This article was taken from the February 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
To understand effective leadership, is the brain the place to look? Proponents of the nascent field of neuroleadership believe so. "Our vision," says the NeuroLeadership Institute on its website, "is to transform leadership through neuroscience."
How might the study of the brain inform our understanding of good leadership? David Rock, cofounder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, used his Psychology Today blog "Your Brain at Work" to compile "5 Big Discoveries About Leadership in 2012". But rather than give a list of neuroscience research that has transformed what we know about leadership, Rock placed in first position the finding that narcissists are better at interviews and therefore more likely to land leadership roles. The brain didn't come into it. The brain was also absent from the four other findings that Rock highlighted that year, and another list he produced at the end of 2013 on "personal effectiveness" was topped by a study that found people dislike open-plan offices.
It's a similar story if you look at the programme for the NeuroLeadership Summit, which was held in October 2014 in San Francisco. One of the main sessions was on the idea that organisations, like people, see staff potential as either fixed or malleable. This is based on the work of psychologist Carol Dweck, who has shown that people who see ability as malleable work harder through tough problems.
However, this is psychology, not brain science. In January 2014 an article in The Atlantic, called "The neuroscience guide to negotiations with Iran", made many excellent points, but they were based on psychologyand history, not brain science.
Is there literally no "neuro" in "neuroleadership"? To be fair, there are cases of leadership research involving measures of brain activity but the quality of the science tends to be poor. In 2011, David Waldman and colleagues published a paper in which they attempted to identify the neurological basis of inspirational leadership. The team recorded the brainwaves of inspirational managers, and planned to teach less successful managers to use neurofeedback to mimic these patterns of brain activity. This overly simplistic approach assumes that the cause of the inspirational managers' vision was the recorded brainwaves. In fact it's just as plausible that the brain activity was the result of their leadership style and experience. This is a long way from robust scientific trials with comparison groups and proper placebo controls.
The Neuroleadership Journal also shows us that when neuroscience is involved in this field, it tends to invoke neuromythology (common misconceptions about brain mechanisms). A 2009 paper argued that a better understanding of "mirror neurons" (brain cells that are active when we perform or watch an action) could help managers understand their employees' feelings. Yet scholars have challenged the idea that mirror neurons are the source of human empathy.
Unsurprisingly the neuroleadership movement is struggling.
Although we learnt at school about "great leaders" with specific, unique qualities, the reality is that leaders succeed by cultivating in their followers a sense of shared identity and purpose. Good leadership is about "we" not about "I".
Instead of studying the brain, the correct approach is to study social-psychological factors: the behaviours, relationships and decisions of people who cultivate a strong group mentality and balance the needs of each member with those of the group. Brain science might one day bring us new insights about leadership, but in its current form the neuroleadership movement is simply rebranded psychology
with a sprinkling of neuromythology.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
