want to empathize with others, which is why we do our best to be fair and include everyone. The downside is we may unknowingly burden their cognitive load and create decision fatigue, leading them to develop an unhealthy, “always-on” attitude toward work. Getting everyone on the same page We find the solution to over-inclusion is thoughtfully excluding. It’s about leaving people out of meetings and emails because you recognize their time and energy are better spent on other things. Based on the leading brain science, we contend the way to do that is through expectation matching. When we run into something that violates our expectations, it causes our brain to do some heavy lifting. With a finite amount of cognitive resources at our disposal, the more those expectations are violated, the less focus and thought we can give to other matters. Leaders who want to thoughtfully exclude can follow the wisdom of science by laying out expectations ahead of time. They can explain who needs to be involved and for what purposes. If everyone is on the same page around those priorities, those who are left out will better understand why. The certainty and fairness will feel rewarding, and they may even thank you for excluding them, as they can now use their cognitive surplus for more productive ends.
By Khalil Smith, Heidi Grant & Kamila Sip Organizations have rightly started making diversity and inclusion top priorities. And accordingly, managers have become more sensitive about who they hire, promote, and assign to projects. They’ve also become more sensitive to sharing information equitably among their staff, and worked harder to give people the right amount of exposure within the department or organization. Continue reading on Quartz
Peter Glick is a psychologist who studies benevolent sexism — the paternalistic belief that women are pure, fragile flowers in need of men’s protection. Benevolent sexism, unlike hostile sexism, feels positive and well-intentioned. But Glick and his colleagues have found that it actually undermines women’s careers by excluding them from challenging assignments and depriving them of honest, critical feedback. We reached Dr. Glick at his lab at Lawrence University, where he’s the Henry Merritt Wriston Professor in the Social Sciences, to ask him what insights he’ll be bringing to the NeuroLeadership Summit. NLI: At the Summit you’ll be talking about your work on benevolent sexism. Tell me about that work. Peter Glick: It’s collaborative work I started with [Princeton psychologist] Susan Fiske on reconceptualizing sexism. Prior to our work, when you talked about sexism, people immediately thought about hostility toward women. I mean, that’s how we define prejudice. And sexism is a form of prejudice. Right? Historically, and even today, men have more power and status. But they’re intimately interdependent with women, if they’re heterosexual. So this theory is rooted in the idea that heterosexual intimacy is part of it, combined with the power and status difference. I call this the “Central Gender Relations Paradox.” It’s a very weird situation when you start to think about it! You’ve got a group that’s more powerful and has more status. And when groups have more power and status, they like to maintain their privileges and tend to view themselves as superior. But at the same time, this powerful group is intimately interdependent on the subordinated group! NLI: And what’s the effect of that? PG: It creates this ambivalence toward women. On the one hand, men want to maintain control over them and keep women in their place. But at the same time, they want to maintain positive relationships in intimate relationships with women. So how do you resolve this paradox? The power difference creates hostile sexism that demeans women, but the intimate interdependence necessitates “benevolent” sexism, which is this paternalistic, protective attitude toward women. Because men are intimately interdependent on them. It’s basically, “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.” Benevolent sexism is this view that women are wonderful, pure, fragile flowers in need of men’s protection and provision and being cherished and adored. There’s this classic Motown song that goes, “I would kiss the ground she walks on, cause it’s my word, my word she’ll obey.” NLI: “It’s my word she’ll obey”? Wow. PG: We have some fantastic research that documents the many surprising and insidious ways in which benevolent sexism undermines women’s equality and undermines women — sometimes more than hostile sexism. It’s harder to get a handle on too because subjectively it’s really nice. This is not some plot men hatched. It’s just the natural, almost inevitable outcome of this heterosexual interdependence coupled with the power difference. We found that across nations, benevolent sexism and hostile sexism go hand in hand. They tend to go together. They’re not conflicted. Hostile sexism and benevolent sexism go hand-in-hand. It’s the carrot and the stick. Hostile sexism is the stick. If you get out of line, the hammer comes down. But if you stay in line, we’ll take care of you. NLI: Can you give me some examples of beliefs that characterize each? PG: For the hostile sexism scale, there are anti-feminist items like, “Feminists are demanding too much of men,” “Women complain about things at work,” “Women use sex to manipulate men and gain power over men.” So that’s about all the “conniving” ways basically that women “try to gain power over men,” or the idea that women compete with men in ways that aren’t fair. This is the modern version of hostile sexism. If it were 200 years ago, it would have been, “Women are incompetent and stupid.” But things have changed, so hostile sexism now is subtle hostility in an environment where there’s more competition. Whereas with benevolent sexism, you could translate it into Ancient Greek and Homer would have recognized it. It’s stuff like, “Women are more pure and moral than men,” and “Women deserve and need men’s protection.” NLI: You were saying that hostile sexism and benevolent sexism go hand in hand. PG: Right. The hostile sexist nations are also the benevolently sexist nations. But if you compare men’s and women’s scores on benevolent sexism, we don’t find as big a gap. Because benevolent sexism sounds really nice — and it is, by the way, subjectively positive on the part of men who hold these attitudes. They’re not being sneaky. Their mom told them, “Don’t ever hit a girl,” and, “You’ve got to protect women.” Romantic scripts tell them that! Benevolent sexism and romance are very hand-in-glove too. So they’re feeling like, “Hey, I’m treating the ladies like they need to be treated.” It’s a very subjectively positive thing. Yet we find these objectively negative outcomes. NLI: When you say that women score high on benevolent sexism — they’re scoring high on benevolently sexist beliefs about women, not men, right? PG: Right. It’s “Women should be cherished and protected by men, do you agree or disagree?” Women can say, “Oh yeah, men should cherish and protect women, for sure.” “Women are more pure and moral.” “A man needs a woman he can adore.” “He’s not complete without a woman.” Women can endorse that stuff as well. I’m not real militant. In romantic relationships, you’ve got to figure out what you want. But when it comes to work, we’ve found that benevolent sexism is related to things like not giving women challenging assignments — because maybe it will be too stressful for them or too demanding. But challenging assignments are how you get promoted! And how you develop your skills! Women often get softer feedback. It’s, “Oh, you’re so wonderful,” and often that praise is on more feminine dimensions, like “Clients love you because you’re so warm and nurturing.” But then when it comes to promotions
In a recent pop up survey on NeuroLeadership.com, we asked visitors one question: What does it mean for a person to have a “growth mindset”? From the 208 responses we received, we learned that, given a few options featuring the most common meanings attached to growth mindset, the vast majority of participants identified the right one: 89% of survey participants correctly identify growth mindset as the belief that a person’s abilities can be improved (correct) 9% think that having a growth mindset means to be positive and optimistic (incorrect) Only 1.4% think that it relates to striving for business growth (incorrect), and 0.5% don’t know what it means (unfortunate) These results basically reflect the findings from our recent industry research on growth mindset. As HR and talent teams work hard on clarifying and communicating the correct definition throughout the organization, they mostly succeed. Once in a while, though, they may encounter individuals or teams that hang on to misinformed and false ideas of growth mindset. We recently explored this trend in an article called “5 Mistakes Companies Make About Growth Mindsets” for the Harvard Business Review. Simply put, don’t mistake growth mindset for endless optimism. We at the NeuroLeadership Institute define growth mindset as the belief that skills and abilities can be improved, and that developing our skills and abilities is the purpose of the work we do. But we have also learned something else in our research: people in organizations attach various, personalized interpretations to the idea of growth mindset — something we highlighted in our recent webinar Growth Mindset 101. Getting the idea of growth mindset right matters. This powerful concept will be increasingly important for individuals and organizations who need to adapt to the ongoing changes posed by digital disruption. Given the many interpretations of growth mindset that are out there, clarifying what it means — and what it doesn’t mean — is a crucial step in creating a growth mindset culture. What really makes a difference is when organizations are able to weave the concept of growth mindset deep into their people’s everyday behaviors and their organizational processes. In order to do that, organizations first need to be clear on what growth mindset means to them. Send your thoughts, feedback, and criticism to Andrea Derler, NLI’s director of industry research. [action hash=”6cd538cd-54dd-4b69-a152-d85ebcd24518″]
Feedback is essential for organizational (and organismal) growth, but what’s the best way to give it? Typical feedback conversations are painful and extremely stress-producing. Managers who try to avoid offending their employees risk over-correcting, giving feedback that is polite, but ultimately unhelpful. Billions are spent each year in an attempt to solve these feedback problems. A recent feature story in strategy+business could hold the key insight: Asking for feedback, rather than giving it unprompted, may be the smartest way to develop a growth-oriented culture. “We’re not promising it’s going to feel good right away, but it will be better for you in the long term,” says NYU psychologist and NLI senior scientist Tessa West. Putting the brain in the right state West and her colleague Katherine Thorson, also of NYU, recently ran a study at a major consultancy that tracked people’s heart rates during mock negotiations. Afterwards, each participant took turns giving and receiving feedback. Certain groups were instructed to ask for feedback, while others gave it unprompted. The findings showed giving feedback was just as anxiety-producing as receiving feedback. However, when people received feedback that wasn’t asked for, their heart rates jumped around erratically. (Equivalent spikes have been found during some of the most stressful events, such as public speaking.) Our brains suffer in these moments of duress. Stress causes a decline in cognitive function and a narrowing of the senses, limiting our ability to think critically or learn. To serve their crucial function of helping employees improve and grow, feedback conversations should avoid this threat response. Based on her recent study, West believes asking for feedback could hold the power to make discussions less painful. When people know to ask for feedback, they feel in control, West says. They feel psychological rewards of autonomy and certainty. They can steer the conversation wherever they choose and feel confident about which topics will get discussed. Givers also feel more certainty, because they no longer have to guess what kind of information will be most useful. Creating the habit of asking To make an asker-led culture a reality, West says to start small. “It’s like going on a diet,” she says. “You don’t want to cut out everything that’s delicious. You have to gradually replace the unhealthy with the healthy.” Leaders can take the first steps by asking for feedback themselves — perhaps about the temperature in the last meeting. Gradually, West says, people will feel safer asking for feedback if they know the resulting discussion will be productive, not threatening. Over time, organizations that take up the strategy should expect to have regular feedback conversations more often, which means avoiding errors earlier and innovating more rapidly. SEE ALSO: How Microsoft Transformed Its Approach to Feedback
Since 1998, when Lisa Rock and I launched a coaching business that would become the NeuroLeadership Institute, we have been passionate about identifying language that helps people be more effective. In 2008, when we launched NLI formally, we went even bigger. For the last decade, we have been on a mission to develop a new language for leadership, culture, and learning. Today, our work is impacting millions of people in hundreds of the world’s largest companies — 30% of the Fortune 100, to be specific — always with the desire of making workplaces more fundamentally human. That’s why I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Your Brain at Work, NLI’s official blog for all things neuroleadership. It’s a chance for us to pull together, in one place, the many ideas and insights we have been developing over the years. We’ve already got some amazing content we think you’ll love. Here’s just a sampling. In The Biggest Myth About Growth Mindset, we present a major finding from our recent industry research project in 16 international corporations showing how managers may be unknowingly burning out their employees. In The Smartest Teams Embrace the ‘Diversity Paradox’, an excerpt from a Corporate Membership piece reveals the hidden challenge associated with diversifying a workforce. Research on power and voice forms the foundation for a thought-provoking piece called What Airline Pilots and Nurses Can Teach Organizations About Decision-Making. Leaders who hold regular performance reviews may be sending the wrong signals or making premature decisions, according to Why the Typical Performance Review Is Overwhelmingly Biased. Click here to check out the rest of our content that showcases research on culture and leadership, performance, diversity and inclusion, and more. The field of neuroleadership is only getting more exciting as the years go by, and we can’t wait to go on the journey with all of you. Thank you for reading! SEE ALSO: The Hidden Leverage of Feedback
[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” hundred_percent_height=”no” hundred_percent_height_scroll=”no” hundred_percent_height_center_content=”yes” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” enable_mobile=”no” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” video_preview_image=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” type=”legacy”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_2″ spacing=”” center_content=”no” link=”” target=”_self” min_height=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”left top” background_repeat=”no-repeat” hover_type=”none” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_offset=”” last=”false” border_sizes_top=”0″ border_sizes_bottom=”0″ border_sizes_left=”0″ border_sizes_right=”0″ type=”1_2″ first=”true” spacing_right=””][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” content_alignment_medium=”” content_alignment_small=”” content_alignment=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” sticky_display=”normal,sticky” class=”” id=”” font_size=”” fusion_font_family_text_font=”” fusion_font_variant_text_font=”” line_height=”” letter_spacing=”” text_color=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_offset=””] [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_2″ spacing=”” center_content=”no” link=”” target=”_self” min_height=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”left top” background_repeat=”no-repeat” hover_type=”none” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_offset=”” last=”true” border_sizes_top=”0″ border_sizes_bottom=”0″ border_sizes_left=”0″ border_sizes_right=”0″ type=”1_2″ first=”false”][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””] By Dr. David Rock, Beth Jones & Chris Weller Not too long ago, 62 employees at a major consultancy found themselves getting called into a room in pairs, neither person having any prior relationship to the other, for what they were told was a role-playing exercise. Researchers asked them to sit across from each other. Participants then learned they weren’t assigned to be collaborators, but adversaries — opposing sides engaging in a mock negotiation to buy or sell a biotechnology plant. They had six minutes to haggle over the price, and heart-rate monitors would track the ups and downs of the argument. Continue reading on strategy + business [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
Chris Pirie isn’t putting the future of organizational learning in the hands of gut feelings. He’s relying on hard brain science. In a recent interview with Singularity Hub’s Lisa Kay Solomon, Pirie, the general manager of worldwide learning at Microsoft, explained how companies will begin infusing research into their development processes. “We’ll start to know what it looks and feels like to pay full attention and which social and physical conditions can accelerate or throttle the learning process,” Pirie said. “Organizations like NeuroLeadership Institute are codifying the research into workable models that help [learning] designers to leverage those brain chemistry process and biases.” In addition to neuroscience, Pirie speculated that data science and social science will also inform how learning experience designers create their internal programs. “The learning scientists are coming!” he said. “Within corporations, we’re going to see a fundamental rethink of the role and responsibility of learning in organizations and the creation of a new type of learning organization.” Pirie has plenty of experience applying research to organizational habits: For the past two years, Microsoft has partnered with NLI to change its culture with the help of brain science. In mid-2016, the tech giant debuted its three leadership principles company-wide: Generate energy, Create clarity, and Deliver success. Simple as they may seem, a great deal of research suggests they put Microsoft in the best position to achieve its goals. For instance, as Pirie points out in his interview, scientists are making great strides in understanding how knowledge moves from short- to long-term memory. Specifically, we have seen the benefits time and again of making learning “sticky,” or memorable, by chunking bits of information into easily digestible pieces. We also minimize the amount of work required of the brain, since humans can’t juggle more than four or five ideas at a time. Microsoft’s leadership principles rely on that set of insights. Each principle is easy to remember, but so is the trio as a whole. We call this “coherence,” as it’s near impossible to remember one leadership principle without thinking of the other two. These strategies don’t just get people excited about making a change; they actually change behavior. As Pirie explains, this is one of the hallmarks of neuroscience-based learning initiatives, and what will propel the field into the future of learning. “I believe we will soon see diagnostic tools to help evaluate costly corporate learning programs against such standards,” he said, “and tools to help learning experience designers design for maximum impact.” SEE ALSO: The Smartest Teams Embrace the ‘Diversity Paradox’
Growth mindset has gained a lot of popularity in organizations over the past decade, now standing as many leaders’ favorite buzzword for boosting productivity. But there’s still one myth that widely persists among companies — at the risk of employee and organizational well-being. Contrary to what many leaders believe, growth mindset does not refer to a person’s limitless capacity to get things done. For the past three months, NLI has interviewed HR practitioners at more than 20 major organizations around the world, as part of an industry research project. Our goal was to find out what, exactly, leaders were doing when they implemented growth mindset around their organization. We found a range of interpretations. Some thought growth mindset was purely a focus on business growth. Others saw it as the belief that any achievement was possible, no matter how unrealistic the goal. In fact, our working definition of growth mindset is: the dual belief that skills and abilities can be improved, and that developing your skills and abilities is the purpose of the work you do. On occasion, managers who hadn’t quite grasped this concept thought employees with a growth mindset were happy to take on projects endlessly. If they claimed their plate was full, they were seen as having a fixed mindset — a scarlet “F” around many offices. The trouble with this line of thinking is that everyone, at some point, faces issues of “capacity,” or the brain’s limit for cognitive function. There is only so much thought people can devote to their various tasks before their output begins to plateau, or even decrease. Managers who keep overloading their employees with work actually inhibit, not propel, long-term progress. What’s more, by making a judgment on people’s ability to handle more and more tasks, managers risk damaging employees’ sense of status. What initially may have been a point of pride could turn into shame over poor productivity. For the sake of employee and organizational health, leaders should align on the true definition of growth mindset. Saying your plate is full isn’t a sign that your thinking is flawed. In fact, it may be the opposite — a sign that in order to develop your skills, the most important thing you can do is pause, and focus on the job at hand. [action hash=”6cd538cd-54dd-4b69-a152-d85ebcd24518″]
The human brain can think about objects and events at various “levels of construal” — from the abstract, high-level, and conceptual all the way down to the low-level and concrete. Marlone Henderson is a psychologist who studies how level of construal affects problem-solving. Among other surprising findings, Henderson has shown that physical distance can lead negotiators to more successful outcomes by prompting them to think about the big picture. We reached him at his lab at the University of Texas at Austin in advance of the NeuroLeadership Summit in October, where he’ll be speaking. NLI: Let’s do a tour of your work on construal and negotiation. Marlone Henderson: When I was coming out of grad school, I was interested in understanding how people’s cognitive style would impact how they would approach problem-solving and negotiation. One of the big issues you deal with in negotiation is when parties have differing priorities. Negotiators tend to come to the table trying to fight out and hash out every little thing, trying to get everything they want, without realizing they may be able to identify key trade-offs where they can sacrifice things that are less important in order to gain things that are more important. I showed that if you push people to think in a more abstract manner — to take a step back from the details and look at things in a broader, more inclusive manner — they’re able to focus on what’s more important to them. When people do that, it increases the likelihood they’ll deal with multiple issues at the same time. When you’re dealing with one issue at a time, it’s harder to recognize that one is more important than another. But if you deal with multiple issues at the same time, you’re more likely to see how different priorities emerge. When you push people to think more abstractly, they’re more likely to deal with multiple issues at a time, and that increases the likelihood that they’ll recognize where different priorities lie. And that then increases the likelihood that they’ll trade off on things that are less important and ultimately come up with more win-win agreements. NLI: What are the implications for organizations? MH: It’s possible to think about this in terms of personality. There are certain people who just naturally think more abstractly. Those might be your more gifted negotiators from the get-go. So the lesson would be, maybe hire people who naturally think more abstractly. But even if you’re not that kind of person, there are situational variables that will push you to think more abstractly. The two variables I looked at were time and space. First, there’s time. If people are negotiating over issues that are more distant in the future, that increases the likelihood that people will construe the issues more abstractly — which will then foster more win-win agreements, through considering multiple issues at a time. The other variable is space. I showed that when people are negotiating with someone they think is physically farther away from them, it works the same way as time: People are more likely to identify areas where they have trade-offs, and therefore recognize they have different priorities, and are more likely to come up with win-win agreements. NLI: What if I’m negotiating with somebody face-to-face — we don’t have distance — and negotiating about something that’s happening now, not distant in time? Is there a way for me to trigger them to elevate their level of construal? MH: That’s a good question. I published one study where we directly manipulated people’s level of construal. Before people start negotiating, we show them the issues they’re going to be negotiating about. With one group, we have them look at the issues and think about how to categorize them or think about them in a broader context. Let’s say you’re negotiating over salary and vacation time. We might say, “Well, if you think about those issues, what do they really represent if you had to think about a bigger category?” They might respond, “They both deal with my lifestyle satisfaction.” With the other group, we have people take the issues and come up with specific examples. We found that when you have people take the issues and lump them together and think about them in a broader category, as opposed to generating specific examples, it works the same way as having people think about distant time. Even though they’re getting ready to do that negotiation in a few minutes and the issues are right there, relevant to them at that moment, having them broaden their horizons by categorizing them in a broader way did the same trick. I have not directly tested this, but the implication would be that even if your issues are relevant now, you might see these benefits just by having people —it almost sounds like a meditative exercise — take a moment to envision their life in the distant future. NLI: What if I have a mildly adversarial posture toward my negotiating partner? Say I walk into my boss’s office and I want to ask for a raise. I’m not saying, “Hey boss, if you don’t mind, close your eyes and I want you to meditate for ten minutes.” Is there something I can say to raise their level of construal that would be appropriate in a negotiation context? MH: Good question. That’s something that as far as I know there’s research on. In our studies, we always control the cognitive style of both negotiating partners — and the two people negotiating are always on the same level. NLI: Let’s imagine a specific situation — I’m going to a low-level construal now to talk about it, using an example. Say my boss says, “OK, how much do you want?” And I say, “Well before I answer that, let’s take a step back. Let’s think about the future. Let’s think about the overarching goal. Our organization wants to grow. Ten years down the line, we want to be
Microsoft turned to the NeuroLeadership Institute to enlist our help in designing a new approach to feedback — one grounded in the neuroscience.
Business leaders can learn a lot about diversity from college kids solving fake murders. It was 2009. Northwestern University researchers had just given groups of fraternity and sorority members mock murder cases to solve. Suddenly, each group learned they were getting a new member. Half of the groups welcomed someone from within their frat or sorority, an “insider”; the other half got a rival member, an “outsider.” When the researchers tallied the results, they found the teams that solved the most murders were those with rival members, not people with whom participants already identified. As in, teams with members from rival frats and sororities outperformed those that were all from the same group. Remarkably, this was despite team members in the diverse condition feeling less positive about their interactions, and less confident in their final conclusion, than the homogenous group. Why diverse teams are smarter The business wisdom we can glean from this study is profound, and it holds great importance as teamwork and collaboration become more essential to working life. Let’s call it the “diversity paradox.” It states that diverse teams often make smarter decisions than non-diverse teams, but — crucially — at the expense of having confidence in that decision. The smartest teams embrace this paradox, putting faith in diversity-driven outputs above comfort in consensus. Diverse teams are smarter teams because they rid the air of groupthink, a term coined in 1971 to describe the possible psychological mechanisms that led to the Bay of Pigs Invasion 10 years prior, an event widely seen as a failure of decision-making. Groupthink, in other words, is what causes groups of “smart” people to go along with “dumb” choices. As NLI recently presented in “How Diversity Defeats Groupthink,” having a mixture of backgrounds and experiences is critical for organizations to avoid groupthink. And the 2009 Northwestern study puts an even finer point on the matter. It suggests that leaders must set the right expectations — for themselves and their team members — for how interactions will feel, in order for people to stay motivated when things get tough. Trust the process, not the feeling When teams are more diverse, instead of feeling fluent or smooth, they will often feel disjointed and even a little tense. That’s because diverse teams don’t (and can’t) settle into familiar ways of thinking; people’s ideas and assumptions are inherently at odds, even if in small doses. Every decision requires thought and effort, a collection of point-counterpoint moments until what emerges is a fuller, more bulletproof idea. However, as we’ve found in our research and work with clients, that friction is essential for arriving at the best solutions. When people feel overly comfortable with one another, they may defer to hierarchy, make dangerous assumptions, use illogical thinking, or succumb to pressures of group conformity. Outsiders, meanwhile, shake things up. They put people on their toes and raise everyone’s level of sensitivity, reducing the chances of what Princeton economist Roland Benabou calls “acting colorblind in a sea of red flags.” Decision-making may never be perfect — so long as teams are composed of bias-laden and error-prone humans — but embracing the discomfort of diversity yields far greater rewards than playing it safe ever will.
If leaders want to make the best decisions possible, it’s critical for their employees to feel confident about voicing opinions that challenge the status quo — or at least what the highest-status person in the room thinks. But speaking up is hard, especially within cultures that don’t explicitly ask for others’ input. If leaders want to avoid biased decision-making, they must gather a range of opinions, not just rely on their own. That means they must wrestle with an important question: How do we get more people speaking up? Aviation and medicine may hold the answer. The almighty ‘two-challenge rule’ Mona Weiss, a University of Leipzig psychologist, has studied the practices of airline pilots and nurses to understand how teams in life-or-death situations avoid disaster. Her big insight: Successful teams implement systems that provide clear if-then plans. These if-then plans in turn help lower-status team members save the day. In both aviation and medicine, teams widely rely on something called the two-challenge rule. It’s a system developed by the U.S. Army to empower crew members to take action if their partner is unable to perform his or her duties. For instance, if a co-pilot notices his captain is confused or overwhelmed mid-flight, the co-pilot can issue a challenge — say, to adjust the altitude or position of the aircraft. If he gets no response, he can ask again. If he still gets no response, the co-pilot is permitted to assume control of the aircraft, potentially saving the lives of everyone onboard. Medicine has since adopted the two-challenge rule, and Weiss’ research has shown it radically boosts team performance. Nurses better prevent surgeons from making fatal errors and more lives get saved. High-status people make mistakes, too Organizations should have their own version of the two-challenge rule, Weiss claims. At the start of meetings, leaders should occasionally remind everyone that speaking up is a sign of status — not a strike against them — because it shows an interest in the team’s shared goals. Ideally, this knowledge will empower people to speak up if others misstep, for instance by using poor reasoning or citing flawed data. People who struggle to find their voice can remind themselves If I hear something that needs correcting, then it’s my duty speak up. The simple if-then plan works because it lets people address the idea at hand without feeling like they are attacking the person responsible for that idea. Indeed, leaders don’t need to stick to the two-challenge rule exactly to help their teams make better decisions. But they do need to think in terms of systems, so lower-status people can have a protocol for pointing out blind spots — and avoiding the crash. SEE ALSO: Microsoft GM of Worldwide Learning Says Neuroscience Is the Future in Companies
Bias isn’t just something that happens within a person. It also happens between people — namely, in meetings. Without meaning to, people at the head of the table routinely make mental shortcuts that save time, but also may impair decision-making. This expedience may feel good, but teams and organizations may ultimately suffer from the scarcity of input. The key to holding less biased meetings is diversity, a premise we explored in a recent Corporate Membership article called “How Diversity Defeats Groupthink.” The piece uses tested research to show how more diverse teams can cut through bias and improve decision-making. We’ve posted an excerpt below, featuring five strategies to help leaders change their behavior and incorporate greater diversity of thought. 1. Bite your tongue when you’re in charge As a leader, you naturally want to share what you know. But it’s important not to bias the discussion with the influence you wield. Next time you find yourself wanting to broadcast your opinion at the outset, remember to hold back until others have weighed in. 2. Solicit contrary perspectives People naturally want to get along, but that can make dissent feel unwelcome. Next time you sense team members hesitating to speak their minds, remind them it’s OK to disagree. The goal isn’t harmony, but good decisions. But you need to rotate the role of contrarian, so that it becomes a habit that people can employ. 3. Amplify quiet voices Bad decisions happen when team members keep their doubts and reservations to themselves. Next time you notice a discussion being dominated by a few vocal personalities, make a point of calling on those whose voices haven’t been heard. 4. Run the scenarios One way to defeat conformity is to change your time horizon. Next time your team’s plans start feeling too rosy, try projecting yourself into the future, running through scenarios and thinking through what could go wrong. Shifting your perspective can inject an important dose of reality and help you see through misplaced optimism. 5. Switch it up The more time you spend as a team, the closer you get. This camaraderie can be fruitful, as team members begin to share the same language and behaviors. But, dangerously, they can also think like each other. Next time that happens, make a point to shake things up. Swap in new people on the team, and shuffle roles. Change can be bittersweet, but it will help keep your team nimble and sharp. SEE ALSO: The Smartest Teams Embrace the ‘Diversity Paradox’
[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” overlay_color=”” video_preview_image=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” padding_top=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” padding_right=”” type=”legacy”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”false” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=”” border_sizes_top=”” border_sizes_bottom=”” border_sizes_left=”” border_sizes_right=”” type=”1_2″ first=”true” spacing_right=”2%”][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” content_alignment_medium=”” content_alignment_small=”” content_alignment=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” sticky_display=”normal,sticky” class=”” id=”” font_size=”” fusion_font_family_text_font=”” fusion_font_variant_text_font=”” line_height=”” letter_spacing=”” text_color=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_offset=””] [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”true” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=”” border_sizes_top=”” border_sizes_bottom=”” border_sizes_left=”” border_sizes_right=”” type=”1_2″ first=”false” spacing_left=”2%”][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””] By Heidi Grant, Mary Slaughter & Andrea Derler Like any psychological concept that booms in popularity, growth mindset — the dual belief that skills and abilities can be improved, and that developing your skills and abilities is the purpose of the work you do — is ripe for misinterpretation. Hoping to learn how organizations put growth mindset to use in a rapidly changing work environment, the NeuroLeadership Institute has spent the last two months interviewing HR practitioners at more than 20 major organizations around the world. Continue reading on Harvard Business Review [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
As the world continues to evolve, and as business, economic, and social influences emerge, the NeuroLeadership Institute is always revisiting the emerging research and our internal frameworks to make sure we’re as relevant as possible. Since so much is going on in leadership, culture — and is now becoming clear, power — we felt a responsibility to revisit the way we describe our leadership practice not only to the world, but to ourselves. Going from Leadership and Change to Culture and Leadership may seem superficial at first glance, but in my twenty-plus years of human capital experience, I have realized that words matter. We say to our clients all the time: think essential, not exhaustive. For us to focus our energies, research, and discussion internally and with clients, it wasn’t just change we were interested in impacting, but culture. So what is culture? For one thing, it’s not a mystery. In the management world, culture is often spoken of with hushed tones, as some mercurial substance, ever-changing and impossible to be harnessed. But in fact, if you look into the brain science, it’s radically simple. Culture is shared everyday habits. They are shared in that they operate between people. They’re normative: they’re common across many people. It’s not reserved for the top echelon of the house, but the sum total of how everyone in the system behaves. They’re everyday, because frequency matters. It’s the consistency and the reinforcement that we provide one another that tells us what the norms are. And they replicate from person to person over time, like genetic code. The fundamentals need to be so integrated that you don’t even need to think about them. When you’re under pressure, your precious energy at work isn’t diverted to what you ought to do, but the expected behaviors are already baked in. You can apply your energy to more urgent issues and unique, in the moment problems. Habits are the stuff of muscle memory, enabling the automatic response. And the way you do it is with frequency, practice, and focus. Habits are contagious. They radiate out from leaders, who set the norms in their teams and across the organization. Decades of social and brain science research has shown that people defer to status, hierarchy, and power in conscious and nonconscious ways. That means that shifting leadership behavior is a lever for shifting culture, the center of the nesting doll of organizational habits. Understanding what your priorities, habits, and systems are allow you to take ownership of your culture. To that end, we have a host of research, insights, and products coming this year about culture. We have upcoming webinars on the science of smarter teams, the means to editing organizational DNA, and rethinking the 9-box. We are launching DIFFERENTIATE, for taking bias out of performance reviews, and DEVELOP, for better long-term career conversations. Culture is an ongoing process. We’re excited for you to join us. Continue reading on LinkedIn… SEE ALSO: The Biggest Myth About Growth Mindset
As the world continues to evolve, and as business, economic, and social influences emerge, the NeuroLeadership Institute is always revisiting the emerging research and our internal frameworks to make sure we’re as relevant as possible. Since so much is going on in leadership, culture — and is now becoming clear, power — we felt a responsibility to revisit the way we describe our leadership practice not only to the world, but to ourselves. Going from Leadership and Change to Culture and Leadership may seem superficial at first glance, but in my twenty-plus years of human capital experience, I have realized that words matter. We say to our clients all the time: think essential, not exhaustive. For us to focus our energies, research, and discussion internally and with clients, it wasn’t just change we were interested in impacting, but culture. So what is culture? For one thing, it’s not a mystery. In the management world, culture is often spoken of with hushed tones, as some mercurial substance, ever-changing and impossible to be harnessed. But in fact, if you look into the brain science, it’s radically simple. Culture is shared everyday habits. They are shared in that they operate between people. They’re normative: they’re common across many people. It’s not reserved for the top echelon of the house, but the sum total of how everyone in the system behaves. They’re everyday, because frequency matters. It’s the consistency and the reinforcement that we provide one another that tells us what the norms are. And they replicate from person to person over time, like genetic code. The fundamentals need to be so integrated that you don’t even need to think about them. When you’re under pressure, your precious energy at work isn’t diverted to what you ought to do, but the expected behaviors are already baked in. You can apply your energy to more urgent issues and unique, in the moment problems. Habits are the stuff of muscle memory, enabling the automatic response. And the way you do it is with frequency, practice, and focus. Habits are contagious. They radiate out from leaders, who set the norms in their teams and across the organization. Decades of social and brain science research has shown that people defer to status, hierarchy, and power in conscious and nonconscious ways. That means that shifting leadership behavior is a lever for shifting culture, the center of the nesting doll of organizational habits. Understanding what your priorities, habits, and systems are allow you to take ownership of your culture. To that end, we have a host of research, insights, and products coming this year about culture. We have upcoming webinars on the science of smarter teams, the means to editing organizational DNA, and rethinking the 9-box. We are launching DIFFERENTIATE, for taking bias out of performance reviews, and DEVELOP, for better long-term career conversations. Culture is an ongoing process. We’re excited for you to join us. Continue reading on LinkedIn… SEE ALSO: The Biggest Myth About Growth Mindset
Does work in your organization get done in teams? Does your performance management approach reflect this reality of interdependent work contributions? If so, we’d like to hear from you. In the coming weeks, the Neuroleadership Institute’s industry research team will interview human resources, talent, and business leaders who manage performance in team settings. If this applies to you and you are available for a 60-minute research interview, we would love to hear from you! Please email us and we will be in touch! What are we trying to learn? Increasingly, work gets done in teams, and teams of teams. Unfortunately, performance management still tends to focus on the individual, often ignoring people’s contributions to the larger group. With this qualitative research project, we want to learn if and how organizations have begun to adapt their performance management process to teams. Why participate? Your participation in this research project will be deeply appreciated, and sharing your experiences will inform others who are embarking on a similar journey. It is also an opportunity to showcase progressive human capital practices for your organization — serving recruiting, branding, and other business objectives. As a thank you for your time and effort, you will receive an exclusive report of our findings when available. We look forward to hearing from you! SEE ALSO: The Biggest Myth About Growth Mindset
[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” overlay_color=”” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” padding_top=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” padding_right=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”no” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=””][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””] [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”no” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=””][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””] By Beth Jones, Khalil Smith & Dr. David Rock When we talk about bias, we often tie it to acts of discrimination or prejudice. But according to cognitive science, everybody, by virtue of having a brain that’s constantly seeking efficiency, is biased in some way — and not all biases make us actively malicious. The key is how we manage our biases. Continue Reading on Harvard Business Review [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” overlay_color=”” video_preview_image=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” padding_top=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” padding_right=”” type=”legacy”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_3″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”false” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=”” border_sizes_top=”” border_sizes_bottom=”” border_sizes_left=”” border_sizes_right=”” type=”1_3″ first=”true” spacing_right=”1.3333333333333333%”][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” content_alignment_medium=”” content_alignment_small=”” content_alignment=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” sticky_display=”normal,sticky” class=”” id=”” font_size=”” fusion_font_family_text_font=”” fusion_font_variant_text_font=”” line_height=”” letter_spacing=”” text_color=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_offset=””] [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”2_3″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”true” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=”” border_sizes_top=”” border_sizes_bottom=”” border_sizes_left=”” border_sizes_right=”” type=”2_3″ first=”false” spacing_left=”2.6666666666666665%”][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””] Once we are aware of the shortcuts our minds take when deciding who to listen to, we can take steps to block those shortcuts. At the beginning of every meeting, a question hangs in the air: Who will be heard? The answer has huge implications not only for decision making, but for the levels of diversity and inclusion throughout the organization. Being heard is a matter of whose ideas get included — and who, therefore, reaps the accompanying career benefits — and whose ideas get left behind. Read More [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” overlay_color=”” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” padding_top=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” padding_right=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”no” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=””][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””] [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”no” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=””][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””] By Khalil Smith & Dr. David Rock The concept of unconscious bias, percolating for years now, is becoming better established, thanks in large part to a wave of scientific research. Every week, it seems, a study or book comes out that offers new and important insights about the subtle ways human beings discriminate against one another, robbing certain groups of important opportunities and depriving institutions of the skills that members of these groups possess. Continue Reading on strategy + business [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
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[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” overlay_color=”” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” padding_top=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” padding_right=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”no” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=””][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””] [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”no” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=””][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””] By Khalil Smith, Dr. Heidi Grant & Dr. David Rock Do you hear Yanny or Laurel? Believe it or not, the same science that fuels this debate—it’s definitely “Yanny,” by the way—can also help explain why it’s difficult to overcome bias in the office. There are deep reasons for why there can be so much disagreement over how an audio clip sounds. In each moment (including this one!), the brain is combining sensory input from the outside world with what’s already happening inside (experiences and beliefs) to create our perception. These subjective perceptions of reality are different for every person. But because our perceptual processes are not accessible to us, our perceptions feel like objective reality. Continue Reading on Quartz [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
By Mary Slaughter & Dr. David Rock Remember being in middle school and preparing for an exam? Chances are you spent your study time paging through your class notes or rereading the textbook. Maybe you highlighted important details as you went. We now know this is a pretty terrible way to study. You might’ve felt like you were absorbing the information, but you probably forgot most of it a few weeks after the test. In cases like these, you’re falling for what psychologists call “fluency”–you have a grasp of the information while you’re looking at it on the page. It feels good, easy, and reassuring. But that fluency doesn’t translate to actually recalling what you learned later on, let alone any change in skills or behavior. Continue Reading on Fast Company
[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” overlay_color=”” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” padding_top=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” padding_right=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”no” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=””][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””][/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”no” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=””][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””]By Dr. David Rock & Khalil Smith Good-faith attempts to champion diversity often backfire for a pretty intuitive reason: The more an organization points out the differences among employees–even in order to celebrate them–the more likely it is that some employees will feel less included, and behave accordingly. The fact is, our brains have been fine-tuned over eons to become amazingly efficient at noticing differences. It’s not just gender or ethnicity, either. Out-groups form even when people are asked to wear red or blue T-shirts. Couple that sensitivity to difference with the human need for fairness, and you may also get dominant groups feeling neglected. Such is the argument some white men in Silicon Valley are making–that diversity efforts amount to discrimination. Indeed, when we asked over 200 diversity and inclusion (D&I) professionals at a recent event about their biggest worry over the next five years, the top answer was backlash against their efforts. Continue Reading on Fast Company[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
This week, Starbucks responded to public outrage following the arrests of two black men who were simply waiting to meet a friend at one of its Philadelphia locations. As a part of a larger response, it announced it would shut down 8,000 stores for one day to give racial bias training to 175,000 workers. That’s $12 million in lost revenue, according to some estimates. This move sends a powerful signal that avoiding bias is a priority for Starbucks. But by itself, mandatory racial bias training is suboptimal, with the risk of many counterproductive effects. In some cases, compulsory trainings like these can actually lead employees to display more bias. When autonomy needs are violated—like when training is mandatory—people often react. In a classic example, white participants who perceived that they were forced to agree with an argument about bias against blacks felt more prejudice compared with whites who felt they could choose to agree, who felt less. In studying decades of industry data, researchers have found that mandatory training usually uses negative incentives (don’t do this/be like that) and the positive effects only last a couple days. Voluntary training, on the other hand, has been linked with significant increases in under-represented groups entering into management. As a research organization, our scientists have spent years studying why organizations that have, like Starbucks, made commitments to inclusivity have not achieved the results they sought. The science suggests that such initiatives have failed to fully reach their goals not because of a lack of commitment or focus—which Starbucks’ leadership is clearly addressing—but because of faulty theories of how bias works and how to mitigate it. Here’s what the science suggests matters most for breaking bias, especially if you’ve made an intervention mandatory. Work on both kinds of biases Bias plays a role in why the loudest person in the room gets listened to the most, why we hire people who remind us of ourselves, and why we give better performance ratings to people who impressed us recently. But it’s also the reason why we can guess where the forks are stored in a friend’s kitchen. Our biases are simply cognitive shortcuts. How you stock a store, how you do scheduling, where you invest resources, and other everyday business decisions can be guided by biases. Instead of focusing on only social biases, companies should think about how biases appear in all of their operations. Spotting biases in business decisions gives people practice in identifying biases and puts focus on the fact that we all make accidental errors across the board. This broadening decreases the likelihood of defensiveness when a social bias is called out. It normalizes the fact that if you have a brain, you’re biased. Mitigate biases not just as individuals, but as teams Too many bias interventions are based on prescriptions for learners like “search your mind for bias.” This is ineffective, to say the least. Bias is individually unconscious, no matter how much you intellectually understand it. While humans tend to be terrible at self-evaluations—we all think we’re more beautiful and better drivers than we actually are—we can see other’s behavior a little more clearly. Our own biases are largely outside of our conscious awareness, but other people’s biases can become quite obvious with some training. To do this, teams need a common language for identifying bias that is non-threatening. “We have a habit of letting the people in the room lead the discussion during conference calls—do you think that’s a distance bias at work?” such a conversation may go. “Maybe we should start the meeting with the people on the line?” You’ll get no arguments from us against people individually striving to become more equitable and fair in their interactions with the world. But in an organizational context, having normalized, nonthreatening conversation about bias is one of the quickest ways to lasting change. Across organizations in three industries, we found that two weeks after a light, digital training, a full 95% of 274 participants reported discussing bias at work at least once a week, with a third of participants doing so at least four times a week. As in so much of life, it’s about having the right words, in a group setting that lets you use them. We believe that this process of identifying process in groups with shared language is central to the success of bias-breaking initiatives. Build habits, not intentions Priorities and intentions have a way of going out the window when you’re stressed, tired, or multi-tasking. To create behavior change, it’s better to focus on building habits—which, the research says, is best achieved through if-then plans. That takes making the right action out of the responsibility of deliberative cognition (“should I do this or that?”) and instead allows you to stick to a script. In a retail context, an if-then plan could be formulated as “If you’re in doubt about a customer, ask three different colleagues who think differently than you.” In the churn of multitask-laden knowledge work, where distance bias has a way of crowding out strategic thinking, a personal if-then plan could be “when I get to my desk in the morning, I’m going to pick out the most important task relative to my goals that day, and make sure it gets done.” Prioritization is vitally important, but awareness is overrated. Real culture change, regarding bias or otherwise, requires cultivating the right habits, fortified by the right language. The most effective learning happens over time, with topics surfaced and revisited repeatedly. These habits then need to be supported by systems that reduce bias at the source. Just like you can’t become strong by lifting a single gigantic weight, you can’t change habits in a single day. The education needs to be ongoing, baked into the rhythms of the organization. Lasting change requires lasting learning and sustained prioritization. Take it from Johnson himself: “Closing our stores for racial bias training is just one step in a journey that requires dedication from every level of our company and partnerships in our local communities,” he said. David Rock is director, Khalil Smith is head of diversity and inclusion, and Heidi Grant is head of research at the NeuroLeadership Institute. Continue Reading on Quartz SEE ALSO: The Biggest Myth
[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” overlay_color=”” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” padding_top=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” padding_right=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”no” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=””][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””] [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”no” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=””][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””] By Dr. David Rock & Mary Slaughter At Apple, Steve Jobs led much of the industrial design charge, while the softer-spoken Steve Wozniak bulletproofed the engineering. In the world of theater, famed lyricist Oscar Hammerstein dreamt up beloved classics such as “The Sound of Music” and “The King and I,” but it was Richard Rodgers who found the music in his partner’s words. Continue Reading on Quartz [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” overlay_color=”” video_preview_image=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” padding_top=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” padding_right=”” type=”legacy”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”false” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=”” border_sizes_top=”” border_sizes_bottom=”” border_sizes_left=”” border_sizes_right=”” type=”1_2″ first=”true” spacing_right=”2%”][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” content_alignment_medium=”” content_alignment_small=”” content_alignment=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” sticky_display=”normal,sticky” class=”” id=”” font_size=”” fusion_font_family_text_font=”” fusion_font_variant_text_font=”” line_height=”” letter_spacing=”” text_color=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_offset=””] [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”true” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=”” border_sizes_top=”” border_sizes_bottom=”” border_sizes_left=”” border_sizes_right=”” type=”1_2″ first=”false” spacing_left=”2%”][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””] By Dr. Heidi Grant (Chief Science Officer, NeuroLeadership Institute) Few of us enjoy asking for help. As research in neuroscience and psychology shows, the social threats involved—the uncertainty, risk of rejection, potential for diminished status, and inherent relinquishing of autonomy—activate the same brain regions that physical pain does. And in the workplace, where we’re typically keen to demonstrate as much expertise, competence, and confidence as possible, it can feel particularly uncomfortable to make such requests. Continue Reading on Harvard Business Review [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” overlay_color=”” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” padding_top=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” padding_right=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”no” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=””][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””] [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”no” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=””][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””]By Mary Slaughter, Dr. Heidi Grant & Dr. David Rock (NeuroLeadership Institute) If you work in an office, you probably spend more time with your colleagues than you do with even your closest friends — and the quality of those relationships can mean the difference between a joyful workday and a minefield of stress and conflict. As it turns out, being liked doesn’t just make work more fun — studies show that being seen as likable is also the best way to get promoted or get a raise. So what can you do to make your colleagues like you more? Here are five science-backed tips to boost your workplace appeal. Continue Reading on Business Insider…[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
Assessing “culture fit” shouldn’t be a gut decision. Here’s how to interview candidates with more precision, based on what your work culture is actually like. One of the hardest parts of hiring new employees is figuring out how well they’ll fit into your work culture. Unlike education and job experience, where there may be specific credentials you’re looking for, “culture fit” can be dangerously vague–and uniquely vulnerable to unconscious bias. Still, hiring managers tend to take pride in trusting their gut, and many screen for culture fit the same way: They get a candidate talking, try to establish rapport, and then make an intuitive judgment about whether the person would get along well with current employees. But since we all gravitate toward people we consider to be similar to us, even the most scrupulously fair hiring managers tend to think more favorably of people who remind them of themselves. The result is an uneven process that limits diversity and fails to secure the best talent. The solution? A more structured interviewing process that’s designed to reflect what your work culture is actually like–and getting more specific about what traits it demands. This also means asking the same questions in the same order with every candidate, and being systematic about how you score responses. Here’s what to ask candidates–and what responses to listen for–depending on the nature of your work culture. 1. AN INDEPENDENT, ENTREPRENEURIAL CULTURE To assess a candidate’s ability to work independently in an environment made up of solo operators, try using a prompt like this: Tell me about a time you planned and executed a project with little or no supervision. What approach did you take to achieving your goals, and what was the result? What challenges came up along the way, and were you able to solve them on your own? The idea here is to look for evidence of autonomy, focus, and resourcefulness. Listen for (and score candidates against) these three job skills in particular: Vision: Do they set and achieve goals on their own? Planning: Can they organize, schedule, and formulate a clear strategy on their own? And how well does that plan actually reflect the underlying vision? Execution: Do they manage their time efficiently and stay on task without much oversight? How well do they make critical decisions and solve problems without outside help? When the unexpected happens, how well do they adjust and without leaning on directions from a superior? 2. A COLLABORATIVE CULTURE Other work cultures are much more team-focused, and collaboration is more important than autonomy. To assess an employee’s ability to work on this kind of team, try a prompt like this: Tell me about a time you worked with a team. What was your approach to collaborating with your teammates? What role did you play on the team and how did you contribute? What were some of the benefits you experienced from working collaboratively? What collaboration challenges arose, and how did you address them? Here’s what to look for in a good team player: Work style: Does the candidate enjoy working collaboratively and thrive in a team environment? Collaborative mentality: Does the candidate prioritize the success of the team above their own individual goals? Collaboration skills: Does the candidate have the interpersonal and communication skills to work well with others? How well does the candidate contribute individually to the goals of their team? 3. A CHANGING CULTURE Maybe your organization is evolving rapidly, or perhaps you’re actively in the midst of a culture shift. To get through this transitional period (and thrive as an organization afterward), you’ll need to hire someone who can not only adapt to change but help push the culture in the direction it’s moving. So try a prompt like this: Tell me about a time you encountered a difficult problem you didn’t know how to solve. Maybe you were asked to perform a task outside your job description, or maybe you had to master a new system, process, or technology. What was your approach to learning new skills? How did you deal with the challenge and uncertainty? And what did you learn from the experience? What you’re looking for here is adaptability, resilience, and the ability to achieve goals and thrive in the face of uncertainty. Specifically these three attributes: Growth mind-set: Does the candidate view their skills and abilities as fixed and unchangeable, or do they believe they can learn new things and grow in order to meet unfamiliar challenges? Agility: How does the candidate react to change? Do they see change as a threat or welcome it as an opportunity to rise to the occasion? Emotional regulation: How does the candidate react to stress and failure? Do they find negative emotions debilitating or motivating? Do they get overwhelmed or push ahead? Of course, no job interview is completely free of bias, but the more concrete you can get on what you’re looking for in terms of culture fit, the better you can interview and select for it. After all, more deliberate and fair hiring decisions benefit everybody–no matter what your work culture might be like. Continue Reading on Fast Company….
In 2004, Pamela Smith, now an associate professor of management at the University of California, San Diego, happened upon a clue into what power does to the brain. She was having coffee with a friend who had just changed jobs, going from one advertising firm to another. With that, she moved from frontline work to a management gig overseeing four people—and as if by magic, things in her head started changing. “It’s like I have to think differently, to use a different part of my brain, now that I’m a supervisor,” Smith recalls her friend saying in what’s now a highly cited 2006 Journal of Personality and Social Psychologypaper. “It’s nice because now everything has more purpose. I’m thinking about the agency’s 5-year plan, not just what I need to do to get through the week. But I feel so removed from what’s going on in the office. I give my employees tasks, and they complete them. I just have no idea how they do it—and I used to have their job!” Spurred on by this tip, Smith led the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology study. In seven experiments, she and her collaborator showed a range of ways that people made to feel powerful—like by writing about times in life where they felt in control of a situation—think differently than their low-power peers. Is a purse an item of clothing? It is if you’re powerful. In study after study, Smith and researchers like her started piecing together evidence for the profound ways that holding power—whether through experimental manipulation or real-life experience—changes the way people process their worlds, in ways that explain not only corporate greed or erratic executive behavior, but sexual harassment. Power is nonconscious, Smith and her colleagues have found; we can have power, and absorb its cognitive effects, without realizing that we’re doing so. Other researchers have found that powerful people consider others’ perspectives less, and that the experience of power increases optimism about risky decisions. It also gives people an “illusory” sense of control over what will happen, increases the anticipation of reward while reducing the perception of threat, and prompts people to perceive sexual interest that isn’t there, among other effects. While we don’t have all the answers, we have started organizing the literature on power and found four major ways that its cognitive effects explain harassment. These categories may provide a better conceptual framework than we have today for understanding what power does to people, how to maximize its positive qualities, and how to curb its dangers, especially in terms of sexual misconduct. This is a crucial step, as sexual harassment training has received such shockingly little research, while sexual misconduct itself dominates the cultural conversation as 2018 begins. The first thing to know: Power blinds you to others’ perspectives In the 1960s, sociologists—like novelists and political theorists before them—described how not having power requires you have to think more about what’s going on inside the minds of the powerful than they ever would of you. Since the less powerful depend on the powerful to feed and clothe themselves, their habits of mind are going to be different. You’re going to ruminate more on what your boss thinks of you than she would in the opposite direction, just as a court has no choice but to try and infer the whims of a king. Powerful people “aren’t thinking about the meaning of the world in other people’s heads,” says Joe Magee, a psychologist studying power at New York University. “They’re only thinking of the world and their actions from their own perspective.” That shows itself on tests of empathy—powerful people feel less distressed when someone sitting across from them tells a story of great personal hardship—and perspective taking, where high-power people are less likely to realize that others don’t share their same privileged knowledge about things—suggesting they anchor too much on their own experience. While there is relatively little research on perspective taking and harassment, one 2008 study of nearly 500 participants did find links. The participants, recruited via newspaper flyers and the like, watched videos of actors playing out situation pulled from major harassment cases. Both men and women higher in perspective-taking were likely to rate the sexualized behavior as unwelcome. The interaction of power and perspective taking also has implications for how organizations treat harassment claims. Powerful people are likely to take cynical views of others motivations. “It is interesting to see how some people have reacted to sexual harassment allegation, with the claims that this person is making a claim of sexual harassment because they’re out to get something,” Smith, the UCSD researcher, says. “Is that an extension of some of the cynicism that comes from having power?” In organizations, cynicism from leadership regarding sexual misconduct can lead to what clinical psychologists refer to as “institutional betrayal”—where the trauma of an assault is compounded by bureaucratic incompetence or opposition or indifference from management. (In a 2013 study, just under half of college women with a history of sexual assault felt betrayed by their schools.) The opposite of institutional betrayal is institutional courage, where bureaucracy is minimized and victims stories are believed—whether it’s on campus or in a corporation. Power turns people into abstract thinkers At the close of Smith’s formative 2006 paper, she and her co-author proposed an abstraction hypothesis. “We propose that … those with power tend to process information in a more abstract manner than those without power,” they wrote. “The ability to see the bigger picture, to plan ahead, to keep an eye on higher goals, may be prerequisites for obtaining power as well as requirements for maintaining it.” In subsequent studies, she found that abstract thinking increases your own personal sense of power, and that just using more abstract, rather than concrete, language makes people appear more powerful. Other researchers found that when experimental participants were asked to think about their lives in a year, they used more abstract thinking in an unrelated follow up task than those who mused about tomorrow—suggesting that abstract thinking in one thing you’re doing can bleed into the next. While abstract thinking sounds innocent, it too has implications for harassment. Researchers have identified a gap in how people describe their sexual
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