ROT197

NEUROLEADERSHIP

AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID ROCK

The founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute believes
the secrets to high performance lie in our ability to master
humankinds greatest asset: the brain.
Interview by Karen Christensen

Research shows that the brain requires three things to func-
tion optimally. What are they?
moderate stress. People tend to think we need low stress
to function at our best, but that isnt true. Most problems related
to poor performance arise when people are already at a moder-
ate level of stress, and they suddenly experience very high stress.
The second requirement for optimal brain functioning is positive
, or emotion, which creates the right neurochemistry for
our conscious and non-conscious processes to function at their
best. If you experience negative emotions consistently, your cor-
tisol levels will be too high, and you wont experience the healing
a good nights sleep, which is critical. For some of us, that means
eight hours. Whatever your needs, even a slight reduction will
make moderate stress, positi
of your life, the more your brain will function at its best.
Y o u h a v e f o u n d t h a t w o r k p la c e e n g a g e m e n t is c lo s e ly lin k e d
to the brains threat/reward function. Please explain.
Neuroscientist Evian Gordon has shown that the over-arching
organizing principle of the human brain is to minimize danger
and maximize reward. I found it very interesting that, when you

29

This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Christopher Abraham's GMBA/DXB/Leadership Excellence course at S P Jain School of Global Management ? Dubai, from December 2016
to June 2017.
 Being threat-focused increases motor functions and heart
rate, whereas a reward focus opens up perception, increases
creativity and tends to improve collaboration.
compare research on employee engagement with Neuroscience
research, lots of common themes emerge. Neuroscientists have
found that when people are in the reward state, they experi-
ence increased cognitive resources, are generally more creative,
solve more problems and have a wider field of perception all
of which is consistent with definitions of workplace engagement.
For example, the reward circuitry in the brain of a bank employ-
ee who is highly engaged would be highly activated. As he goes
about his work, he would have good levels of dopamine in his re-
ward circuitry, including the pre-frontal region and anterior cin-
gulate cortex, and only moderate levels of activation of the threat
circuitry. We could even measure an individuals overall engage-
ment with life, which would include levels of engagement when
at work, at home and in leisure activities.
The point is, in a sense, we humans have two gears: forwards
and backwards. We are always either minimizing danger which
is sort of a backwards response, a pulling away or were trying
to increase reward, which is a forward response. We monitor the
world according to these two responses, every second (actually,
about five times per second), determining threats and rewards
unconsciously to maximize our chance of survival.
Of course, these two systems have different value in differ-
ent environments: if youre in a dangerous environment, being
30 / Rotman Magazine Spring 2013
This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Christopher Abraham's GMBA/DXB/Leadership Excellence course at S P Jain School of Global Management ? Dubai, from December 2016
to June 2017.
threat-focused is adaptive; but if youre not, it is substantially
less effective particularly with respect to perception, cogni-
tion, creativity and collaboration. Being more threat-focused
increases motor functions and heart rate, whereas a reward
focus opens up perception, increases cognition, increases cre-
ativity significantly and tends to improve collaboration. On the
other hand, what we think of as workplace engagement occurs
when people are in a towards state: they are moving into a proj-
ect and moving towards their goal. There is evidence from many
different domains of Neuroscience that the towards state is
far more effective for achieving the things that matter, at work
and in life.
Which workplace scenarios are most likely to create high lev-
els of reward responses?
My colleagues and I have found that the key is to create an atmo-
sphere that promotes Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness
and Fairness. We call this the SCARF model. Lets look at each
element in turn.
First is Status. As humans, we are constantly assessing how
social encounters either enhance or diminish our status. With-
in the brain, feelings of low status actually provoke the kind of
cortisol elevation associated with sleep deprivation and chronic
 anxiety. One study found that the neural circuitry that assesses
status is similar to that which processes numbers: the circuitry
operates even when the stakes are meaningless which is why
being the first off the mark at a green light feels so satisfying.
Understanding this can help leaders avoid organizational prac-
tices that stir threat responses. One common threat is the custom
of offering feedback. The mere phrase Can I give you some ad-
vice? puts people on the defensive, because they perceive the
person offering advice as claiming superiority. Inside your brain,
it is the cortisol equivalent of hearing footsteps in the dark.
The second aspect of neural engagement is a craving for
Certainty. When an individual encounters a familiar situation,
her brain conserves its energy by shifting into a kind of automatic
pilot, relying on long-established neural connections in the basal
ganglia and motor cortex that have, in effect, hardwired this situ-
ation and the individuals response to it. This makes it easy to do
what she has done in the past, and frees her to do two things at
once; for example, to talk while driving. But the minute the brain
registers ambiguity or confusion if, for example, the car ahead
slams on its brakes the brain flashes an error signal. With the
threat response aroused, the driver must stop talking and shift
her full attention to the road.
At work, not knowing what will happen next can be pro-
foundly debilitating, because it requires extra neural energy,
which can undermine performance and disengage people from
the present. Breaking a complex project down into small steps
can help to create a feeling of certainty. Although its highly un-
likely that everything will go as planned, people will function bet-
ter because the project now seems less ambiguous.
Third is the Autonomy factor. As long as people feel they
can execute their own decisions without much oversight, stress
will remain under control. Because our brains evolved in re-
sponse to stressors over thousands of years, they are constantly
attuned, usually at a subconscious level, to the ways in which
social encounters threaten or support the capacity for choice. A
perception of reduced autonomy for example, when someone
is being micromanaged can easily generate a threat response.
When an employee experiences a lack of control, his or her per-
ception of uncertainty is aroused, further raising stress levels. By
contrast, the perception of greater autonomy increases the feel-
ing of certainty and reduces stress. Leaders who want to support
the need for autonomy can give people latitude to make their
own choices, allow them to organize their work, or maybe even
set their own hours.
The fourth aspect is Relatedness. In the brain, the ability to
This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Christopher Abraham's GMBA/DXB/Leadership Excellence course at S P Jain School of Global Management ? Dubai, from December 2016
to June 2017.
feel trust and empathy about others is shaped by whether they
are perceived to be part of the same social group. This pattern
is visible in many domains, from sports (I hate the other team)
to communities (those people on the other side of town always
mess things up.) Whenever you meet someone new, your brain
automatically makes a friend-or-foe distinction and then expe-
riences the person accordingly. In terms of workplace implica-
tions, this means that teams of diverse people cannot simply be
thrown together. They must be deliberately assembled in a way
that minimizes the potential for threat responses to arise.
The last element of neural engagement is Fairness. The
perception that an event has been unfair generates a strong
response in the limbic system, stirring hostility and undermin-
ing trust. The cognitive need for fairness is so strong that some
people are willing to fight and die for causes they believe are just
or commit themselves wholeheartedly to an organization they
recognize as fair. People often engage in volunteer work for this
reason; they perceive their actions as increasing the fairness
quotient in the world.
In organizations, leaders who play favourites or who appear
to reserve privileges for people who are like them will arouse a
threat response in employees who are outside of the circle. The
old boys network provides an egregious example: those who are
not a part of it always perceive their organization as fundamen-
tally unfair, no matter how many mentoring programs are put
in place.
What does deep engagement look like?
This occurs when people experience rewards from all five do-
mains of SCARF. One way to accomplish this is to undertake a
task that you perceive will improve the greater good. In doing so,
you are improving your status in the eyes of yourself and others;
you are decreasing uncertainty by solving some kind of social
problem that didnt have a solution; you are acting autonomous-
ly, making choices instead of complaining about the problem;
you are connecting with other people to facilitate change and you
are reducing unfairness in the world in some way. Thats why vol-
unteering for socially-valuable projects is so deeply rewarding.
You are an advocate of quiet leadership. How do you dene
this approach?
When I say quiet, I am literally referring to the interactions that
take place between a manager and his or her team. In most cases,
the role of a leader is to try to grow or develop people in some
way. What we have found is that, if you are trying to create a be-
Rotman Magazine Spring 2013 / 31
 The mere phrase Can I give you some advice? puts
people on the defensive. Inside your brain, it is the
cortisol equivalent of hearing footsteps in the dark.
haviour change, the best way to do that is to facilitate insight into
the mind of the person youre trying to change. When we learn
something through insight, we recall it and it is more powerful,
because insight changes the brain immediately. Unfortunately,
the more you tell someone what to do, give advice and make sug-
gestions, the more you will inhibit insight, particularly when the
issues are personal or emotional in any way. Quiet leadership is
about having change conversations in such a way that you with-
hold your suggestions and answers; instead, you focus on bring-
ing the other person to their own insights.
Your research indicates that a 500 per cent improvement [!] in
insight generation can be achieved by following a few simple
rules; please explain.
What we did is, we measured peoples effectiveness at generating
insights in others before and after a training session, in exercises
based on real-life work challenges. What we found is that with
just a little bit of training just one or two days you can see a
dramatic increase in your effectiveness. That 500 per cent num-
ber you mention came from some data we pulled from about 320
participants in programs we ran around the world; when we work
directly with individuals, we often get an even higher average.
The two main muscles that people need to learn to flex in
32 / Rotman Magazine Spring 2013
This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Christopher Abraham's GMBA/DXB/Leadership Excellence course at S P Jain School of Global Management ? Dubai, from December 2016
to June 2017.
order to increase their insight-generation capability are:
a) being solution-focused, even when significant problems
are at hand; and
b) being able to bring another person to his or her own
insights, rather than trying to convince them of your
answers.
These might sound easy in theory, but they are terribly difficult
in practice, and they really change the game dramatically for the
effectiveness of conversations.
In a recent study [by Carnegie Mellons David Creswell], peo-
ple who were distracted from what they were doing performed
better on a complex problem-solving task than those who put
in a conscious effort. Why would this be?
Once you get to a certain level of complexity, the con-
scious brain becomes pretty much useless at problem-solving.
And it doesnt take a lot once you get to about four vari-
ables, you lose the ability to process. At this stage, what weve
seen in lab studies is that if you give people time to cognitively
try to solve a complex problem, they dont do very well, and if
you give people the opportunity to guess, they dont do well; but
 if you distract them for just a few minutes, and then give them a
chance to guess, they do much, much better.
The reason for this is that some of the deeper regions of the
brain that are activated when you first start to solve a problem
actually keep working under the surface, even if youre distracted
a little bit. Not if youre distracted into doing some really heavy
cognitive thinking, but if youre just lightly distracted, the deep-
er problem-solving regions will keep working on the problem.
Weve actually seen this in brain scans.
You have said that speaking to executives about all of this
can be a bit like speaking to a classical musician about jazz.
Please explain.
The challenge is that many hard-driving executives have gotten
to where they are by being extremely goal-focused, and being
goal-focused switches off the brain circuitry for thinking about
yourself and thinking about others. Another challenge is that
high cognitive load which executives experience regularly
makes it very difficult to mentalize, to imagine being another
person or reflect on your thinking. So there are all these people
who are very goal-focused experiencing high cognitive load, and
without much practice or experience, they are asked to reflect on
their thinking. For many people, this requires building up a whole
new set of mental muscles.
make different cultures process the world in different ways. In
our globally connected world, its extremely important to know
about this and to respect those differences.
What parting advice do you have for leaders who want to help
their colleagues have more insights?
Respect the quiet. We cant solve complex problems with more
effort; it requires switching off and quieting down the mind. In-
dividually, this means allowing for some downtime each day to
let your mind wander freely, whether its on the train or taking
a walk. Dont fill every waking moment with stimulation, be-
cause you wont get the downtime needed to have creative break-
throughs. I suggest turning off all your devices for a few hours
each day and for a few days per week if you can manage it.
Organizationally, we should be allowing people to have
quiet spaces when they need them. The open plan office is good
for collaborative work, but it can be a hindrance for insight. Also,
the brain will tend to be quieter in the mornings, before the buzz
of the day; try to allow people to shut themselves away without
meetings for a couple of hours in the morning, rather than sched-
uling meetings first thing.

Tell us a bit about the emerging discipline of Cultural Neuro-

science.
This is a relatively new and fascinating field that my colleagues
and I are now drawing on in our work. It involves cognitive neu-
roscientists and biologists and others who are looking at the basis
of cultural difference, particularly between different countries
and different races. What we are learning is that there are signifi-
cant cultural differences in how people process raw information.
For instance, there are differences in what people from different
cultures find rewarding or threatening. One example is, if youre
from the Far East, there is a 70 per cent chance that you will
have a gene that changes oxytocin uptake in the brain. What this
means is that you will feel both social reward and social threat
more acutely than other people; and one result of this might be
David Rock is the founding president of the NeuroLeadership
that you develop a more collectivist approach. The field is basi- Institute and CEO of Results Coaching Systems, which helps
cally tracing such traits back to a genetic basis. organizations grow their leadership teams using brain research
The fact is, different cultures have different genetic make- as a basis for self and social awareness. He is the author of Your
Brain at Work (HarperBusiness, 2009) and Quiet Leadership: Six
ups; weve always known there is individual variation, but now
Steps to Transforming Performance at Work (Collins, 2007). Sessions from
we know there is also cultural variation. Cultural differences are the 2012 NeuroLeadership Summit can be viewed at neuroleadership.org/
not just skin deep there are unconscious biases involved that summits/2012Summit.

Rotman Magazine Spring 2013 / 33

This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Christopher Abraham's GMBA/DXB/Leadership Excellence course at S P Jain School of Global Management ? Dubai, from December 2016
to June 2017.