Brain Hacks 4 Leadership

Do you want your team to be more productive, innovative or engaged? Basketball legend Michael Jordan says it all "Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships." If you want to know how you, as a leader, can leverage neuroscience to increase trust and vulnerability to build and sustain a high performing team, this is the podcast for you.

Paul Zak is my guest, his two decades of research have taken him from the Pentagon to Fortune 50 boardrooms to the rain forest of Papua New Guinea. All this in a quest to understand the neuroscience of human connection, human happiness, and effective teamwork. His academic lab and companies he has started develop and deploy neuroscience technologies to solve real problems faced by real people.

His latest book, Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High Performance Companies, uses neuroscience to measure and manage organizational cultures to inspire teamwork and accelerate business outcomes. His 2012 book, The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity, recounted his unlikely discovery of the neurochemical oxytocin as the key driver of trust, love, and morality that distinguish our humanity. In another obsession, Paul's group uses neuroscience to quantify the impact of movies, advertising, stories, and consumer experiences. Along the way, he has helped start several transdisciplinary fields, including neuroeconomics, neuromanagement, and neuromarketing.

Paul is the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics, Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University. He has degrees in mathematics and economics from San Diego State University, a Ph.D. in economics from University of Pennsylvania, and post-doctoral training in neuroimaging from Harvard. He also serves as a senior advisor to Finsbury, a global leader in strategic communications that advises many of the world's most successful companies.

Paul's research on oxytocin and relationships has earned him the nickname "Dr. Love." That's cool. He's all about adding more love to the world.

Thank you Paul so much for being with us and Paul is going to talk about trust and vulnerability for leaders and how important that is and also the science behind it and some tips that you as leaders can use for yourself and your organization. So thank you Paul. So Paul, tell us what is the science behind trust and vulnerability for leadership? I spent most of my professional life running neuroscience experiments to understand why some teams perform at high levels and other teams not so much. And we found that two components are necessary. One is having a trusted team and the second is your purpose. If you know where you're going, it marshals brain resources that motivates you to draw on social resources like people around you to reach goals, particularly when those are difficult but achievable stretch goals. And so when we started looking at the underlying factors that produce trust between teams, we identified eight components and one of those which I call natural, is really being yourself at work.

And a key component of that is being vulnerable. So it turns out that many studies have shown that people who are, too beautiful too perfect, we kind of hate those people because we can't believe anyone can be that great and most people aren't that great. They're putting on this mask. And so when you let that mask fall and you say, hey, you know what team, we want to do this thing, you guys are experts in this, not me. I know it's important to us. Here's why. Yeah, take a couple of weeks and start exploring whether we can do this or not. So, a concrete example, you know, my lab, we collect terabytes of brain data and we build predictive models of them and we've started investing in machine learning. So I read some books on machine learning. I'm roughly, you know, acquainted with the different techniques, but I don't have time to learn how to do them.

So I have a team and I said, you guys are super smart. You're all learning about machine learning. Here's a couple of giant data sets. Go see if you can improve our predictions using machine learning. And then all of a sudden they want to tell me about, well, we did this and support vector machines. I like, I don't even want to know if it works. Then you explain it to me. If it doesn't work, I don't care, I don't want to waste my brain power. So really empowering those people in my group to say "you are the experts in this, not me." And then come back even though I'm the leader, come back and teach me something and that's a whole different ballgame than "we have to do this and you guys have got to make this work and blah blah blah." So I think the punchline for the work we've done on building high trust teams is that everyone should be treated as a volunteer at work.

Everyone's choosing volitionally to be at this organization. So if you're a volunteer, then you need to ask them to do something you can't demand. You need to explain why they're doing something, not just scream at them to get something done. And at the end of the day, they should be thanked for the extra effort they're putting in to move the organization's goal forward. And so that's really being a servant leader or a vulnerable leader. It's a really effective way to achieve high performance in teams. I love that example of not giving the answer, but letting the team come up with that. So why is that so much more valuable then leaders telling them what to do? I think a lot of that is what we've seen in the past, that type of authoritative leadership. I need to know the answer, if I tell them I don't know, I'll appear weak.

What is it that happens for employees that makes them more willing to volunteer and be creative when you're asking them to come to the solution versus telling them what to do. Right? This is where the neuroscience comes in. So the work we've done in particular on a brain network is activated by a neurochemical called oxytocin, shows that when we asked for help as social creatures, we almost always are motivated to respond in kind. So if you asked me to do something as opposed to demand or in an aggressive way forced me to do something, most of us get this kind of defensive approach like, Hey, what the hell? I mean, even if you're my boss, don't be intimidating me dude! My recent book "Trust Factor" has a lot of Peter Director in there, who was on the faculty with me at Claremont for years.

And you know, Peter is the one who's coined the term knowledge worker. He said if you're a knowledge worker, you need to be your own CEO. Well everyone is a knowledge worker today, literally everyone. So if you're year own CEO and some dude is screaming in the office and I've worked for screamers, you'd probably have too Jill. I don't like it. And the first thing I want to do is get the heck out of there. So we all are our own CEO, so we should treat people like that. Like I'm thrilled that you decided to work for our group. Am I going to push you? Yeah. Am I going to challenge you? For sure. Am I going to talk to you when you're missing your goals? For sure, right? There's no sense in which people are not being held accountable, but I really want to have people give this intrinsic effort and I can't do that, that's internal to the employee. So by the way, I don't even like the word employee, I like colleague or team mate. I think we should get rid of this kind of weird Marxian hangover of capital and labor being at conflict somehow. So anyway, so I don't want to ask colleagues or to force them to do the things I want them to do. I want them to be passionate about what we're doing. If they're passionate about it, they're going to hit the ball out of the park, if I give them the tools to do that and help them learn how to hit the ball. So anyway, I think in the world we're in with an unemployment now, 3.9%, I think I just saw in the US, just getting bodies on board is hard enough, but getting high performers, if I want to do that, I've got to create a culture where people can really thrive and if you are authoritative, if you're aggressive, it's just not going to work and people will go elsewhere and we know that money is a very weak motivator for performance.

So let's create the conditions, the social conditions, that drawn our social brain, and in particular induce the release of oxytocin - make us want to work for the team goal. And when we do that it's anti aggressive, it's inclusive and accepting. It's challenging and it's going to be hard and we're going to make mistakes. But guess what? If I'm a leader, I'm going to make mistakes too. And I'd love feedback from you guys as well, but just all try to get better at this thing. So one of my great examples of this actually from the book is where I live near Silicon Valley. They have many, many tech companies have monthly "Congratulations, you screwed up celebrations" Let's get pizza and beer and let's talk about the mistakes we made this month and see who screwed up the biggest because if you want to innovate, you've got to make some mistakes and when you celebrate, you also share those with the company.

So if everyone is seeking to innovate that we know everyone's making mistakes, right? Jeff Bezos has said this, "one or two out of 10 of the bets we take pay off, but they pay off big enough that we could do lots of small scale experiments." So yeah, let's talk about how we screwed up. Let's make sure everyone knows so no one else makes that mistake and let's make it fun. So if you want to innovate, try some new stuff and empower those, trust those people around you to make decisions that are going to drive performance up. If you're just going to scream at people they make a mistake, then you're going to get status quo and your going to get a lot of turnover. Yes, they keep the best for themselves when you do that, right? Yeah, for sure.

So you shared that there is two things that you found for really high performing teams, a trusted team and purpose. Can you talk a little bit more about purpose? Thank you. Yes, so I think there's two kinds of purposes within organizations. One is the sort of transactional purpose, the processes that you've got to set up to run a company efficiently. I'm talking about a different kind of purpose, which I call transcendent purpose, which is why the organization exists at all and according to Drucker and Edward Deming. at its core organizations exist to improve people's lives. And so companies that embrace that, a sense of service to their client, service to their community, are much more productive and in experiments we've run, we've shown much higher oxytocin release when we have a social purpose, what we're doing, much higher productivity and more enjoyment. So again, I think every organization can find that core purpose that tells us why we're working so hard. Right? Yeah, I need the paycheck. Um, yeah, probably I liked some of the people I work with, but when I got a long day when I've worked my butt off and I realize I'm doing this because I'm saving patients lives or because I'm making my customers day a little better.

Doug Rauch, who took Trader Joe's national, he just retired from them, said that when he was taking Trader Joe's national, he realized that they were not a grocery store. They were an organization that was designed to make people happy. They just happen to do that by selling interesting, funky food. But it was all about making people happy. So that's when they started. If you go to Trader Joe's, if you ask the question to one of their colleagues, they walk you down the aisle to find the thing you've asked about. They will do everything. They'll walk the stuff out to your car. They will do everything until you are extraordinarily happy. So that's a really cool approach, right? It means that everything that you're doing has got to fit into that core purpose. It also means if you're doing stuff that doesn't fit their core purpose, you shouldn't be doing it.

I love that. I love that example as well with Trader Joe's that is a fun store to go into, definitely. You talked a little bit about how you use this with your team personally. What is one thing that leaders could do if they want to really improve on getting that high performing team? I hear that a lot - high performing team, trust, purpose and especially purpose. So what are the one or two things that a manager could do?

I mean it sounds like we're in kindergarten, but it's really simple. Say please and thank you. My group works a lot on project basis, so we have a funded project come in and instead of assigning that task to somebody we say, hey, who would like to do this task? It is a whole different approach. Again, this is done a lot in the silicon valley world. Here's the project, who wants to take lead on this? Who wants to build a team and work on this thing for three months or six months? Who's got capacity? Who's interested? Who wants to stretch themselves and a lot of celebrations. So from the neuroscience perspective, anything that happens more than about a week in the future is almost irrelevant in terms of setting up a feedback loop. So when goals are met, even kinda midterm goals, right? Maybe milestones, have a celebration. do the debrief, get some feedback. I think of that celebration is a chance to have the community of people that you work with come together to celebrate high performance and then you set up aspirations among the entire company for high performance, right? If we're celebrating this. And also if performance goals are not met, celebrate in public, but critique in private. So, very good neuroscience showing that if I dress you down in public, all of a sudden I've shamed you in terms of your social group, that is a guaranteed recipe for disengagement.

So you're not meeting your milestones, I will sit down and say, "Hey Jill, you know what, the last couple of weeks you seemed to be behind on where you're supposed to be. Let's talk about why you seem to be missing these milestones and what we can do to help you get around that". And then if, you know people you can't serve remediate, then we have to have a discussion about maybe this is not the right fit for you. But again, I think the explosion of neuroscience in the last 15 years has really allowed us to make specific well tested predictions about how to manage the humans who are around you at work and they're complicated, they're beautiful, very diverse, and they make mistakes and they do extraordinary things and so all of those I think are part of building this high trust high performance team.

Yeah, I think those are great tips and just because it seems simple doesn't mean it's easy or maybe we think that it has to be more complex to really make it work. So what else are you working on right now, thinking about or having your team look into to help leaders and teams and organizations be more effective?

We've been doing work for the last about 12 years on persuasion, on the neuroscience of persuasion, so how do we create messages both internally to teams and externally to clients that engage them, get them to act, whether that's a purchase post, share word of mouth, and we have identified neurologic signals that are very accurate at allowing us to predict whether messages are effective or not. And recently we rolled out wearable wireless sensors, worn on the forearm in which we can pick up this data coming out of the brain and see in real time how effective a message or an experience is at really engaging people both intentionally, but also emotionally. Do you care about this thing or not? So very exciting, we just released this in January and now working with companies ranging from movie studios and TV producers to large management consulting companies to increase the effectiveness of messaging, of training, of education and just making overall experiences great. So that's what we really want. We live in the experience economy now and so if we want to create great experiences both for our employees but also for our clients, we've got to have measurement tools, otherwise we're just counting on our fallible intuition. So anyway, we're real excited about rolling out these wireless sensors so people can contact me and find out more.

That's great. So the wireless sensors you're working on helping organizations, use those to test with their customers or potential clients? How does that work?

Both, yeah, with clients we are doing a lot of work on effective messaging, but doing a lot of live events, corporate training events, everything from onboarding recently did some work to help company with employee recruiting. So how do I get people to actually apply for my jobs at my company? And then really on communication in general. So how do we create an effective narrative that tells our company's story or purpose narrative and our narrative to customers, but lots of work in advertising. And I worked on movie trailers, you know, it's amazing at this age and time we live in that a movie studio will spend 100 million or more producing a movie and then you know, they look at some trailers and they go, ah, I like, I liked number one and number seven, let's release that. There's no science there, you know, so it's really blending the art and the science, the art of creation. We can't do that. But from a testing perspective we can get better than just intuition. So that's what we're getting to - having a real tool and doing it in real time was hard. Gosh, was that hard, a lot of signal processing has to go on and cloud computing. So anyway, as you can tell, I'm really excited about having a real time neurosensor that is predictive of what people will do.

Very fascinating. Yeah. We are lucky to have all these breakthroughs and ability in technology that allows us to so quickly be able to gather this and use it for good. Right? Absolutely. Yep. Well thank you. So any last words from you? Any specific tips that we didn't cover or anything that you think is really important for leaders to understand as they focus on building trust and transparency with their team.

Thank you. Yeah, it's been great to be on with you. I think really understanding that in the world we live in today with really looming labor shortages and a real need to keep the highest performers in your organization, it's the human factors that matter. Vulnerability also means letting your emotions show, being honest, really being a human. I think when you let your humanity show you also absorb the humanity of those people around you and that's what we really want when we work in teams and when we're stretched and we work hard. Human beings are fascinating species I've discovered in my experiments, so really being a great leader means being fully human, accepting your humanity, accepting emotions and letting them show and making mistakes. No one's perfect. We all make mistakes and owning those mistakes too, so no need to be perfect and no-one is a little god at work. As long as we're trying our best and we'll make some progress, it's all good.

That's great. Yeah. Take that stress off of trying to be perfect or thinking you are because like you said, you get more out of people when you're not and you're honest about that. That's great. I really appreciate that. Well, thank you so much for sharing this and I hope to have you back as you start doing more work on the neuroscience of persuasion and we get to learn a little bit more about what you're learning and how leaders can use this as well. So thank you and I hope you have an amazing week. Thanks so much Jill.

Closing

I hope that you have enjoyed this and can start using some of these great ideas build high performing teams. Make sure to subscribe to be alerted to ongoing podcasts. I work with leaders and their teams to apply these concepts, grow themselves, their teams and their business. Schedule a free 30 minute consultation here to see if I can help you, your team or your organization. You can reach me, Jill Windelspecht, directly by email at [email protected] and visit my website at www.TalentSpecialists.net.

Get in touch with Paul: Paul's Website

Do you and your team want to get better at making decisions that are not status quo? Would you like your team to take the right risks and encourage a culture that learns from success and failure? Did you know that being too results oriented can get in the way of making the highest equity decisions? If so, this is the podcast for you. Annie Duke, professional speaker and Decision Strategist, will share her research and help you learn how to create a process that helps you make better decisions, while encouraging learning and risk taking. She helps people have uncertainty with confidence.

Annie Duke is a woman who has leveraged her expertise in the science of smart decision making to excel at pursuits as varied as championship poker to public speaking. For two decades, Annie was one of the top poker players in the world. In 2004, she bested a field of 234 players to win her first World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet. The same year, she triumphed in the $2 million winner-take-all, invitation-only WSOP Tournament of Champions. In 2010, she won the prestigious NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship. Prior to becoming a professional poker player, Annie was awarded the National Science Foundation Fellowship. Because of this fellowship, she studied Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Well, Annie, thank you so much for being on the podcast today, really looking forward to hearing about some of the work that you're going and starting to think about now around resulting and how it gets in the way of learning. That's what your last book was really about, and also to the ways that we make decisions more defensively that can impact our productivity, something that is near and dear to the hearts of any leaders.

Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be here.

Great. Well, tell us first what does resulting mean?

Yeah, so resulting is really something that I take a deep dive on in my book in terms of how it gets in the way of learning, and basically resulting is when we make too tight a connection between the quality of an outcome and the quality of the decision that preceded it. The issue is really we have an outcome, we have the way that the future turned out and that future can end up that way for a variety of reasons, and trying to work backward from the outcome to the quality of the decision that preceded it is really hard because these things are relatively loosely correlated. So, to get this into a concrete example that I think that people will be able to feel pretty deeply and I think that it really gets people to understand what resulting is, I want to take us back to the 2015 Super Bowl where the Seahawks are on the 1-yard line of the New England Patriots.

It's second down, there's one timeout left and the Seahawks are down by four with only 26 seconds left in the whole game. So, this is obviously a super important movement because if Pete Carroll can call a play that gets a touchdown, obviously they're down by four, that's gonna put them up by two. Let's assume they make the field goal, but even if they don't they're up by two and it's very unlikely that the Patriots are gonna have any time to get all the way down the field to score again so this is for the game. So, if they can score here this is gonna win them the game. So, with 26 seconds left they've got a running back, they're only on the 1-yard line, remember. They've got a running back named Marshawn Lynch who's an amazing short yardage running back and everybody's kind of expecting Pete Carroll to call a hand off so that Marshawn Lynch can just sort of barrel through, hopefully, the defensive line of the Patriots.

Instead, Pete Carroll does something super unexpected which is he calls for a pass play. So, Russell Wilson, the quarterback of the Seahawks, passes the ball and the New England Patriot's Malcolm Butler intercepts the ball in the end zone. So, let's agree this is a really, really disastrous result. This is a very, very bad outcome quality. So, obviously the Seahawks lose the game there and when you listen to the in game call, in other words the announcers, Chris Collinsworth, he's really pretty brutal about the whole thing, really saying he can't believe this call, this is the worst call that he's ever seen. Then when you look at the headlines the next day for most of the pundits who are doing a nice job here of Monday morning quarterbacking, they are not disagreeing.

So, it's a lot of this is the most horrible call in Super Bowl history repeated throughout all the headlines and then actually USA Today managed to say it was the worst call in football history period. Now, when Pete Carroll was actually asked about this on the Today Show, what he said was that he would agree that it was the worst result of a call ever, and I think that that's a really important distinction. So, what we know is that the result of this call was terrible but does that actually mean that the call itself was terrible? The answer is not necessarily. We'd have to go back and we'd have to really look at the mathematics of that call. Just super quickly, the chances of an interception there are somewhere between 1% and 2%.

So, once you know that fact that 99% of the time either the ball's gonna be caught for a touchdown or it's just gonna be dropped, which will stop the clock and allow them to go for another play, once you know that fact of what's the interception rate there I think we can agree that probably declaring it to be the worst call in the history of football is probably a little bit of an over exaggeration. I think that we can see how much the quality of the outcome, which was so bad, is yanking us around in our ability to see through to what the quality of the decision is and we can do that pretty easily by just imagining this.

Imagine that he calls the pass play and the ball is actually caught for a touchdown in the end zone, and I do this in front of audiences all the time. I ask them to actually just close their eyes and imagine this, and everybody can feel it immediately. What are the headlines gonna look like the next day? Everybody just says immediately it's brilliant, it was one of the most brilliant calls in football history, and we can actually see this because Philadelphia this year actually called a similarly unusual play but in this case it worked out and everybody hailed the coach of the Eagles, Doug Pederson, to be a genius. So, there's clearly something weird going on here, right?

You have the decision. The decision's the decision regardless of which future happens to occur. There's a variety of futures that can occur, and yet we can feel it very deeply that when the outcome is really bad we think the decision is really back, and when the outcome is really good we immediately think that the decision is really good, and yet based on one time that shouldn't actually affect in reality what we think about that decision, and that's just because in life the quality of an outcome and the quality of the decision are only loosely correlated. I can give you a super example. I've run a red light in my life, not gotten a ticket. I haven't gotten in an accident. I'm not trying to re-do that. I don't think that that was a good decision because the outcome happened to be good. You can see how this is a really big problem for learning.

So, what I've been thinking about recently is how is this a problem when we're results oriented? This is a very common thing that people say, we're results oriented. So, I've been thinking about that because we have this problem which is well what do you mean by results? Because clearly you can see what happened with the Seahawks, that people said oh here's this result and I'm gonna make this results oriented decision and what ends up happening is that Pete Carroll is getting excoriated for a decision that was actually mathematically pretty good. By the way, if anybody wants to geek out on it they can go look at Benjamin Morris on 538 to see some really good analysis of the play.

But, now what I've been thinking about is well what does that do to people's decision making if they know that they're gonna be evaluated based on the result? If they know that what's gonna happen is there's gonna be a collective outcry about the quality of the decision if you have a bad result? And, what are you doing to people in that situation? What I've been realizing is you really force people into a very defensive crouch when they're making decisions. In other words, you're gonna get it so that they're not making necessarily decisions that are going to create the biggest value. They're going to make decisions that are going to defend against being judged for a bad outcome.

So, if we go back to the Pete Carroll situation, I can give you an example of how this might happen and then we can take a deeper dive. If you go look at Benjamin Morris, there's a very good argument that the highest return play is the pass, and obviously Pete Carroll felt that way. He felt like the highest return play was gonna be a pass. Now, the lower return play would be a hand off to Marshawn Lynch. This also happens to be the status quo play. It also happens to be the expected play. This is what everybody expected him to do, but it's actually a lower return. You can imagine that if a coach knows that when you do this unexpected thing when you do the pass play, which happens to be higher return, that if it doesn't work out you're gonna be yelled at, then you can imagine that as a defensive maneuver they might just hand it off to Marshawn Lynch. Why? Well we can do that thought experiment as well.

Let's imagine that you hand the ball off to Marshawn Lynch and Marshawn Lynch just happens to fail to score. What do the headlines look like the next day? I've done this thought experiment with people that I work with and they all say the same thing, oh the Patriots were too good. So, now they're not blaming Pete Carroll's decision making anymore because it's just the status quo choice, but it happens to be a lower equity choice. It has a lower return. It's just that it happens to be a choice that defends against people yelling at you for the choice because it's a choice that's more agreed upon. People have talked for a long time about how in the NFL they've been very, very slow to come around to these more creative fourth down plays like going for it on fourth down, for example, and if you wanna know why even though the math has been out there, I think that this problem with defensive decision making is really what tells you what it is.

If a coach whose job is on the line knows that they're gonna be evaluated on the result of one play or one game or one season where you don't have enough data to really say anything about what the decision process is, that they're gonna be just evaluated solely on their short term result then what are they gonna do? They're gonna make decisions that defend against being evaluated on those short term results. In other words, they're gonna stick with the status quo.

Which is definitely not something that you want when you're looking at innovation, trying to compete or beat your competition, right?

Well, yeah, so what you're really trying to encourage in the people that work with you is you want them to be trying to find out what the truth of the matter is, what it is that can be learned from outcomes good or bad, what innovations might be there to be had. You're asking them to figure out what the highest return decision is gonna be. What you don't want them to do is figure out what the decision is the least likely to incur somebody's wrath is gonna be, and there's all sorts of ways in which you, through evaluating people on short term results, you can force them into defensive crouches and that defensive crouch can exhibit itself in a variety of ways. So, one of the ways, and this relates back to what we were just talking about, is that people will very often try to make a decision such that if there's a bad outcome it is a reasonable explanation. It appears reasonable that it could be due to luck. In other words, to factors that are outside of the person's control.

Here's a simple example that's not from business and then we can talk about how this might manifest itself in a business situation, but I think that this will help people to see very clearly where the problem comes from, and this example comes from Kevin Zollman, who's a game theorist actually at Carnegie Mellon. Let's say that you as a leader offer somebody a plate that has two cookies on it and one of the cookies is very big and one of the cookies is small, and the person feels this, that they know if you choose the really big cookie that they will be judged by the leader for being greedy, for being super greedy and a pig. And, if they choose the small cookie they're gonna be judged as a ridiculous virtue signaler. So, no one situation. If the outcome is I've chosen the big cookie, then I'm gonna be judged for that. If the outcome is I've chosen a small cookies, then I will be judged for that. So, the solution there is for them to flip a coin. If you flip a coin, now notice that the judgment goes away.

Why is the judgment going away there? Well, it wasn't in my control. I know I ended up with the big cookie, but you can't say that I was a pig because I flipped a coin. That's how I ended up with the big cookie. Or, I know I ended up with the small cookie and you can't say that I'm a ridiculous virtue signaler because how could I have controlled it? I flipped a coin. There was nothing I could do. So, this is one of the ways that people will get into a defensive crouch. So, they're not choosing the cookies based on what their values are or what they think the best result for them is or what they think the best result for you is. Instead they're just sort of deflecting and saying well let me pick up a coin and I'm just gonna leave it to chance. Obviously this is not something that you want to have happen.

There's different ways that you can do this, by the way, that don't involve coin flipping. Let me ask you this, have you ever been in a situation where say someone that you're on a date with is trying to figure out what restaurant to go to and you insist that they choose?

Yes.

Right, so why are you doing that? Well, because then it's not on you if it's not a good experience.

Exactly.

Shouldn't you be choosing? It's very rare that you don't actually have a preference. You're not going in and examining what your preference is and balancing that with what you think their preferences might be and trying to come up with the most rational choice for the both of you, which is gonna balance out both of your happiness. Instead, you essentially pick up a coin to flip by saying no, no, no, you choose.

Yeah, happens a lot.

That could take the responsibility off of you and you can see how that happens in the workplace a lot, that sort of you choose. No, you choose. It's your decision. We're offloading decisions and we're not really thinking clearly about what our own preferences are, what we think is gonna balance out to everybody's preferences in the room because by saying you choose now whatever the result is it's like well it's not on me, I didn't choose. Notice that saying you choose is a choice in itself. It's interesting because obviously picking up the coin and choosing to flip is still a choice in itself, we just don't think about that because we're just like oh, okay, now luck is a reasonable explanation so we're gonna go with that. And we can see this in the Pete Carroll example which is why is it that as the collective public we feel so much better if he fails by handing the ball off and having the run play happen? Which remember, that's the lower return play. It's mathematically not as good a play.

So, why is it that we feel so much better about that? Why is it that if he had made that decision we would all be like poor Pete Carroll, nothing he could do? And the reason is that that choice of hanging the ball off is the consensus choice. It has a tremendous amount of consensus around it just like not going through red lights has a lot of consensus around it. It's a decision that people, they've already made an evaluation of whether it's a good decision or a bad decision, it's just the status quo choice and when you have a status quo choice, people say well clearly that's a good choice because that's been agreed to as part of the collective wisdom, and so therefore if there's a bad outcome from it it must just be due to luck because that clearly was the best choice because we've all agreed to it.

This is the first thing that we see happen when we put people into a defensive crouch is that they tend to go with status quo choices. They tend to go with what the legacy choice is and not poke around to see if there's a better way because if they go with the legacy choice and it doesn't happen to work out, well there's already consensus around that. So, they know that people are gonna shrug and say well what could you do? Because this is the way it's always been done, but what you really want from the people that you're working with is the willingness to poke around, to push the boundaries, to see if there isn't a better way. This is how progress gets made, and this is certainly how we defend against people coming in who are creative, people coming in who are trying different things. If we continue with the status quo then what happens is we obviously get caught unprepared for when there are big changes and we're not pushing the boundaries and we're not moving things forward. We're not really looking around for that pass play anymore.

So, what is it that a leader can do personally to look at their own decisions and test to make sure that they're not just going for status quo and that we're really making a decision that is the best decision?

I think there's a variety of ways to do that, and I think this actually ties back in to how do you get the people that you're working with to not be in these defensive crouches and defending against bad decisions? I think that these are tied together because what you want to be doing is always examining to try to make sure that you have the best process going as opposed to really signaling that you're results oriented. So, how can you do that? There's a few ways that you can do this. Let's say that an outcome has already happened. So, way number one is to really work with the group when somebody is coming in to try to do the post mortem on an outcome, to have it look more like they're doing it before the outcome occurred to try to reinforce that there's a very lose relationship between outcome quality and decision quality. So, how can you do that? Well, when you're describing a decision to people or when anybody is coming in and describing a decision and asking for advice from a group that you're working with in order to try to figure out whether you would want to repeat that decision or what parts of the decision might be due to luck or what might be due to skill, have them describe the decision that they were struggling with only to the point that they need help.

So, in other words, if you're in sales describe what the relationship is with the person that you were negotiating with. Obviously in this particular case you know what the product is because you're in the same group with the people, so really work with this is what I knew about the person that I was negotiating with, this is what my past experiences with them had been, this is what my goals were in the negotiations so I went in and we're negotiating and we get to this point where he says X and I needed to know what to respond there, and then stop. Our tendency is to want to tell the rest of the story. Our tendency is to want to say and so I did this so this was my choice, and then this was his response, and then so on and so forth. Notice what you've done there is you've let the person know first of all what your choice is, which you don't want to because they're gonna try to in general, the first thing is you don't want to let them know your choice, particularly as a leader because they'll try to make your choice make sense.

So, you've now infected them with a bias which is they're gonna try to attempt to make your choice make sense because that's the sort of thing that you do when you're in a room with someone who's in a leadership role. But then once you've actually told them what the response was of the other person, let's say that the response of the other person was good, now we're in the Pete Carroll problem. They're gonna try to make the good response make sense. So, they're gonna talk about your decision as if it were a good decision because you got a good response from the person that you were negotiating with. If the response of the person was bad, then they're now gonna try to figure out what was wrong with your decision.

It's gonna change the way that they view what you actually decided to do. What you want to do is essentially quarantine all of that off from the group and really describe the decision problem up until the point that you have to make a choice and no further, and then start to elicit advice from people in the room. What you're doing is essentially you're getting them to think about the problem as a prospective decision as opposed to a retrospective analysis. That's one thing that you can do. Now, sometimes the decision is already known. In that case, you have to be asking really good questions. So, if everybody in the group already knows what the outcome was, the outcome is already known, the result is already known, what you can do is say okay, we know that the outcome was say bad so you've told me all of the reasons why you think that this was a bad decision because the outcome was bad, but now I want everybody to really argue the other side.

How are we gonna do that? So, let's go back through this decision and imagine it was a good result. Why do we think we would have gotten a good result from this decision? So, now you're just asking them to do what's called a counter factual, which is imagine that things had been different. So, just say I get that the ball was intercepted but let's imagine that the ball was caught for a touchdown. Now, let's go back and analyze that decision in light of the ball being caught for a touchdown and just see what happens there. So, notice that you're allowing for the fact that there were many different futures that could occur. One future happened to occur, but let's think about what would have happened if other things had happened and get people to really start working with that, and what will happen is that they'll start to focus more on the good parts of the decision.

You can actually query particular things. Okay, this is all great so what do we think was due to luck, though? We know that some stuff was due to luck. Let's try to identify what the things were that were due to luck. What do we really think was due to the decision quality? So, that's another thing that you can do with a group. Another exercise that you can do with the group is to divide the group into two and with one group go and tell them the decision, so this would be if the outcome is not known by the group, with one group go sequester them off. Do break out groups. You've got two breakout groups. One group you actually describe the decision and you give it a good outcome.

In the other room, you describe the decision and you give it a bad outcome and now you have the groups come together and discuss their analysis of the decision so that you can get them to see how much the outcome quality is really affecting the decision quality, and now you can interprelate between the two analytics processes to try to get down into the truth. Now, what this does is it helps you with two problems at once. It's a little killing two birds with one stone. It's certainly helping you analyzing your decision process. So, it's helping you with that retrospective problem of you have an outcome you're trying to figure out whether a decision was good. How do we now get people to give us good advice on the decision quality?

So, that's certainly helpful and that's gonna help your process more because you're gonna be better at identifying the luck elements and the skill elements, but what it's also doing is it's signaling to the whole team that you're interested in process, that you're not so interested in the way that things turn out. You're really interested in whether the decision itself was a good one, and that's what you care about and that you're gonna be poking around at whether something was status quo or not. You're gonna be poking around at what was luck, what was skill, what could we have done better? How do we think that we could have improved this? You aren't that kind of results oriented leader, at least not when we mean results in the short run based on just a few outcomes.

When you start signaling that you want to poke around into the decision process and that the quality of the outcome is not so important to you because you trust that good quality outcomes will come from good quality decisions, what you've done is you've freed that group up. You've sent a really big signal to them that what you care about is really pushing the boundaries of what a good decision looks like.

That's a great example. I can see how that could really not only impact the decisions you're making in that group, but to your point earlier you're gonna change the culture and you're gonna change people's actions by showing what you reward.

Yes, exactly. Here's another way that you can signal this. In a room, if you create a really good scenario plan which involves here's the decision under consideration. This is what we're thinking about. Let's identify what we think the possible outcomes of this decision are. So, let's take a super simple example. So, I actually did this with a nonprofit that I work with called After School All-Stars. They are involved in a lot of grant writing. There's a very simple example of how you can do this and how you can do scenario planning. Obviously when they write a grant, let's simplify this to there's two outcomes. They either get the grant or they don't. What they had done before was there was some award amount for the grant. Let's say they were applying for a $20,000 grant or a $100,000 grant and they just had a list.

Here are the grants we applied for, here are the grants under consideration that we're thinking about applying for, and here are all the award amounts. So, the status quo, the way that they dealt with this situation before was that naturally they wrote the bigger grants first and they prioritized those and if they were gonna hire an outside grant writer, they would tend to hire it obviously for the biggest award amounts and then they would go down the stack. So, that was just the status quo way that they did that. Then, they judged how things went by whether they got the grant or they didn't, so that sounds like a pretty natural process but this creates this problem of resulting. We're really just looking at what's the result of the end point of the grant process.

So, when I went in I said what I'd really like you to do is really think about these grants in terms of expected value, which just means let's think about our decision making process in terms of we have the award amount of the grant, say $100,000. Don't think about that grant as $100,000 grant. Think about that grant as what percentage of the time do you think you'll get it multiplied by the potential award. If you think you're gonna get that grant 80% of the time and the potential award is $100,000 then that grant is worth $80,000 because you're gonna get it 80% of the time that you're applying over time to $100,000 grant. If you think that that grant you're gonna get 20% of the time, then that grant is worth $20,000 in the long run.

I said I want you to walk through all of your grants and I want you to take a stab at what the expected value is, what the percentage is. Now, they said to me well how are we supposed to know what the percentage is? I said well, you know better than anybody else does because you've been writing grants for a long time and you've dealt with grants like this before and so go and try to do your best. Just take a stab at it. Now, what's important about the willingness to take a stab at it is let's say that you take a guess at it and you say I'm gonna say 60% because I think we're gonna get it somewhere between 40 and 80% and the sort of mid range of that is 60, and what I say to them is well that's better than defaulting to I don't know, it's just worth $100,000 so at least you're taking a stab at it, and in taking a stab at it, what you're thinking about is how well does this grant fit? What has my track record been in terms of the grant writing process? What kind of things are out of my control?

What are likely just gonna be due to luck? What are likely gonna be due to the kinds of things that we do? You're actually going to be thinking about the skill and luck elements of getting that grant, but now what I did was I had them go through and did that. Now they had a percentage of the time that they took a stab at that, a percentage of the time that they thought that they might get the award, and now they multiplied that by the grant awards. Not only does that get you thinking about really what are my chances at the grant? But, notice it changes your work stack now. So, you've upended the status quo a little bit because before they would have paid much more attention to a $100,000 grant than a $50,000 award amount just because that's what they would have done.

They would have said well the $100,000 one is worth more. Look, it's $100,000 but now what I revealed to them is that sometimes that's not the case because if you have say a $50,000 grant that you think you're gonna get 80% of the time, that is worth $40,000, and if you have $100,000 grant that you think you're gonna get 20% of the time, that is actually worth $20,000 in the long run. So, notice what you figured out is that the $50,000 grant is actually the more valuable grant to you because you're gonna get it more often so that means you really want to make sure that you're getting that one done. So, the first thing it does is actually gets you to restack your work.

The second thing it does is it gets you thinking well what can I do in order to improve the probability that I'm gonna get this grant? So, if it's a lower probability grant you're actually thinking really clearly about what can I do to push the probability out? It also allows you to see when it's worth it to hire an outside grant writer because if you say well I think an outside grant writer is gonna increase the probability that we get the grant by X, you can actually look at that, figure out how many hours, so let's say you think it's gonna increase it enough such that the grant is worth $5,000 more, what you can do is you can say well is the outside grant writer gonna cost me less than that? And as long as the outside grant writer is gonna cost you less than that, then it would be worth it to hire the outside grant writer so it tells you when you should be hiring independent contractors, for example.

But, then also what happens is that now whether you get the grant or not, you're not going back and blaming anybody because it's now in the stack. What you've said, if you say I think I'm gonna get the grant 20% of the time, what you're recognizing in advance is that 80% of the time you will not get the grant, and that has been agreed upon in the room through a process, through a memorialized scenario plan such that nobody's pointing a finger saying that's your fault that we didn't get the grant. Instead, people are saying okay, well, we didn't get the grant. That was one of the outcomes. We recognized that in advance. What we cared about was the process in the writing of the grant and how we stacked our work, so now let's just take that to make sure that we call up.

So, what you do now is because you're so focused on refining the estimates of how often you think you're gonna get the grant, you call the foundations both where you don't get the grant, which would be our natural tendency is just to call up and say why didn't I get it? But you also call up the foundations where you did because you're gonna be querying on particular things like well how much luck was involved? How much was it because I wrote the grant? Were these things that I could have done better that would have even increased even more the probability that I got the grant? And you're actually querying the awards when you actually get it versus when you're denied also.

So, you're querying on both sides because you're focused on process now. And, you can see all these really nice signals that it sends to the team there.

That's a great example. Nice process and then also, like you said, the reinforced learning on what did work and maybe what was missing from a learning perspective.

And notice that it helps you to not, what we don't want as an organization, not only do we not wanna be defensive in our prospective decision process, which is I'm just gonna stick with the status quo, but we also retrospectively once we have outcomes occur, we don't wanna be reactive. We really don't want to overreact to something. So, there are two disasters that can happen. One is that you have a result that's mainly due to luck and you start mucking around with your decision process because you're overreacting to the quality of the outcomes, so you have some bad outcome that's just mainly due to luck and now you start changing your decisions just because they outcome was bad so you feel like you need to do something.

And, then it also stops you from reinforcing decisions that shouldn't be reinforced, in other words good outcomes that are mainly due to luck where you start reinforcing those decisions when actually it was due to luck. Sports is such a great place to see this. There's a really great study that was just done. People can find it if they look on Behavioral Scientist is where it was reported, where somebody looked at NBA teams and what happened when there was a very close win versus a very close loss. So, let's take the example of an NBA team wins by one point or loses by one point. When there's a one point win or loss, let's assume that the quality of the decision making that led up to the one point win is probably, I think we should just make an assumption no different on average than the quality of the decision making that leads up to a one point loss.

I mean, that's clearly within the margin of error. A one point win or one point loss, it's like did the last team get their shot off? What happened with the shot clock? Who had the last possession? These are gonna be things that are gonna be relatively out of your control, and yet what they found was that line up changes occurred much more often after a one point loss than a one point win. So, in other words when the team won by one point they tended not to be changing the decision process that led to that one point win. They're not really changing the lineup at all. But, when the team lost by one point then they were going in and reacting to that and changing the lineup, and that is not what you want in your business.

You do not want to be changing your lineup all of the sudden when you have a one point loss and not changing it with a one point win. You want as much as possible to react to those same events identically.

That's a great point, great example. I agree on the sports analogy, too. I can really see that. How have you applied it to yourself?

So, let me first of all say that these biases that we have around results, these biases that we have around outcomes, like any bias, whether it's confirmation bias or availability bias or hindsight bias, any of the biases that we have are very, very built into the way that our brains work. So, I just want to say I do apply this to my own life but I'm bad at it. And I want to say that really clearly because I think that once we are aware that these biases exist, we can actually be very judgmental of ourselves when we fail to avoid them. So, one of the things that we need to recognize for ourselves in that they're hard to avoid because I can't look at the color red and not see red. I can't just say oh, I know that there's particular wavelengths and my brain happens to be perceiving that that is red so now I'm just gonna have that not happen.

The biases are very similar to that as well, that while we might know, for example, that confirmation bias exists or resulting exists, that doesn't mean that just knowing it is gonna make us stop doing it and as much as we try to put processes in place I think we need to recognize that we will still be falling prey to that on a regular basis. Otherwise I think that we can get into a stance that is not particularly compassionate to ourselves or the people around us as we hold ourselves to a higher standard than is actually realistic given the way that our brains our built. So, I want to be very clear about that, that I do very poorly at this, but that being said I do better than I would have if I didn't know that these kind of things existed and if I hadn't set up guardrails in order to help me to do this less.

The good news is that like compounding interest, small changes make big differences in the long run. If you can cause people to be defensive less, if you can fall prey yourself less to, say, confirmation bias, if you can be more process oriented and less outcome oriented less, those things will have very big returns over the long run. So, I just want to say that first.

So, in my own life, one of the ways that I've really gotten to be able to change these kinds of processes for myself is that I've really trained myself and worked with other people to enforce this within myself, so a lot of this, notice that what we were talking about is how the group is behaving. Obviously you're creating culture as a leader, but you're reinforcing this as a group that I've really set up where the people around me are holding me accountable to these kinds of processes and I am trying to think and express myself in a more probabilistic way, and I think that that's probably the biggest thing that I've done in my own life that has helped me to be a little bit better at this kind of stuff.

So, let me give you an example. If I were to express to you some sort of opinion or prediction that I had and you were talking to me, you would notice this thing that I do which is I try to actually assign a percentage to it. So, when I was working with the nonprofit, After School All Stars, and I was getting them to assign a percentage to the chances that they thought that they would get the grant. I actually do that in my personal life. So, here's an example. If you asked me if I could go to dinner on Friday, I might say to you I'm 80%. So, I'm not saying yes or no. I'm giving you some sense of probabilistically how likely I think that that is to occur. So, here would be another one as far as expressing something in my own life. So, there's a lot of talk right now about whether say the Democrats are gonna win the house, and what I hear from pundits on TV is they seem to be either in the yes or no camp, but if I were talking to you about it I would say well, at the moment Democrats are pulling way ahead, but November is still a very long way away and a lot of things can intervene between now and November.

I'm not enough of an expert to understand how the districts are drawn to know how I'm supposed to translate necessarily that the Democrats are say plus six in the generic vote. So, if I had to say do I think that the Democrats are gonna win the House, I would say 65% of the time. Now, that's not my actual prediction. I'm just throwing that out right now to make it clear, but I do that about things like that and then I also would do that about belief, for example. There's different ways that I might express uncertainty about a belief. I might give you a percentage, I might give you a range. So, I might say to you Elvis was somewhere between 40 and 47 when he died.

So, notice I'm giving you a range, I'm not giving you an exact number there but that builds my uncertainty into it. It tells you how certain I am of that belief. I might say I think Citizen Kane won best picture, but I'm like 63% on that. I'm always trying to think how sure am I? What's my level of certainty or uncertainty is a better way to put it around this belief or prediction that I have? The reason why I think that's just super helpful in terms of overcoming this is that first of all I'm wrapping in on the front end the possibility that the thing that I believe is not true or the thing that I'm predicting will not happen so that when it doesn't happen, I don't consider that a bad outcome. I consider that an outcome that I had already expressed so it's neither bad nor good. It's just one of the possible things that could happen.

The other thing I think it does for me that's really, really valuable is that it's constantly reminding me that my beliefs are under construction, that they're in progress, that they're not logged so much as true or false but as probabilistically open and that what my goal is is not so much to confirm the things that I already believe, which would be engaging in confirmation bias and to have my view of the world be correct, but rather to always be trying to refine these percentages. So, in the same way that once you're putting a number on the chances that you think you're going to get a grant, what that does is now it causes you to be really, really hungry for information where you're trying to figure out well, what are the factors that will help me figure out what this percentage is so that I can be better at that?

Once I get the grant or don't get the grant, I've gotta circle back and find out what I did well, what I didn't do well, what I could do better. How much luck was involved? So that the next time that I try to put a percentage on this that I'm more accurate. So, by expressing myself this way, I keep myself in the zone less of I know this to be true or I know this to be false and more this belief is under construction, it's in progress, and so therefore I wanna be really open minded to all the information that pertains to this belief that's out there. I wanna think about why I might be wrong. I wanna find out what other people know that I don't know, what other people's opinions are so that I can then wrap that in to become better and refine those percentages more so that I can start approaching a more accurate representation of what the objective truth is as opposed to just reinforcing the things that I already believe.

I think that that way that I talk about things does actually help me. I think it does help me to incorporate other people's opinions a little bit more. I think it does push me toward open mindedness and the people around me enforce that. They really help to hold me accountable to that because they know that this is a goal of mine and I've expressed that to them. So, sometimes if I do express something with certainty, somebody around me who's in on it, because not everybody is, but the people who are in on it who are around me will say to me well, how sure are you? How often do you think that's gonna happen? They'll actually remind me that I'm supposed to be expressing probability when I say that.

That's great. Telling people where you're focusing on and having them give you reinforcement is extremely powerful for learning. So, Annie, this has been wonderful. So, helping us understand resultancy and really thinking about it from a perspective of as leaders in business we want to get results. Of course you want to get results, but when we're so focused on results we can get people to take that status quo decision, the decision that might seem safer so we're not being judged, but what we miss out is a great process and a way to really think through the best decision, think about criteria for that, and really get some consensus from a team perspective.

Right, exactly. And actually, I'm really happy that you used that word consensus because I do think that one of the things that we have to be careful of, and I do think this comes through this idea of creating these processes, particularly I think really valuable is that the two breakout groups where one group is told that the outcome is good and one group is told that the outcome was bad and you then see what comes out of that, because what you want to be really careful of is creating false consensus. What is the thing about consultants? They never tell you to eliminate the department that hired them. So, consultants are a way that you can create false consensus.

Let's say that there isn't a status quo decision that's already agreed upon, that there's no red light, green light situation, and you're trying to work through a decision. One of the ways to create false status quo is hiring outside consultants are used this way a lot where they'll come in and just reinforce what the person who hired them wants to do, and so that's creating false consensus. Well, they agreed with me so therefore we can move through with this or to push the team toward consensus.

So, here's an example of a way to get false consensus is let's say that you have four people interview a job candidate. If you have them all discuss it in the room with each other, you will get false consensus around a candidate. So, it's whoever expresses a strong opinion first, the other people are gonna tend to coalesce around whoever expressed that strong opinion first as opposed to offering up with what their real views are. Now you have some false consensus toward the decision. So, what would be a good decision process there, the same thing is quarantine. So, have each of the four people write a report on how they view that candidate before they get to talk to each other because once they get to talk to each other, you might as well not have had four people interview the candidate.

So, that is one thing that I do wanna stick a pin in is just be careful of false consensus because that's a different way to get to status quo.

Yeah, that group think.

Yes, exactly.

Well, thank you so much. Is there any other last tip to share or how about this? What is one thing that they can take away and put into action after they listen to this call? One small thing?

Yeah, I think that the main thing that's really easy to implement is to start trying to express uncertainty in the way that you speak. Now, that doesn't mean, I don't think that you're supposed to go around being like well I don't know. I don't know, you choose. Notice if I say something like I think that it's 65% that the Democrats are gonna take the House in November, I can express that with a tremendous amount of confidence and it's actually feels very good and believable to the people who are listening to you because by saying that I think that it's 65% that the Democrats are gonna take the House, I've signaled a whole bunch of stuff to you, that I've thought about it, that I'm bold enough to actually assign a number to it, that I'm willing to say that I've thought about this enough that I will put a percentage on this.

I think that you can express a lot of confidence in expressing uncertainty as long as you express uncertainty in the right way. I think it can make you be a much more believable communicator by saying I'm 65% that this will happen, I actually invite you to share your information with me because you know that when you do that we're not gonna be in a fight. If all I say in the Democrats are gonna take the House in November, if you disagree with me you may not open your mouth for fear that we will be in a fight because we disagree. But, if I say it's 65%, now I'm opened the door for you to do that so you're now gonna share helpful information with me, which is actually really important to my process.

If I'm a leader, I want people to feel free to express their concerns or their contrary opinions in the room. It's really important to process, so this is literally one of the simplest things you can do is just start trying to talk this way. Start thinking when you say I think that this is the candidate we should hire, instead of saying that, say and my level of certainty around that opinion is 77%. If that's all that you do, you will change the culture of your workplace, of your team in a way that's very positive.

Well, again, thank you so much for coming. I've really enjoyed your topic. I'll be very interested in hearing about your next book and as you start really thinking through more about some of these decisions and how we can become more effective as leaders, leading organizations, leading our teams and helping people have uncertainty with confidence.

Oh, I love that. Can I use that? That's a great turn of phrase. I would like to be able to use that. I will credit you.

Okay, you can have it!

Thank you.

Thank you.

CLOSING:

I hope that you have enjoyed this and can start using some of these great ideas to start making smarter decisions. Make sure to subscribe to be alerted to ongoing podcasts. I work with leaders and their teams to apply these concepts, grow themselves, their teams and their business. Schedule a free 30 minute consultation here to see if I can help you, your team or your organization. You can reach me, Jill Windelspecht, directly by email at [email protected] and visit my website at www.TalentSpecialists.net.

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If your interested in making better decisions, solving problems, getting the best out of yourself and your team and managing your time more effectively, this is the podcast for you.

My guest, Jason Howlett is the Co-founder and change agent @ Manpremo. Jason's passion is helping people develop, with the purpose of increasing well-being and actualising potential.

Jason uses applied science (neuroscience, psychology and physiology), combined with data, to optimise brain performance and build change competency.

For the past 8 years, Jason has been working with organisations and their employees on programmes that develop Leadership and Talent; Well-being; Strategy Implementation; Mindset and behaviour change; Resilience/Grit in individuals and teams.

Before focusing his work on people, their mindset and behaviour, Jason worked in IT for 7 years.

Jason studied Applied Positive Psychology at the University of East London and has a degree in Computer Science from Royal Holloway, University of London.

Jason is a certified Personal Trainer and Lifestyle Coach.

Podcast Transcript:

Well thank you Jason, again, for joining us, and Jason's gonna share brain science and highlight what leaders can do to really maximize their personal leadership based on what we know about some of the science in the brain. He's done a lot of work with leaders over the last several years. So Jason, why don't you tell us what's important for our audience to know today.

Thank you Jill. I'm going to focus on looking at a data driven approach to increasing the performance of our brain for personal leadership. We're gonna focus on a subset of the brain functions. We'll look at what's commonly known as the cognitive or executive functions of the brain. These are things that help us to get things done, so they're critical for us being able to plan, to learn, the ability to solve problems, make decisions, and essentially to also control ourselves, to manage how we manage our impulses, but also our emotions.

These cognitive or executive functions are also crucial in us building competencies, whether that be leadership competencies or any other particular functional competencies that we wish to learn.

Now these functions are there to help us, but they are not there all the time. We do not have an infinite resource that fuels these functions. They depend on several factors being in place.

There's two key areas of these factors that we need to consider if we really want to have the cognitive part of our brain fully switched on. The first part is looking at the physical needs. The very basics, which we all know we need, which is sleep, rest, fuel, bio nutrition, and movement. So these things have been proven through neuro biological research to be key in switching the cognitive functions on. To give you an example, if we look at sleep, which is really the number one example from the physical needs, just by trying to maximize a good seven to eight hours of good quality sleep will increase our ability to learn by a minimum of 40 percent. It will also decrease the amount of stress we wake up with, which will decrease the amount of anger and fear that we have. But there are a whole host of other benefits that sleep provides. Because essentially, sleep is the number one factor to help us to learn and memorize things, but also to of course repair and restore the functions in the brain.

Another small example is movement. We know that movement's important for our heart and our lungs. But in terms of our brain, there's two key things that regular movement does. It first of all increases the circulation of blood to our brains, which brings more oxygen and nutrients to our brain. It also helps to increase neurotransmitters, which are important for the brain's function. But secondly, regular movement helps to increase factors that help the brain to develop and also become more plastic. In crude terms, you can say the brain is plastic, the brain can change. It's the term called neuroplasticity. But regular movement helps to increase this ability. This is key when looking at behavior change, or again, learning new things.

These are two examples of the physical needs, sleep and movement. But let's look at the other group of factors.

The other group of factors are our social needs, and these needs are also extremely important. They are things like feeling safe in the environment that we're in, feeling accepted, that we have a sense of belonging, that we have the recognition we need, but also a certain amount of autonomy, ability to have control over what we say and do.

These needs, both the physical needs and the social needs, are really crucial to have in place so that our cognitive brain is fully switched on. And essentially a lack of these needs causes the brain to trigger the threat response. This is really important, because when the threat response is triggered, i.e. what we commonly know as the stress response, something that causes us to want to fight or to flee or to freeze. This response puts the brain into a self preservation mode, so it no longer really cares about anyone else other than our own survival, and we become very reactive. The key thing here is that we don't just become reactive, but our cognitive functions that I mentioned before, like planning, learning, problem solving, decision making, they're offline. So the ability to control yourself is offline. So you will act much more under any sort of anger that you may feel, your ability to solve problems, make decisions, to plan, they're also offline. So you become much more primitive in how you behave and act when these needs are not met.

We can monitor these needs and actually simple ways. And today if I focus on the physical needs first, we can, by using simple wearables, but of course also medical grade devices, we can monitor the stress recovery balance in our body, which has a direct link to the functioning of our brain.

To keep it simple, there is a science of heart rate variability, and heart rate variability just means the variation in time between each beat of your heart. If I was to measure someone's heart rate now, and it came out to be 60 beats per minute, the assumption would be, well, there's 60 beats a minute and there's 60 seconds in a minute, so there must be one second between each beat. But the reality is this is very dependent on how activated or stressed you currently feel. For 60 beats per minute is quite a low recording, but what could actually be happening, because the heart rate is quite low at 60 beats, is that between the first beat and the second beat, maybe there is a second. But between the second and the third beat, there could be 0.8 of a second. Between the third and fourth, it could be 1.2 seconds.

The variation is very small. It's within milliseconds. That's not easy for us to measure ourself, but there are devices that you can very simply use, watches, bands, and also medical grade, electro based devices that can measure this heart rate variability. And essentially the lower the variability, the more stressed you are. So that means that using these devices, you can monitor what are the events, situations, or people that cause significant stress, and what are the events, situations with people that promote my recovery?

Because going back to the analogy before, when the brain is experiencing stress, the cognitive functions, like planning, solving problems, decision making, they are inhibited. So if we can learn, if we can trigger us self awareness on what is basically draining resources, we can help to better manage that. And this isn't about measuring yourself a life, it's just about triggering awareness.

To take that a step further, of course, this would involve regular reflection and for you to actually monitor the output from the watch or medical device you use. So what we've essentially done is built an app that takes all of the input from your wearable, and it also takes in input from your calendar, and it then notifies you over the week on what are the events, situations, that have caused you particular stress, and what are the events that have caused you particular recovery. Using this, you get a better stress recovery balance, and therefore you're better able to keep your brain switched on when you want it to be. I think that's an important point to make here, especially in leadership. You cannot be switched on all the time. I've worked with some people and organizations that even have in the signature always on, and the key thing is is that it's scientifically proven that the cognitive aspect, even if you're not stressed, cannot be always on. The brain goes through periods of what's called task positive and then task negative action.

You can think of the task positive like focused attention and the task negative like mind wandering. And it's very important that the brand can go through this cycle of focused attention and mind wandering.

I think the key message is that this is about triggering self awareness around, okay, what can help me to optimize my brain performance when I really need to be at my best, and the other things that I can do before I face a situation, like having to either sit down with my team and deliver a good or bad message. It's about when I've got conflict management, managing ambiguity, when I've got to influence people, any of these kind of key behaviors where you really want to be switched on, you know what you can do to prepare for that. But you also know what to do when things do get tough, when you do feel particularly stressed.

You have simple techniques, and we're going to go through some of those in a minute, that you can use to very quickly reduce the stress and increase recovery so that your cognitive functions come back online again. This is quite individual, hence why we use devices to really work out an issue, what works for who, because we do find a lot of people already think they know what helps them to relax, but when we measure them, their heart tells a very different story. For example, watching TV. It might feel relaxing, but it's actually a quite stressful, quite activating I should say for the brain, and especially not a good idea to do just before bed because of the way that it reduces the production of melatonin in the brain, and of course that being the key rest and recovery hormones, so your sleep quality is reduced.

But there's a whole host of different factors that people can learn about so that they know just the one or two key things to look out for and the one or two key things to practice. They can build a habit around it to to better manage the stress.

Thank you. Can you tell me, if we don't have one of those wearables on us, what are some things that we can notice that are happening that are giving us triggers, our body giving us triggers, that we might be in a stressful situation and need to self reflect a little bit?

Yes, a super question, Jill. Whenever we experience stress, the biological factors that will let us know, and that's why think it's also important that we don't become dependent on devices, but we learn that if we can tap into the fact that our heart rate is rising. Or maybe we don't notice the high rate, but we notice our breathing rate has increased. Or we feel suddenly our pulse. Literally, we become more aware of that in our head, because we suddenly realized tension in our head. Or sweaty hands. This kind of unease would be the easiest way to say it. Suddenly you feel that tension or unease. That's a great trigger to say, "Okay, let me pay attention to what's happening right now. Let me be more present with myself so I can face whatever it is. Whether it's external, being caused by the environment around me or the people around me, or whether it's my own thoughts or feelings inside." Does that make sense?

It does, yeah. I think that sometimes we just don't even realize it's happening, and later we might look, or we might even look at, are our fists clenched, or like you said, sweaty palms. Those are things that I think are important to notice, that that means your body's telling you if we want our cognitive to work effectively as leaders, that's not going to help us.

Yeah. It's a super point, and I think that's where time to reflect or a mindfulness space practice, somewhere where you train your brain's ability to have focused attention and to become more aware of what your triggers are or what are the causes of the different things that you're feeling, so essentially emotional awareness and emotional intelligence. This is a key factor in you reducing the time of what's called the amygdala hijack. Or essentially, keep it simple. Let's say someone says something to you that triggers you, and essentially it triggers the stress response. Your brain will launch this response in literally milliseconds. And it can take a little bit of time for your cognitive brain or your consciousness to become aware of the fact that now I'm stressed, now I realize that I'm clenching my fists or I have muscle tension up in my neck. It can take a little bit longer for that to become aware, maybe a second versus a split second.

It's a short time, but the process of having time to reflect, on mindfulness is a great way to build that awareness of the fact that something's happening, and then to use emotional regulation or a technique to work with the trigger of the stress.

Is there a mindfulness practice that if I'm in the moment and I'm noticing that maybe I'm getting ready for a presentation or getting ready to have a difficult conversation, what's something that I could do fairly quickly as a leader to get my physical back in line and those less stressed so I can think through the way I want to?

Yeah, that's a great question. It's quite individual, but what we've found to be the quickest way for most individuals to reduce stress and switch their cognitive brain fully on is simply to sit there for as little as two to five minutes and to follow the following rhythm. You take a nice slow deep inhalation for a count of three, and then a nice slow exhalation for a count of normally four to seven. This is where it's very individual. It depends. But you essentially need to exhale over a longer period than you inhale.

What that does is it triggers in your nervous system the rest and recovery response, and that's been proven. If you continued that for five minutes, you actually empty your bloodstream of cortisol, the stress hormone. But even within just two minutes of getting awareness of your breathing, you can change a body from what's called a stress dominant state to a rest and recovery dominant state.

That would be the most simple one. Other people like yawning. That's also something that would trigger the recovery response. But I think the breathing would. That simple rhythm, in for three, out of four, is quite easy once you practice that a few times, to do that even in a crisis situation, because you don't even need to close your eyes. You can be in a meeting and practice that and bring more power to your executive brain.

Yeah, I love that you said you can even do it in a meeting without closing your eyes, right? Because you can do it without people noticing, but you're getting yourself back. Because sometimes we go into meetings where something triggers us.

Yeah, I mean, that's a nice short practice that people can use.

You talked about physical needs and social needs. You gave us a nice tip around physical and what's going on in the brain around that. From a social needs perspective, can you talk a little bit more about that?

Yeah. I think the key thing with social needs is that first of all, we need to consider the environment that you're in. We're gonna have a lot higher access to our cognitive functions when our brain is not launching a significant stress response. But that depends on us actually feeling safe. So are we in an environment where there's a constant threat?

Some organizations have a zero failure culture, sometimes for good reasons, many times for maybe not so productive reasons. That is something that will ... You know that if you make a mistake that you're fired or penalized, and of course that will mean that you are constantly moving around in a mild stress response, which will inhibit the brain cognitive functions. Again, you can work with that.

For mission critical situations where you really need to have zero failure, there are of course ways you can work with a case ... The belief system of the people that are doing the work to reduce that. But let's talk about the more general sense. You've got, first of all, a sense of belonging. We're social beings. It's very important for us to be in an environment where we feel like we belong, because we are beings that depend on each other. As much as we like to be independent, we really do thrive in group.

Just knowing that the people around you respect you for who you are, and that you feel that you get regular recognition, helps you to feel like you belong, and that key social need basically helps to reduce stress. On the other hand, if we in a situation where we basically don't get that regular feedback or recognition, then we don't really know where we are. We don't know whether we are doing a good enough job. Are we really meeting the needs of the people around us, and are we also, which is kind of a key thing for our sense of meaning, is are we actually doing something that matters? Are we actually using our time to serve others in some shape or form? Having awareness of that is something that's key to reducing stress.

I think what's key here is to think about a meeting situation, because it's in meetings where we tend to have the greatest trigger of our emotions, especially when we're in meetings with people from all different departments. Maybe we don't know everyone in the room, especially if we're meeting them for the first time. What our brain does in that situation is it's constantly scanning to see, okay, well ... Other people listening to me, do they respect me? What do they think of what I'm saying? Am I getting any recognition? The brain is constantly scanning to see if these things are met.

So often people are sitting in a meeting room, but even if it's a short meeting, their cognitive functions can be inhibited if they are really feeling that they are not a part of the group, or that they're not being listened to or appreciated. So a simple check in, starting a meeting with a one or two minute check in where people literally share what's at the top of the mind or to use eye contact throughout the meeting. Having meetings where each person has maybe even a short time to share, but everyone shares the key things that they need. That's also making sure that there is an agenda for the meeting. Right, so what do they need, what is the information they can give, do they need to seek approval, but that everyone does get a chance to talk, and that they're listened to, just helps to increase that sense of belonging, respect and recognition.

Otherwise people would be in that meeting and they'll be seeking to preserve themselves. So self preservation behavior versus wanting to behave to benefit the group.

The tips that you gave, the things that leaders can do if they're running the meeting ...

Yes.

You said start with a check in to see what's on their mind. Tell me a little bit more about that. What would that look like? Because I could imagine some managers would say, "Oh, I don't have time for that." So tell me what that would look like and help us understand the benefit.

Yeah, that's an important point. I think as a leader, what's really key when you get to that meeting is that, of course, you reiterate the direction, why do we have a meeting, what's the purpose of it, what do we want to get out of it, so that that brings everyone into this current point.

But I think a check in's important because these days meetings are the second biggest waste of productivity after absenteeism. And the reason for that is, one, they normally have too long, two, they don't have a specific purpose or agenda, and three people go back to back with meetings, which by the way, in your second meeting, you would have lost up to 60 percent of your previous meeting or more without having a short break between the meeting, because again, your cognitive functions cannot, one, retain all that information, but two, your brand needs a break. You need to get this stress recovery balance.

A check in is a way the leader can basically give each person as little as a minute to say what's at the top of their mind. And this depends on the size of the team and how close you are. But let's say it's the leader's own team. Here is the sharing. Whether it's a good or bad feeling, you don't have to share why you have it, it's not going into your personal reasons, on the fact that you had a bad start to the morning because you had an argument with your partner. It's not to go into those specifics. But it is important to, especially for the leader to start, by saying what's at the top of their mind. Because what this builds over time is transparency and trust. Trust is number one for a high performance team or a well functioning team of any kind.

Especially on the days where everyone can sense that the leader is not at their best. And by the way, again, being social animals, people don't need to say things for us to realize that there's something wrong. Body language, tone of voice, all these things give out subtle messages that there's something wrong. And I think what's very powerful is when a manager shares that, "I'm not at my best today, it's nothing to do with you." That's key, saying that it's nothing to do with you. "But not quite feeling at my best today, so don't take that personally." It allows people to see that they can be human beings in the workplace, and also, especially from an employee perspective, is they're not going to tread on eggshells thinking that it could have been them that caused the leader to not feel at their best.

The last point on the check in which I found quite interesting is to simply share what is one thing that you feel didn't go well since the last meeting and why, and what is one thing that went very well since the last meeting and why. Some people call this success of failure, but I don't think you need to use a strong term as failure, but it gives a very short term for the person to reflect on. Some people like to focus on work, or it could be both work and at home. But what is one thing that didn't go well, what you learned from it, and one thing that went really well and what did you learn from that. That's a nice way of having a check in.

Probably gets everybody's brain into a more relaxed state to sharpen the cognitive ability and that executive ability of the brain.

Yeah, I agree.

So Jason, you've talked about the data driven approach to help us with our cognitive or executive function of the brain, and that part of the brain when we plan, make decisions, control ourselves. Especially our emotions to make sure that we're online. You talked about physical and social needs around that and gave us a few tip. What else is important for us to know about making sure that we're able to get the best ... We're able to use our cognitive and executive function so we're effective through the day?

I think as a leader, again, what is a really nice practice to build up throughout the day is regularly giving feedback and seeking to receive it as well. Because the nice thing about regular feedback is that you build the self esteem and self worth of the person that you're providing it to. Even if it could be feedback where you feel they could do better, but you're really giving them awareness on how they can grow and develop. Whether it's feedback on something that's gone well or could have been better, you're giving them attention, you're being present with them, and that builds their self worth, and also their self esteem of course. But what it does for you as a leader is it also builds their respect for you.

I think this habit of giving and receiving regular feedback is a really nice way of keeping your employees' brains fully switched on and also your own. Because as I mentioned with social needs, the self esteem and self worth for the individual will help them feel safe, feel recognized. That will fully switch their brain on. The fact that they respect you as a leader will give you that feeling that you're also actually functioning well and providing them with what they need. So you also feel a sense where your self esteem will increase, and therefore again, your brain will not be in a stress response. It will actually be in a mode where it's increasing these executive functions.

Jason, do you have a specific example of a leader that you've coached, or how you've used this personally to become more effective at switching on that cognitive part of our brain to make better decisions and plans?

Yeah. Let's start with what is most likely the most [inaudible 00:28:24] effective for myself, but also for whether I'd estimate over 90 percent of the leaders and people that we've worked within organizations is that it really starts with putting aside time to reflect, and during that time that you reflect, to look at the way that you're also going to be spending your time with the week ahead. So doing this either on a Friday and looking at the next week, or doing it on a Monday morning for the current week.

But really not just reflecting on what did you do the previous week, what are the key priorities you have coming up for this week, but also where in calendar have I already set specific times to practice recovery. Whatever works best for me. Have I set specific times as a leader to have the one on ones that I need to have? That time to reflect with others. Not just reflection on your own, it's reflection with others.

The other part is ensuring that you also have your other physical needs met, so where are you getting the movement that you need? Where do you have your mindfulness practice, or simply having time to be yourself? That reflection period, which can be as little as 15 minutes on a Friday or Monday, that is one of the most important factors that we've seen making a difference, because that's also ... If you build a habit around that, that is like a chain reaction that promotes all of the other things that you would like to build. Again, a habit around mindfulness or a habit around increasing the time you have with your employees. So that reflection is important.

To help people start that habit, we use a tool that basically attracts people's time management. It's completely confidential, so it's not shared with their colleagues or anyone else. But they can use that to look at, okay, how are they spending their time, where do they have back to back meetings, and where do they not spend enough time with the right people, i.e. their own team, with the leaders in the other departments and so on. So you can use that as a way to build that practice up. The key point, with technology aside, is to build that habit of reflection.

I love that you said 15 minutes, do the rear view look at the week, and then plan for your week ahead, making sure that you've got time for movement, and you've got time for recovery, and not having those back to back meetings that often leaders have, or sometimes they take pride in having.

And of course, yeah, it's also about the 80/20 rule, right? If you do that 80% of the time, it's really gonna pay off.

I think that's another thing that's challenging, especially as responsibility grows for leaders, because it's always they don't have time. But that's the thing with finding the right habits. Because I really believe, I mean it's a key philosophy of mine, that if you can automate the key behaviors that drive the greatest success for you, you have way more capacity to do the things that are new or you haven't done before, you need to learn. Because up to 45% of what we do every day is habitual. It's completely automated by, yeah, let's just say the unconscious part of the brain. And that's really important for us. But we need to practice the behaviors before they will become habitual. And we also need to make sure they're small enough to repeat.

If we can start to practice that over time and not punish ourselves too much when we miss it, then we will be able to automate more of these key things and have way more cognitive capacity or performance to address the new or unexpected things that come up in this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

That's one thing we'll never have more of is time. It's fixed.

Yeah. Exactly.

Good point. Thinking about those habits. What is one thing that a leader could do or potential leader could do right now that's going to make them more effective at making better decisions, planning, getting control of that cognitive executive function?

I think the number one thing, to be quite honest, it's simply to prioritize sleep. This goes back to the physical needs. I can of course add one that people can do at work in second. Well, some companies here in Denmark actually can sleep during the work day. But the number one is sleep, just to work - and very specifically here - work with the one hour before bed, because that hour is a very important window on which you can impact the percentage of recovery and quality recovery that you get during yours. A lot of people will spend that hour by working, using their phone, or essentially using devices, and all of these devices emit blue light from the screen and decrease, as I mentioned before, the production of melatonin in the brain, and will really decrease the percentage of recovery you're getting, especially the deep sleep and REM sleep. So switching out television> But when you really need to be your best, no alcohol, actually no alcohol at all during the day would be ideal for your sleep, but especially after 4:00 in the afternoon.

I mentioned devices, but those last little looks at the phone or email is a really bad idea during that hour, because even though the short look at it will not be enough for the blue light to maybe have an issue, the thought process that that triggers, especially if you see an email that means that there's an emergency has occurred or something you're going to face tomorrow is gonna be something that is demanding, subconsciously your brain is going to be working with that. That's very activating.

Getting rid of devices and using that hour to simply either read a book, quality conversations with your partner, catching up with a friend, but actually using something that will help you to wind down. It might be a nice cup of herbal tea. I mean, this is quite individual, but for the majority of the people we see, reading a fictional book or a Kindle that's not back lit is a really nice way for them to allow their natural recovery process to kick in and get a good quality sleep, and that's the number one thing for your brain performance. Good quality sleep.

The other tiny tip, which is super simple to implement, which I think has had one of the biggest effects throughout the day for both leaders, but for any employee, is to put in their calendar for ... Well, you can try it right after the call now, but if they're going to be at work tomorrow, to actually put in their calendar specific time. Just block out as little as five to 10 minutes as a private event so no one else can book them, and practice that breathing I mentioned before, where you're breathing in for a count of three and out for a count of four. Because that's one of the fastest ways to regulate your stress recovery balance, and you don't need any devices, you don't need to close your eyes. You just need the trigger to do it, which could be as simple as a calendar reminder.

Those are wonderful tips. Sleeping and breathing are two things that we do every day.

Hopefully, yeah.

And honestly, simple things to maximize that, to help us think more effectively and really get more control over ourselves can go a long way.

Well Jason, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for sharing your insight, and the great data and research about the brain and how we can really be more effective in planning and making decisions. I wanted to give you one last opportunity to see if there's anything else you'd like to share with the group.

First of all, thank you to you Jill for the invitation. Appreciate the talk.

You're welcome.

The only other thing that I will say is that again, it's important to find what works best for you. And as you mentioned before, sometimes technology can help, but it's not something that anyone should depend on. But it's taking the time to build your own awareness on what are the things that are really draining my resources and what are the things that are gaining my resources is a great starting point on which you can then use to build the personal leadership. And that I think is critical when leading others, because it all starts with leading yourself. The greater the self awareness and self management you have, the greater your ability to be able to be present and to be able to know what to do to lead others.

Think that would be the closing point.

Great. Thank you. Well, I appreciate your time today and your tip, reminding us the best way to lead others is lead ourselves first. Thank you very much.

You're welcome, Jill. Thank you.

CLOSING:

I hope that you have enjoyed this and can start using some of these great techniques to create more cohesive teams. Make sure to subscribe to be alerted to ongoing podcasts. I work with leaders and their teams to apply these concepts, grow themselves, their teams and their business. Schedule a free 30 minute consultation here to see if I can help you, your team or your organization. You can reach me, Jill Windelspecht, directly by email at [email protected] and visit my website at www.TalentSpecialists.net.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

Manpremo: https://manpremoperformance.com/

Article on increasing brain performance: https://beatyourbest.manpremoperformance.com/posts/brain-performance-1505845

Article on building change competency: https://beatyourbest.manpremoperformance.com/posts/change-competency

Do you care about getting more engagement from you team? Do you want to know how you can create an environment where your team works collaboratively, reduces conflict and supports each other and your organization? Are you focused on retaining and attracting talent?

Are you struggling to build more inclusive teams? If so, this is the podcast for you.

My guest, Jay Van Bavel, will highlight the importance of group identity in building high performing teams and share simple things that you can do right away to get your team moving in the right direction.

Jay Van Bavel is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science with an affiliation at the Stern School of Business in Management and Organizations at New York University where he teaches one of the largest courses in the university. Jay completed his PhD at the University of Toronto.

Jay conducts award-winning research on how collective concerns—group identities, moral values, and political beliefs—shape the brain and behavior. He has published over 60 academic papers on implicit bias, diversity and inclusion, group identity, team formation, cooperation, motivation, and the social brain.

Jay has written about his research for the public in the Harvard Business Review, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Scientific American. He has appeared on Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman and NBC News, been interviewed on WNYC, Bloomberg News, and NPR, had his work profiled in international media and been cited in the US Supreme Court.

Jay has given a TEDx talk at the Skoll World Forum as well as invited talks at many of the top Psychology Departments and Business Schools in the world (Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Oxford, Stanford). He has also given featured talks at international conferences and numerous organizations (e.g., Uber, Amazon, Reed Smith, Canadian Space Agency).

Podcast Recap:

Human nature makes it easy for us to identify with groups. Go to any culture in the world and people form groups. It is a human universal. Jay's research looks at how you activate that in people's minds - how you change that way their brain processes information once you put them in a team.

Researchers have found it as simple as flipping a coin and putting people on the red team or the blue team. This gets them to automatically and quickly identify with their group. They are willing to give more to their group, engage with their group more and show them more trust. So, the first step in creating a good team is creating an 'us' an a 'them'. The hard part is identifying the right 'them'. You don't want people to be competing with other members of other groups within the organization or you can get sabotage or conflict, people retreating to silos, lack of collaboration and cooperation. There is certainly an art to it and identifying the right 'out group' is often a key element.

The other element that is key is creating an element of a distinctive group. The groups that are stickiest, that they identify with the most, are ones that fulfill a sense of belonging, that make them feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves and at the same time creating a sense of distinctiveness. That they feel that there is something special about being in this group, that is hard to get into and different from other groups. This is referred to as the Velvet Robe Effect. If you run a club and there is a long line outside and a velvet rope with a bouncer, even if you get inside and no one is there, you feel from the outside looking into it that it a special club, something hard to get into …..or as Groucho Marx famously said, he would never want to be part of a club that was willing to admit him!

We like to be a part of groups that are exclusive and distinctive. This is why fraternities and sororities have initiation rituals and why big corporations like Apple are able to hack the psychology. If you walk down anywhere in Manhattan and you walk by a coffee shop, 90% of the people have their MAC books open or their iPhone open, and yet most of these people feel that they are unique, and that their MAC is part of their unique distinctive identity. The reason for this is Apple has been triggering the psychology in people for decades. It started in the most famous commercial of all times in 1984 during the Superbowl, they aired an ad of someone speaking as if they were the famous book 1984, droning on and people were blindly watching it. Then this woman representing Apple came and smashed it and so the message is that you are anti-authority and anti-big brother if you use Apple. Another example with Apple is when Steve Jobs came back and started the Think Different campaign, which was about all these scientists and leaders, from Einstein to Gandhi, throughout history who stood out and were different and challenged convention. Apple is now more conventional and one of the world's most recognized brand in the world, but now when you have one, because of all the advertising over the years, it creates a feeling among it's users that there is something special or distinctive about them.

So, leaders who can create this within their groups that you are part of 'us' and we are different, are the ones who are able to create the most distinctive, compelling and sticky group identities. This can directly correlate to higher engagement and discretionary effort given to the leader and the team.

If you care about engagement or care about reducing absenteeism or presenteeism, this is a good strategy. When people are engaged and committed to their group, they don't want to let their team down. They don't want to fail because they actually care about the group and it's success. This is useful if you want to retain your best talent or recruit other talent to your team, to give them a sense that there is something special about them, is one powerful way of triggering this very basic psychology in the mind.

As a CEO or senior leader, what should you be thinking about? One is to create a shared vision and/or common goal. Another thing that you can do is create a sense of history, and this is where distinctiveness can really be articulated. If you have this very unique story or history that everybody knows, they feel part of that connection and they feel like they are part of something bigger than them. Leaders could do more to articulate and remind people where they have come from, what their story is and finally where they are going. Finally, another thing is, and this turns out to be key to getting people to contribute, is making everybody feel like they have an important role to play, even if it is a little one, and that their role is essential. Letting them know that we can't succeed unless you do this little thing. That is something that really increases engagement and is a very helpful way to deal with diversity in teams. The teams that feel like everyone contributes are more likely to be inclusive and will choose to solicit the input and support of other team members and so you actually create the kind of situation that promotes the success of diverse groups and diverse organizations.

What is going on in the brain that is causing this connection? The moment we flip a coin and put you on a team, your brain starts to process how you see in group and out group team members differently. You automatically start seeing people of your own group more positively. This activates early brain circuits like the amygdala and also changing the visual system, so it also suggests that the way you are seeing faces is changing in real time. You are starting to see people that are part of your team more as individuals and you are more likely to remember who they were. Basically, this is engaging a more careful attention and concern about who is with you. It does this amazing this because if you care about your identity, this group you belong to, and you see other in-group members get a reward, the same parts of the brain that respond when you are getting a reward get triggered. So, it is almost as if you were getting a pay increase or benefit. That is only for people who care about the group, otherwise you can get jealousy and conflict if you see others get what you wish to have. Identify solves that problem and it can reduce jealousy and conflict over things like that. This is also what is known as basking in the reflective glory. For example, this is when you go on social media and brag about a friend of yours or a colleague winning an award and you say that you are really proud of them. This means that your bragging on their behalf. You are getting part of the joy that they are getting because you care about them and feel you have a shared purpose with them. We have also found that pattern of activation in the brain when people are thinking about in-group members who are getting a reward. They don't show that same pattern when an out-group member gets a reward.

Jay personally applies this to the team he leads at his research lab at NYU. Their lab is over 30 people who range from first year student volunteers to people who are post-doc and already have their PhD and are top researchers from other countries, so he cares a ton about identify. Every year he gives a talk to the whole lab about the vision, goals and their past. This meeting marks their progress and he shows graphs showing how many publications they have had over the years, and how it has grown, so they can see that they are getting better and stronger over time -- they are part of that. He also points out all the accomplishments of all the people in that lab that year – people who have graduated or won awards, became professors or had a break through with a method in the lab. He makes sure to call out all of them in front of everybody so that there is a shared identify that if you contribute to the team you are going to be celebrated as part of the team in this annual state of the union.

Another thing Jay does is creating symbols of identity, doing little things like creating coffee mugs with the lab logo on them and once you start doing research with the lab you are part of the in-group and you get a mug. This year he is taking images of everyone's brain and will be creating pop-art, Andy Warhol type of art in the brain. He plans to frame it and put it around the lab – highlighting all the students who got their PhD in the lab. This is the highest and hardest level of accomplishment.

He is finding ways to constantly remind them that they have a shared identity, showing a sense of history and highlighting all the individuals who came before them who have been part of this culture. The other thing is I get my student's advice before I hire anybody so they all have a voice in insuring they have a culture of people who care about the group and are cooperators who aren't just self-interested people. I take that as seriously as somebody's credentials when I am deciding who to bring into the group. I care about who is going to be a good group member. That doesn't mean just blindly going along with me or the other people. In fact, often during his meetings, when they have presentations, he tries not to speak too quickly because he doesn't want to create group-think where everyone has to agree with him. He is very conscious of not creating the negative parts of groups like group-think because there is a pathology that comes if you mis-manage a group with a strong identify. So that is also part of it, giving your team a voice so they have a feeling of commitment and shared ownership over where the group is going.

What is one thing I can do right away to get the group dynamic right? The simplest thing is creating a shared vision, but I would go one step further because most people know that. First of all, your shared vision needs to be simple and you have to be able to say it all the time, so everybody knows what it is, but the second thing and the trickier thing is connecting it to your history. Showing where you came from and where you are going has everyone under the shared vision but also creates a sense of distinctiveness, so there is something special and unique about this group and about your organization.

Jill works with a lot of leaders and finds that communicating a compelling vision is a challenge and often find that they don't talk about it enough to their team and their organization. They feel that everybody understands it when often that is not the case. Connecting the history is great because you will always have people coming in and out of your organization. This allows them to feel like they are joining something that is bigger than them, reminds them and keeps it fresh for them.

One last thing, if you think of a team as a delicate ecosystem - if you add in one or two bad elements the team can unravel. I like the philosophy of the New Zealand men's Rugby team as they are the most successful team in any sport. They have a number of rules, but the most important rule is a simple one. They have a policy of No Dick Heads! When you think of the world's best team you think of the best talent. When you think of the best talent often you think of prima donnas, and that this is what the best talent looks like. They say no…no one is above the team and no one can put their interests above the team. As they leave the field at the end of each game, they all help to clean up the mess at the bench. They act like no one is above the team and that is the single sentence that describes the model. It helps them create a sense of tribe, family and friendship and nothing supersedes that. One of the keys to creating a good team is also not allowing anyone to put themselves above it. As leaders that rule starts with you!

I hope that you have enjoyed this and can start using some of these great techniques to create more cohesive teams. Make sure to subscribe to be alerted to ongoing podcasts. I work with leaders and their teams to apply these concepts, grow themselves, their teams and their business. Schedule a free 30 minute consultation here to see if I can help you, your team or your organization. You can reach me, Jill Windelspecht, directly by email at [email protected] and visit my website at www.TalentSpecialists.net.

Have you ever wished you or your team could be more creative? Would you like your team to come up with different ways to solve problems? Do you think that only certain people have that kind of creativity? Would you like to 'turn a dial' and become more focused or creative?

My Guest: Balder Onarheim, CEO of PlatoScience

If so, this is the podcast for you. Balder Onarheim, CEO of PlatoScience, will break down how to tap into your creativity and the creativity of your team. The good news is that it is not magical – everyone has the ability to be creative.

Balder Onarheim is a serial entrepreneur and former associate professor in creativity at the Technical University of Denmark.

He is the founder of the Copenhagen Institute of NeuroCreativity and CEO at PlatoScience: making the world's first creativity boosting headset. Balder's expertise lies within a neurologically based understanding of creativity, and methods to use this understanding to make people better problem solvers. He is a popular speaker with talks at prestigious conferences and universities around the world, and more than 300k people has seen his TEDx talk "3 tools to become more creative

Podcast Highlights:

Balder has been working with Neurobiologists to understand what creativity is and how it works from a neuroscience perspective so that they can help all of us be more creative. We all have creativity, it is everywhere – the secret is learning how to tap into those abilities.

The first step for leaders is to acknowledge the importance of creativity, as simple as that sounds. When leaders have a mindset that some employees are creative, and others are not, they treat employees differently and can miss out on the creativity of their whole team. Realizing that creativity is a basic human skill that we all have is important. It is a matter of nurturing it, training it and using it for the right purpose in the right point in time. By doing this you can make creativity part of your everyday work.

After you acknowledge that creativity is a crucial skill, using it every day in small ways is important to create that habit. How many little ways can you encourage creativity? For example, setting up rules like 'we need one bad idea for every good idea'. When you use this approach across the whole organization, it can help people re-analyze the way they solve problems.

There are 5 cognitive traits associated with Neurocreativity, they are:

1. Priming
2. Cognitive Inhibition
3. Remote Associations
4. Fixation
5. Incubation

The first is priming, setting the stage for what you want, on a management level it could be asking the team for alternative solutions and setting that expectation to think differently. Avoid giving your own idea first or an example of an idea because it can lead people to only think of that type of solution for the program. The key is to mix it up, keeping it random. A few ideas to get yourself to think more creatively:

1. Go to Wikipedia and select Random Article on the navigation, which can spark creativity because you will get a piece of information you would not normally have read. (Balder explains more about this in his TedX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-YScywp6AU )
2. Take a different route back and forth to work.
3. Grab a random book off your bookcase, flip to a page, have a short read and then go back to what you were doing.

The information we take in shapes the ideas we will have. Shaking it up allows you to have new thoughts that allow you to think creatively.

The second trait is cognitive inhibition – it is a controlling system in our brain to keep us from being overloaded with information. It works to restrict the amount of information you get access to, keeping us sane! For most of us it works overtime and the downside is that it can get rid of new information that can lead to new ideas.

Remote associations is the third cognitive trait associated with neuro-creativity. The associative network is where all our thoughts and memories are stored. Think of it like the internet as a whole that can link to multiple websites, everything is connected, it is just a matter of how many steps are needed to connect it. For example, if I say 'dog', your brain will most likely bring up the concept of a cat, it is closely associated. Creativity is a lot about finding those remote associations, so the strategy is to find any method you have to get to those remote associations that can help you think more creatively about the problem you are working on. Creativity is about combining things that are normally not related.

So, how can I be more creative? The more you simply understand neuro-creativity, the more you can apply and tap into it. Awareness is the key and the first step. Understanding what creativity is and how it works, then training yourself to use that knowledge through practice.

Fixation is the fourth cognitive trait and we have all experienced this. For example, when you can't get your head off a certain topic or a certain word. It is the 'tip of the tongue' effect when you are trying to remember the name of someone and you get it close….but not right. Suddenly it becomes impossible to get the right word because your brain gets fixated on this other name which is close but not quite there. You are zooming in on this part of your associative network and therefore you can't see the right word. The more you associate one thought with another, the stronger connected they become. When you get fixated, the best thing to do is to stop thinking about it and think about something else, take a walk or clear your head another way. This is the last trait – incubation.

Incubation – these breaks we discussed are necessary for you to tap into the remote associations that allow you to be more creative. Step away from the problem you are working on and start thinking of something else.

We can't be creative all the time – the key is to be intentional about when you want to be creative and then using these concepts and acting differently to get the creativity. As a leader, as yourself 'Do we need to emphasize creativity right now?' If yes, what are the best methods for you to do so? If you are trying to be creative think about how you are setting up the environment.

How often do you need these breaks? Studies range from 20 minutes to one hour before needing a break and starting to think about something else or just shifting tasks.

What do you do on that break? It goes back to priming, ask yourself what sort of priming will help you get to the next stage? If you or the team is getting fixated, get up physically, go outside if you can, do some exercises. Balder does squats with his team to get some circulation going when this happens. The key is doing something or thinking about something differently. These can be social breaks where you are checking in with a spouse or talking to your peers about other outside interests.

We all have the ability to be creative and as leaders we can create environments that will unleash it for our teams. Once you get started, creativity can be addicting, and your team will continue to be creative if you continue to encourage it. The key is to GET STARTED!!

One thing that you could do today – acknowledge the importance of habits for yourself at home and in the workplace. We tend to be single minded about this if we are allowed to do so. Be conscious about the importance of breaking some of these habits when you want to be more creative. For example, do you always search the same websites or resources when looking for answers to a problem? Think about your team meetings, if you always have them in the same room, in the same seats, looking in the same direction with the same agenda and order of speaking, these influence you and your team. If you want to be more creative, change something up here. So, the starting point for creativity is to acknowledge the importance of random inputs and changing habits.

Quick tip – the direction you look out from your desk has an impact on your creativity scores. Just by turning the chair 90 degrees and looking in a different direction can help stimulate creativity. It can be that simple.

What are the technological advances you are working on? They have been working on ways to get to your brain from the outside for the last three years by sending weak electrical impulses through the brain which allows you to slightly change the brain's ability to perform a task in a certain region of the brain, essentially trying to hijack a brain function. They have over 150 products in the market today that you can use. Customers range from programmers, lawyers, students, engineers, management consultant, etc. who want to focus on being creative using one of their unique headsets. The way it works is that you use the app to pick the thinking style you would like that would be most beneficial to the task you are working on and the headset will replicate the balancing of the brain for that type of task. If you want to know more and get your own headset go to https://platoscience.com/platowork/

What are some things that leaders should do when they are planning to have these leadership off-sites focused on being creative? There are two ways that Balder and the team have worked with numerous organizations to accomplish this:

1. Assumption Dumption – bring out all the assumptions people have about the problem you are trying to solve out in the open. Most of these are unspoken and would not be shared any other way. Discuss them and sort them by truth, relevance or those things that need to be just kept in mind. Scrap those assumptions that are outdated or just rumors. This helps to eliminate thoughts that limit their take on the problem – getting rid of the old ghosts!
2. Negative Brainstorm – flip the problem around and ask people to come up with diverse possible solutions that they think are bad ideas. This brings some humor into the meeting and you will find most of the bad ideas can bring something useful to the table. You take the absolutely worst ideas that come up and analyze them – what makes them bad as well as what are the positive elements. Challenge people to remove the bad things and keep the good things and you end up coming up with a good idea that comes from a terrible idea. It is fun, gets people to think about the problem in different ways. It always brings out new good ideas that you would normally never dare to bring up if you were asked to come up with only good ideas.

NEXT STEPS FOR YOU!

I hope that you have enjoyed this and can start using some of these great techniques to become more creative and create the right environment for your team. Make sure to subscribe to be alerted to ongoing podcasts. I work with leaders and their teams to apply these concepts, grow themselves, their teams and their business. Schedule a free 30 minute consultation here to see if I can help you, your team and/or your organization. You can reach me, Jill Windelspecht, directly by email at [email protected] and visit my website at www.TalentSpecialists.net.

Resources:

PlatoScience - https://platoscience.com/

3 tools to become more creative - TedX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-YScywp6AU

PlatoWork Headset - https://platoscience.com/platowork/

Have you ever wished you could get that moment back when you let your emotions take over? Do you want to make better choices and better decisions in the moment? This is the podcast for you!

My guest, Dr. Marcia Reynolds, MCC, is fascinated by the brain, especially what triggers feelings of connection, commitment, and possibility. She draws on her research as she helps coaches and leaders make every conversation is a difference-making experience. She has provided executive coaching and leadership training programs in 38 countries.

Dr. Reynolds is a pioneer in the coaching profession. She was the 5th global president of the International Coach Federation and has returned to the board as a Global Director. She is also the training director for the Healthcare Coaching Institute at Virginia Tech, and on faculty for the International Coach Academy in Russia and Create China Coaching in China. She is recognized by the Global Gurus top 30 as the #5 coach in the world. She was one of the first to earn the designation of Master Certified Coach.

Interviews and excerpts from Marcia's books Outsmart Your Brain, and The Discomfort Zone: How Leaders Turn Difficult Conversations into Breakthroughs, and Wander Woman: How High-Achieving Women Find Contentment and Direction, have appeared in many places including Fast Company, Psychology Today, and The Wall Street Journal.

Marcia's doctoral degree is in organizational psychology and she has two master's degrees in education and communications.

Highlights from the Podcast:

Information doesn't change behavior, just because you 'know' something it doesn't mean you will do it – there needs to be emotion involved. The first step to being aware is managing your emotions and your energy. Next you need to be curious because when you are with other people you need to think about how you are showing up with them. For example, are you partnering with them and helping them move forward OR is your intention to just get them to do what you want them to do?

Emotions are just energy moving through your body and it is important information to pay attention to that tells you what is going on in the moment – notice it and accept it. Don't label it good or bad, just notice it. Where in your body do you feel anger? Notice it – it is different for everyone. One tip to start noticing your emotions is to set a reminder on your phone 2 to 3 times a day to just track what you are feeling at the moment. This can help make you more aware. This is how you can start to build Reflective Intelligence – noticing the emotions is the first step.

After you notice the emotion then you can go to what you want to feel instead – but you have to feel the shift. You can't just tell yourself to be patient – you have to do something to feel more patient. For example, turn on some music or look at pictures to make you feel calmer. You have to understand what your triggers are – what are people taking from you that makes you react? For example, do you feel you are being respected, not safe or now being acknowledged? The thing about triggers, (which she goes into much more deeply in her book and you can go to www.outsmartyourbrain.com and search for emotional triggers to download the list) is that whatever has made you successful in this life is what is going to be your emotional trigger because you are protecting it. For example, if you want attention, control, order or accuracy and feel that any of those are being threatened, you will go on the defense. This happens really quickly and when you realize what is happening you have the choice of (1) asking for that or (2) letting it go. Being aware gives you more control in your response if you understand your reactions and why they are happening.

If something is really important to you, the primitive brain kicks in because the brain is designed to protect you. When we get defensive, it happens pretty quickly, and we react because we feel like someone is taking something from us or not giving us something we feel we deserve like respect or credibility. It is a primitive reaction that happens quickly and we either react or shut down, we are either a flighter or fighter. Now this could happen in the primitive brain, or if it bypasses the primitive brain, then it hits your social brain. Then we have the social needs where I might feel embarrassed or disappointed or frustrated because I am not getting what I think I need. This happens in the middle brain where you get defensive, you argue, you shut down or you feel embarrassed or sad. This affects what you will say or not say and the actions you will take.

It doesn't hit your logical brain until all this other stuff comes into play, which we use to give ourselves great reasons as to why we reacted that way or why we said that thing! (There is a great example of this in Chapter 1 of Outsmart your Brain).

Once you start noticing these emotions – what can you do? Well, first know that these never go away, just accept that you are human, and this is who you are and they will decrease. You won't stop being triggered and there will be certain people in your life that will trigger you more than others. The more we acknowledge them the less power they have over us and we get triggered but it is not as strong.

There is a 4-step formula to shift your emotions: Relax…Detach…Center….Focus.

Relax – because it is biological, breathe and release the tension in your body, breathing is the quickest way to release the tension. Do a body scan and relax your muscles.

Detach – clear your brain and wipe it clean.

Center – Take a tip from professional athletes that are taught to shift their awareness to their center, which is at the bottom of your breath – the center of your body. You take a deep breath in and notice the bottom of your breath – that is your center, your core. When you can move your awareness there, you are more powerful.

Focus – choose the one or two words that represent how you want to feel and then feel those emotions before you speak.

This is how you can make better choices in the moment – which leads to better outcomes. The best part is this not only helps you at work, but it helps you at home.

Great resources that you can leverage to learn more about this: www.outsmartyourbrain.com and her books Outsmart your Brain and The Discomfort Zone.

Last thing, people want you to be present more than they want you to be perfect. Listen to what they have to say, this makes people feel valued and important without any words.

I hope that you have enjoyed this and can start using some of these great techniques to build more self-awareness and have better conversations. Make sure to subscribe to be alerted to ongoing podcasts. You can reach me, Jill Windelspecht, directly by email at [email protected] and visit my website at www.TalentSpecialists.net.

Special Guest: Richard E. Boyatzis, Ph.D., Distinguished University Professor, Departments of Organizational Behavior, Psychology, and Cognitive Science and H.R. Horvitz Chair of Family Business, Case Western Reserve University

• Creator of Intentional Change Theory (ICT)
• Most Influential International Thinker, HR Magazine (2014)
• Author of more than 175 articles and 7 books, including Primal Leadership and Resonant Leadership

Highlights from the Podcast:

A recent study on motivation and retention, involving 1,800 MBA grads two years into their work, found that salary & benefits were the 7th reason they stayed at their job. The first 6 all had to do with novelty and learning! Development is very important if you want people to use their talent and to stay. People are not looking at their job as a transaction anymore. Training is not typically effective, especially in high power distance cultures, so coaching is the answer.

Richard defines coaching as helping other people move toward their ideal self or personal vision. Coaching in business has been around since the 60's (not a new fad as some believe) – and it is all about helping. Coaching is desired….but not always effective! His personal studies have shown that 70% - 80% of managers are not adding value in this space…..and that includes CEOs. The Coaching Research Lab at Case Western Reserve focuses on these 3 coaching client outcomes – (1) the person articulates or reframes their personal vision (2) helping someone's behavior change in the way they want to and (3) helping them build better relationships with their coach and other people so they can continue to grow, develop and innovate. If you want to know more about the research they are doing, follow this link: https://weatherhead.case.edu/departments/organizational-behavior/coaching-research/

Neuroimaging studies are showing how important personal visioning is because when someone dreams, not set goals, it activates the default mode network. It dramatically activates the visual lateral cortex, which is the part of the brain engaged when you are imagining things. These studies helped show us that problem solving coaching doesn't work if you start with that and don't get people to think about their personal vision first. If you only focus on solving a problem, you will not get behavior change. Understanding your personal vision is critical to making change last. In the Intentional Change Theory he developed, he said to sustain desired change – you have to want to change – not do it for someone else or because you think you should. It starts with you – you have to really want to change.

We are dismally poor in knowing how we are coming across to others – this is where a coach can help a lot. In addition, a coach can help you set your personal vision – identifying your ideal self by pulling out your dreams. I asked Richard what his dream was and he said his purpose is to help liberate people in terms of their dreams, individually or collectively – to help them find their shared vision in a way that energizes them.

What is one thing you can do today? People in organizations spend time thinking about being more effective….and that is appropriate, but you shouldn't think about it so much that you are not thinking about how to adapt and innovate. These two tasks take place in different parts of the brain. Learning to have more balance / more flexibility is one thing that is key. The more narrow you are, the worse off you are. How do you become less narrow and more innovative? Talk to people who care about you, who have comparable interests and who see the world differently from you to get the diversity you need. Build relationships that have more caring in them because that is what is going to last. Executives don't do the work, their job is to inspire others to do the work and you can't inspire others unless you are inspired yourself and care about other people.

For a free copy of Richard and his team's latest paper on antagonistic neural networks and leadership in Frontiers: http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/Abstract.aspx?s=537&name=human_neuroscience&ART_DOI=10.3389/fnhum.2014.00114&utm_source=Email_to_authors_&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=T1_11.5e1_author&utm_campaign=Email_publication&journalName=Frontiers_in_Human_Neuroscience&id=79428

Your Host: Jill Windelspecht, President of Talent Specialists Consulting, is an executive coach, speaker and consultant who works with leaders like you, across the globe, to grow themselves, their team and their organization. It is all about People….Science….Purpose. Dedicated to helping people, leveraging neuroscience and social science to help leaders and organizations find their purpose. www.talentspecialists.net, [email protected]