Success at work? It's all in the mind
Bill Lucas explains how neuro-science could shape your career
Bill Lucas
Guardian
Saturday June 16, 2001
Every employer is agreed that people are their greatest asset in the new economy. Yet few of them show any real interest in understanding the most important part of any person - their mind.
Employees, too, pay little heed to advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Yet to be successful in business, everybody needs to know how their brain works and how they can apply it in their working life.
Take three important brain principles, for example. First, the brain needs the right blend of challenge and stress. If we are pushed too hard, the most primitive part of our brain demands our survival and calls on us to fight or flee, draining blood away from the parts of our brain devoted to higher order thinking. When stressed, we can forget how to tackle a normal, instinctive, activity. Our short-term memory deserts us as we panic.
Secondly, your brain loves both the security of patterns and the excitement of making new connections. Try folding your arms naturally and then the other way round and you'll see what I mean. Your brain prefers the pattern it knows best, but is perfectly capable of doing it the other way. Always fold your arms in the same way in your daily life and creativity is stifled.
Thirdly, all brains like to be given information in a variety of different ways and to get the big picture. We need the visual, the aural and the experiential. To make sense of data we also need to un derstand the whole, but too often employees are asked to solve a jigsaw puzzle without being able to see the picture on the lid of the box. Any management team that seriously applied these principles would enhance its performance, creativity and internal communications. Understanding the mind has a dramatic impact on our understanding of the learning process. In fact learning to learn is essentially a matter of ready, go, steady. You need to be emotionally ready. Then you need to go for it, using a range of practical techniques to make your learning more effective. And finally, you need to be steady in the face of many conflicting pressures, making sure you put your learning into practice, changing and adapting accordingly. Too many organisations expend ludicrous amounts of money training people who are simply not ready to learn and too little time applying the re sults of learning so that behaviours are adapted beneficially. I recently interviewed a number of top leaders to find out how brain-based approaches are influencing their thinking. Increasingly they are looking for the practical applications of neuro-science, often relying on instinct and commonsense.
Take just two areas, creativity and communication.
Two things struck me forcibly about creativity and learning. With a high premium on good ideas, leaders want to know how to get them. Interestingly, not one of the people I spoke to got their best ideas at work. For Joyce Taylor, MD of Discovery Channel, it is walking. Periods of minimal activity stirs up Sir Bob Reid of Bank of Scotland. And Jayne-Anne Gadhia, who heads Virgin One Account, says that the best ideas come to her while running or in the shower.
Many corporate leaders, aware of their own preferences for the visual, are starting to change the way their businesses communicate.
Hilary Cropper, chief executive of FI Group , says: "I like pictures. Drawing an idea gets a concept across more clearly than numbers." Chris Mellor, group MD of Anglian Water, spoke of thinking in metaphors and stories, which use a different part of your brain.
Centrica has really put this into practice by creating an interactive learnibition to enable call centre staff to see the new company vision in its totality to learn about raising customer care levels.
Does all this mean managers have to become neuroscientists? Hardly. But there are some simple things that they could do: Ensure all employees understand the basics of how their minds work and how factors such as diet and fitness contribute to the workings of their brain.
Always give the big picture. Use stories, pictures and experience as the core of communication strategy.
Make sure people are emotionally ready to learn by investing in interactive internal communication and understanding motivation. Make human resources integral to change programmes by ensuring that learning and adaptation go side by side. And run the majority of HR functions through operations staff, developing managerial competence to keep challenge and stress in balance.
A commitment to the people mantra is not in itself enough: organisations need to get more out of the minds of their people and really find out how they learn best. ?
Bill Lucas is chief executive of the Campaign for Learning. His latest book, Power up Your Mind: Learn Faster, Work Smarter (￡14.99) is published by Nicholas Brealey this month.