Leading People
Gerry Murray talks to leading people about leading people. Get insights and tips from thought leaders about how to bring out the best in yourself and others.
Leading People
What if everything you believe about leadership potential is neurologically wrong?
Step into the revolutionary intersection of neuroscience and leadership with Professor Patricia Riddell and Ian McDermott as they shatter outdated brain myths and reveal how understanding neuroscience transforms leadership effectiveness.
Most leaders operate on brain models that are 60-65 years out of date. This knowledge gap isn't just academic – it directly impacts how we develop talent, make decisions, and build organizational capacity.
Patricia and Ian introduce "neuro-effective leadership," a groundbreaking approach that applies cutting-edge neuroscience to practical leadership challenges.
Neuroplasticity emerges as the game-changing concept every leader needs to understand. Leaders who understand neuroplasticity see potential differently – not as a fixed attribute to be measured, but as a capacity that can be systematically developed through the right experiences.
The conversation reveals surprising insights about how our brains handle tasks versus relationships.
We also explore how understanding empathy as a structured cognitive skill rather than a vague "soft skill" provides practical techniques for creating psychological safety while maintaining accountability.
Patricia and Ian's upcoming book "Neuro-Effective Leadership" will be published by Routledge in June 2025, with pre-registration available in May.
Connect with them on LinkedIn to learn about their Applied Neuroscience program (get a special offer) and discover how understanding your brain can transform your leadership capacity.
Curious?
If you want to lead more effectively, build better relationships, and create a leadership style that truly works for you and your teams, this episode is packed with practical neuroscience-backed insights you can apply immediately.
🎧 Tune in now and start leading with more choice, clarity, and confidence!
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Welcome to Leading People with me, gerry Marais. This is the podcast for leaders and HR decision makers who want to bring out the best in themselves and others. Every other week, I sit down with leading authors, researchers and practitioners for deep dive conversations about the strategies, insights and tools that drive personal and organizational success.
Speaker 1:And in between, I bring you one simple thing short episodes that deliver practical insights and tips for immediate use. Whether you're here for useful tools or thought-provoking ideas, leading People is your guide to better leadership. Thought-provoking ideas Leading People is your guide to better leadership.
Speaker 2:Can neuroscience help you lead better? What if your leadership habits, assumptions and even your decision-making style were being shaped by unconscious brain patterns? And what if you could train your brain so you could become a more?
Speaker 2:effective, adaptable and impactful leader. In this episode of Leading People, professor Patricia Riddle and Ian McDermott reveal how understanding the brain can transform leadership. They explain how neuroplasticity acts like brain sculpting and how you can rewire habits, why your leadership assumptions may be limiting your own and your team's potential, what neuro-effective leadership really means and how to apply it, and how to create more choice, empathy and compassion in your leadership. If you've ever wondered why some leadership strategies fail while others thrive, this episode will change the way you think about leadership and performance.
Speaker 2:So stay tuned. This is one you won't want to miss. Patricia Riddle and Ian McDermott welcome to Leading People. Thank you Great to be here. Great, I first met both of you when I trained with you in actually 2016 on your Applied Neuroscience and the Brain and Behaviour Change course. And, just for our listeners, you've published many books and research papers, and you're here today to talk about neuroscience and leadership and maybe give us a little sneak preview of what's coming up in your new book that you'll be publishing, I believe, sometime in the not-too-distant future, and we'll get to all of that shortly. But first, so our listeners can get to know you a little bit better, how did you both get to where you are today? What people, places or events or epiphany moments stand out in your respective journeys?
Speaker 3:So for me, I've been an academic forever and have worked in developmental psychology actually, so it's quite a long way from where I currently are.
Speaker 3:But the epiphany for me was when somebody actually a colleague asked me why it was that she ran training programs that didn't transfer into the workplace, and could I have a look and tell me what was going wrong in people's brains so that she could make it better?
Speaker 3:So I went away and had to think about learning and memory and how it transfers, and I came up with some ideas, because I'm not that's not my area of expertise. I took it to a colleague of mine and said this is what I'm thinking of saying about memory and learning, what do you think? And he looked at it and said everything you say is correct, but I would never have thought of the applications. And for me that was the moment of thinking oh, my goodness, there's all this stuff that's sitting in neuroscience and psychology that's not actually being transferred and being used usefully, and that's where I started my journey into doing properly applied neuroscience. So, and I spent the last 15 or more years just thinking about how can we get this the most recent research and transfer it translated into something that people can apply immediately in their own lives. It's not about teaching people neuroscience.
Speaker 2:It's helping people to apply neuroscience yeah, and that that's one of the great things that I learned from you, and you've got a professorship today, don't you? In applied neuroscience? At which university again?
Speaker 3:um at reading, but the when you get to be a professor, you get to choose what your title is, and the title I mean what I do is neuroscience, but actually what I'm more interested in is application, which is where the applied neuroscience title came from.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's probably a great segue into your background, Ian. I've got several of your books from your NLP days here. Perhaps you can take us through that journey.
Speaker 4:Oh dear, yes, it really started a long, long time ago. My hair was a different color at the time, but there you go. Time moves on, and what happened was originally when I was working with clients, be it their individuals, families, couples, teams. I was interested in what worked, and that's how I ever became familiar with what was known as NLP neurolinguistic programming simply because it was looking for different ways of engaging with different kinds of people using different models, rather than saying there is one way and this is it. And that gave rise to a kind of fascination with what really works. And so, in my own career, I founded an organization which was dedicated to putting it out there, making it available to anybody who wanted to have practical how-tos, and the result of that was, I felt, both democratizing and demystifying, because people began to know what they could do and how they could do it. And guess what? You know, success results. Now, does that mean everybody ends up as Mozart? No, it doesn't. But can we go towards a greater capacity that we already have inherently? Yes, we can, and so you know.
Speaker 4:The years went on and that flourished and that indeed, it's still going. But I was also aware that there was this tsunami of research that was coming out of the field of neuroscience, and I also knew that I'm not a neuroscientist and I'm not going to start making grand claims that, yes, neuroscience tells us, tells us this, that and the other. But I did think it would be really remarkable if I could demonstrate what was often referred to as the magic of NLP, had research backing, and I endeavored to find some neuroscientists who were interested in exploring this, and I had a number of goes not very satisfactory. And then, by more luck than anything, trish and I met and it was like boom immediately, because we both had the same interest, which was this is all fine and dandy, but how do you apply it? And if you've got just vast amounts of research being generated, if the researchers love doing research, fair enough, but that means nobody's actually taking it out there and saying, ah, yes, if you were to try it this way, you might get a better result.
Speaker 4:And so it was just a remarkable kind of exploration that then began, and the first thing we had to do was recognize ah, these are different backgrounds. My background originally was psychotherapy. So you're finding a common language in how we're going to explore things and how can we test them to see is that actually practically useful for people to learn? And so began the journey we started. We were thinking about this the other day. I think it was like 15 years ago. For the last 10 plus years we've been running a program called Applied Neuroscience because we wanted to make it bite-sized chunks so people could understand. And here we go again to demystify and democratize it, and so that has continued. We've refined it over the years and the net result is we got to a point of saying I think we could legitimately make a contribution now to the literature, but maybe we'll talk about that in a while.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I just can say for the benefit of the listeners that I can attest to the chemistry, yes, and I can also really endorse the program because of what you said. It's quite remarkable how many opportunities there are to talk about the brain and talk about what's going on for people in just ordinary layman's terms, without getting too technical well, I probably couldn't actually get too technical, but sometimes just to be able to to first notice for yourself right, it's the self-awareness bit that really you start to go, okay, I wonder what's going on for me today, etc. Etc. And then being able to also start to notice how people are maybe processing a situation and go doesn't seem to be the most useful state that they're in at the moment. Maybe we need to talk about something else or reframe or whatever so there's a whole lot of beautiful stuff that comes out of that and I personally found I do quite some training.
Speaker 2:Sometimes I've been asked to do a few little formal things around the neuroscience in in. You might be asked to do a little thing on conscious bias or something. We've used a lot of Canman stuff in decision-making courses, but it's not even just doing it formally, it's just that ability to have a chat about it with people and have people go. Oh wow, I never thought of it that way. And that's the beauty of this, I think and your course is so good at it because it's not academic Trish you give us a little bit, but then you send us off to find out how it works and we had to do some. Incredibly, I would call heavy lifting to actually you didn't say go away now and we'll see you in a couple of weeks again. You went away and said go away and go off and do something and come back and show us what you did. And we were able to to learn not just from you guys, but we also learned from each other a lot as well.
Speaker 4:So I can endorse that a lot that's good to hear actually a student speaks.
Speaker 2:Yes, I stay in touch with other people who've done the course and they're all I mean mean they're pretty enthusiastic about it. So we'll get to some of that a little bit towards the end, because you might have something to say about it towards the end. But let's just get into the whole idea of where neuroscience fits into leadership and particularly coaching. I mean, patricia, you co-wrote a book a few years ago which I have behind me here on the neuroscience of leadership coaching. I mean, ian, I don't know, I couldn't even count take four or five hands to count the number of books that you've put out on NLP. But when we get into, how do you both see neuroscience enhancing coaching and leadership development and what does the integration of neuroscience offer that traditional leadership approaches might be missing?
Speaker 4:Oh, I think a neuroscientist should speak to this first.
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Speaker 3:So I think there's a number of ways that you can come at this, jerry, and the first thing I would say is that often it's about really legitimizing what people already know is working.
Speaker 3:You know, I'm doing this thing, I don't know why it works, but it seems to work and often just giving people a better understanding of what might be changing in the brain as they're trying these, these techniques, gives them a confidence and a credibility in what they're doing. So I think I would start with saying it's not about completely reinventing either coaching or leadership. But the other thing I would say is that the brain doesn't always do what the layperson thinks it might be doing, and those areas where it's doing something that's unintuitive often mean that we're trying things one way because we think that's the way the brain works. But when you stop and say to people you know, hold on a minute, that's not actually how it's doing it, it's doing it this way instead, it can really kind of change people in thinking oh right, okay, well, if that's the way my brain's working, then it's worth me trying something different.
Speaker 3:And absolutely in both leadership and in coaching, I think the main thing that the neuroscience and access to better understanding of the brain can do is increases your choice. I have so many more ways that I can think about things because I understand how my brain is working and it increases compassion, and compassion for self first, also compassion for others, or if that's the way their brain's working, then I shouldn't be surprised that this is a response I'm getting now. How, how might I help them to do something different that would be better for them and probably better for me in the long run too.
Speaker 2:I guess, ian, this notion of choice is very has been very prominent in the world of NLP over the years, and being able to have choice and create choices and expand our models of the world, and what's your experience of this?
Speaker 4:Because you do a lot of coaching at choice is in itself, a significant thought shift for many people. What does it mean to be at choice? You mean, for example, working with somebody very recently who has a big challenge coming up. My question was simply so, if you're going to be at your best, how do you get to be at your best in preparing? It's a very simple proposition the idea that if it's going to be challenging, I think I'd like to be firing on all cylinders when the occasion arises. But the how-tos, those are something which neuroscience can actually help us say specifically what will assist and what will actually get in the way. But I think that there are some radical opportunities here which and I'll do this as the non-neuroscientist which are really fundamental for understanding if you're a leader, and one of these is that your understanding of the brain, which may be something you don't spend a lot of time thinking about, it's just like, well, yeah, everybody's got one, I wish I'd use it and something, but actually the understanding is frequently extraordinarily out of date. I know this because of our initial time together.
Speaker 4:I actually asked Trish because she's in a field that was not my field. Necessarily lay understanding lags behind specialist research, so I'd expect there to be some time lag, and I said to her what would you say in terms of lay understanding of the brain versus current understanding, what's the time like? And at the time, the first thing she said was 20 to 30 years and I thought, good God, this is like. I mean, basically it's extraordinary. But okay, then there's a lot of reason for doing what we're about to start doing. However, the kicker was that she came back to me some days later. In fact, you should say this Trish, what did you say?
Speaker 3:Well, at that point some of the models are 50 years out of date. Now make that 60 to 65 years out of date. So I'm still hearing stuff being said that is 65 years old.
Speaker 4:I'm a very left-brain person. Oh yes, I'm sure hearing stuff being said that is 65 years old. I'm a very left-brain person oh yes, I'm sure you are. What are we talking about here? We're not talking about anything of any real. It's not real.
Speaker 4:But the reason why this matters in this context, to answer your question, Jerry is the perceptions that people have shape their understanding of what is possible, and therefore, if you are talking about your own development, you know what's possible for you. Well, it's all downhill after 25, isn't it? Or whatever nonsense you have, then that's not helpful, but it's far more pernicious than that, because if you're in any leadership role, these are the assumptions you're bringing to the development potential of entire teams of people. You know you can write off a lot of people through ignorance, and so one of the things for us was well, what would this mean if you started to understand? Let's take one fundamental concept, which is possibly like the beginning neuroplasticity. What does that do? If you understand something about that and again, I'm going to keep my mouth shut for a moment and trish neuroplasticity, I mean, who cares before?
Speaker 2:you answer the neuroplasticity, because that's, that's a, that's a brilliant topic in itself. Um, what always occurs to me is um because I sometimes joke in my own little way in the room what prevents this being taught to children and adolescents about? You know? What prevents? Just talk, because it seems to me like having a manual for this part of you know, our anatomy, which tends to have a big influence, would be such an obvious thing to have, not at the very site, technical stuff although when they get to biology and stuff like that and chemistry, maybe you can start to sprinkle a bit more technically but what stops the education system just teaching young kids this? Because think of it, if they embed that early on and they just build on that, it would be beautiful. I wish I learned it when I was a kid, so without going too deep into it and turning it into a rabbit hole. What's the?
Speaker 4:what's the kind of jerry I'm I'm just so struck at how trish and I are both sort of champing at the bit here well, I completely agree with you 100, and it's a passion of mine to see if we can get this into schools as well.
Speaker 3:Um, and I actually um, we've been running some seminars for teachers, and every teacher that we give this information to says why didn't we learn this in teaching college? So there's one way that you could do it. You could get it to be part of the teacher's vocabulary and that way it gets immediately into schools. There are schools that are taking this on board and doing it. So it will happen. It is just a very slow burn, okay.
Speaker 4:My rather flip answer to your question why is? Why isn't this being taught in schools? Well, that's down to adults. I mean, that's the short answer. And why? Why is that significant? Because if you start talking to kids about you know, whatever the topic may be, uh, there's something to do with the brain. If you keep it just as straightforward, principles of what that makes possible, or some things are difficult, and the more difficult because you immediately have identification and children are fantastically adept at going oh right, right, yeah no problem.
Speaker 3:For example, I was talking to my eight-year-old granddaughter and she was doing some maths homework and I was teaching her. When you learn, you get new connections in your brain. They're called synapses. So if you're doing your maths homework, you're getting new synapses. And she just sat there and she was sitting doing stuff and she looked up at me and she said am I getting new synapses? And she just sat there and she was sitting doing stuff and she looked up at me and she said am I getting new?
Speaker 2:synapses now, and what was the conversation like in the playground the next day? How many new synapses did you get last night?
Speaker 4:yeah, even the questions that get asked change, and what's so fascinating and this is why it really matters to us is you're changing the terrain of expectations, and that then means that I'm not very good at whatever the topic is. You know, fill in the blank. No, not at the moment. Maybe you're not, but that's not, you know, inherent Would you like to be. And so if you, if you have any interest in growth mindset, for example, which you know you could have heard of without any neuroscience at all my god, there's so much neuroscience to support why bother with growth mindset? Because you're opening up a world of possibilities for anyone, at any age, any age.
Speaker 2:So let's now get to the neuroplasticity, and I want to take a few seconds just to share a personal experience with this, which was at the end of 2018, my father had a stroke and you know he was lucky they called it just in time, but he had quite some days in intensive care.
Speaker 2:But I was at home with him a little while after he came out of hospital. He was putting little beads into little buckets or things and it was very frustrating. My father did manual work all his life, so it was very frustrating for him to do this and he was cursing and swearing and I said to him do you know why you're doing it? He said the physio told me to. I said well, actually, you're probably trying to teach your brain that there might be another way to do the things. It's not maybe guaranteed, but you're doing something to try and change your brain here, not because the physio told you yes, the physio told you, but I think there was another reason beneath that but explain to my listeners the power and the value of understanding neuroplasticity you're listening to leading people.
Speaker 2:With me, jerry mur. My guests today are Professor of Applied Neuroscience, Patricia Riddle, and Executive Coach and Leading Author, Ian McDermott. Coming up next, Patricia and Ian unpack how your brain balances tasks and relationships, what really happens when leaders create choice, empathy and compassion, and why state management is key to high-performance leadership.
Speaker 1:Stay with us. There's so much more to explore.
Speaker 3:Oh, my goodness, where do you start with that? So I think one of the biggest things for me is to have a better understanding of potential and to destroy the myth that, as Ian says, it's downhill after a certain age. If we understand the degree to which we can sculpt our brains at any age, then that's a great thing to be able to think. What does that mean? Is possible for me? What does that give me that I didn't have in terms of belief, and you know so.
Speaker 3:For instance, one of the things that we often share with people is the London Taxi Driver Study, and many people have heard about this study. You know the idea that you can actually see that the part of the brain increases in size when you learn a spatiotemporal map of London. Well, that's a big bit of learning to do, but the the most important element of that and I think it's one that's not often stressed is that the people were doing the learning in their 30s, 40s, 50s and even 60s, and age didn't make a difference to the degree to which the hippocampus grew. It was about the experiences that they were giving themselves and taking on. That was the thing that made the difference. So learning is possible at any age, if you have the right motivation and the right kind of belief in what you can do.
Speaker 2:And in my work I come across a lot of people in HR asking we need to establish a person's potential right, and yet a lot of it is is like this you know, like a finger in the air, and they've got nine boxes which weren't even intended for that. They were intended to evaluate business portfolios and they say, ok, what's their performance like? And you know what's their. And they put people in these boxes. And yet if they understood what you're talking about, trish, they'd probably really wanted to look at that aspect.
Speaker 2:And what opportunities are people having to to to learn new things? What are the assumptions about these things in the organization? You know, is there an assumption that you get to vp and then you don't go to trainings anymore because you've made it and stuff like that? You know so, um, but that nicely segues, I think, into the, this concept you have created called neuro effective leadership, leadership, and of course, with my own little linguistic background, I go neuro, okay, brain effective oh, wow, that's an interesting word leadership. So, as far as I've heard, you're co-authoring this book, and the questions I would have to get started on it is who's the book for, what is neuro-effective leadership and what's the kind of core message you want people to get when they read this book.
Speaker 4:Oh, can I kick off Trish? Yes, any and all of those. Great place to start. So here's the background, which I think probably puts it in context.
Speaker 4:As we've developed the, the trainings which take the neuroscience and give practical tools that are how-tos that people can learn and take away and use, we got to a point where we felt that we could codify this in written form for people who may not be able to come to a train, and one of the really fascinating questions of what we would put in such a book was it's got to be effective, otherwise it doesn't merit inclusion.
Speaker 4:What we're interested in, and have been from the outset, is just that does it deliver something which is a practical benefit that's going to be valued to an individual, to a team, to an organization preferably all three and if so, we have a very simple question we can ask is the current way of doing something effective from a neurological point of view? And if we, you know, abbreviate that to, is it neuro effective? We have a question which is an excellent discipline for keeping us on track about what can we say that we know we can now offer because it's been tried and tested, and that's what the book focuses on. We can see many, many applications in different areas, but we still start from that place of well, does it work? What am I going to get and how can I use it?
Speaker 2:that's the short answer and I believe there's a subtitle is there leading yourself and others? Is that right? Because actually this podcast, the tagline on this podcast, is how to bring out the best in yourself and others. That's what leading people, my concept of this was. You know, you have to start with yourself. So how does that then frame the neuro effectiveness?
Speaker 3:Yeah, the reason it's the subtitle is because there's two, two volumes, potentially the neuroscience of, you know, the neuroaffective um leadership of self and others. We're talking about techniques that are important both for increasing self-awareness because if you're not aware of how you're doing things, then it's hard to help people to trust people a bit more, to build empathy with others all those sorts of things that are about relationships between self and others and then thinking about it too in terms of mental health and well-being. How do I maintain a healthy existence while also being in the leadership position, because so many leaders nowadays seem to be suffering from overwhelm. So how do we help them to build better resilience for themselves and others too.
Speaker 2:So I have a question, then, because I'm sure, if I was putting myself in the shoes of my listeners at the moment, they're probably gagging for some sort of practical examples. What would be a simple technique that you could share, that because, because of the type of work you've been doing and where you come across where one, one or two simple things that people may not be aware of, but when you, when you basically say what about this or do this, what would be one or two things that you could share with our, the listeners there, that they could even start to explore during whilst they keep listening to this?
Speaker 3:so one thing that we found that's really really powerful is again is this new or is this empathy? But empathy comes in two types. So there's empathic concern I feel what you feel and there's empathic understanding I understand how you feel, but I don't need to feel it with you and we know that, under empathic understanding, that more cognitive level of understanding others is linked to compassion and wanting to help people who are in difficult situations. Um, so there's a really simple thing that you can do, I mean, apart from making sure that you put yourself in other people's shoes and take the time to do it, because it's not we think of of empathy as maybe a soft skill, but it's not. It's a hard skill. It's hard in that if you're taking the time to actually imagine what it might be like for somebody else, then that takes a lot of cognitive processing. So it's not just I feel like it, it's I can really imagine it and understand it, but using that to create better relationships, we can talk about empathy.
Speaker 3:How do I empathize with somebody and then add the? And this is what we'll do with it? So I agree with you on this. I'm demonstrating empathy because I've listened to you. I'm repeating back something that's important to you. We're in, in agreement about that, and here's what we'll do. Or I'm in agreement with you and I'm empathizing with you, but here's the reason that we can't do what you've asked and that empathy with a response. I was talking to somebody that had been in a course recently and they just said it's a game changer, just always starting with empathy and then, and then you know, decide not giving a really clear reason for what you, what's going to happen next, can just take the you know the the heat out of a conversation, a difficult conversation of course on an NLP level, you you kind of have to suspend your assumptions and your mind reading to be able to do empathy, Would that not be?
Speaker 4:If I may, let me interview you on your own podcast for a moment, just because there you are. You know you're somebody who took the program. What have you used? What have been particularly? Oh yeah, I don't know, I use that many times.
Speaker 2:Well, some free coaching, Ian.
Speaker 4:Is that what you're saying? No, I'm just interested in the question you ask. There is an experience you've had and you may have taken things away and, you know, found well.
Speaker 2:I quite often refer to that bit of the program as opposed to any other bit of it, you know, because it's like certain things resonate at certain times with people yeah, honestly, um, the, the, I suppose one of the first things that, um, I've always been, let's say, very interested, since my nlp days, in this concept of managing your state. You know, if you're not in this, it's this idea, like, would you ask the ceo, how do you become the best version of yourself? And I've been a performing musician all my life and I've had to walk out on stages to up to 10,000 people. Maybe the next gig's 40 people. The 40 people is more scary because you can see them all. And I guess it's kind of being aware of what's going on within my own neurology and experimenting with, for example, mindfulness. I found that very, very useful for me. Now I know that for some people it doesn't work in the way of just that silence and self-aware. I find that a fascinating thing and we know that that helps us understand what's going on, uh, not just at that amygdala level, but maybe on the, that whole ventrum striator rewards part of the brain that that might also be a bit over overstimulated at times. And I, and I found that and I use that, for example, in virtually every training course I do, or team building or anything, and I've had people say to me do we have to do this couple of minutes? I said no, you see, because if I give you some time and space, it's quite likely your brain's going to start arranging things for you. You never know.
Speaker 2:And I'll give you an example, ian, of working with a client not long after I did the course, and it was interesting. It was a small business with a couple of the partners who owned it, in the room with these younger people, and I said to them so in the afternoon, roughly what time do you take a break? And they looked at me like well, they looked at the partners first and then they looked at me like well, they looked at the partners first and then they looked at me. Like I said maybe 3, 30, 4 o'clock, and the partner one of the partners said oh, you don't understand. She said if we start taking breaks at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, we could be in the office till 8 o'clock. I said if you took a break at 4 o'clock for maybe 20 minutes, you could be home at six. And it was that. And they said what?
Speaker 2:Because you, probably, you know, if you're your brain trying to make so many decisions, you know you, you know you, maybe you're getting stressed, you need to maybe be able to remove yourself. So I just find it's just. There's always like I teach negotiation skills. You know, I, I, I, I have some videos to show what happens if you get provoked.
Speaker 2:Doesn't matter how clever you are at doing the deals and you're stacking up stuff, if you're not able to to manage yourself in those situations and you might get provoked and everything you, you can actually not be as effective as you thought you would be. That that's kind of that's just. There's just a couple of smatterings of things that come along when my kids are studying. One of my daughters gets stressed out for exams and and then she gets into that cycle where she can't then rationalize things and then she gets more upset and then. So we try to get her out and maybe get her for a walk or something, try to get her to, to, to rest the brain a little bit and reframe the situation, do something different with her physiology. But I don't know if that answers your question, but that's yeah, I think.
Speaker 4:Well, I think it does point in a direction of certain things get to be more significant, and you know it's going to vary person to person. So one of the things that has been important for us is just being able to think it through to get it as clear as possible. So, in writing the book, we've got chapters that focus on very particular things like what is it to develop an achieving mindset, how would you know yourself better, and so forth. But also part one that would be in part two is very much about leadership in teams. You know, how are you going to be able to, for example, use neuroscience to promote psychological safety? There are things you can do. They make a difference.
Speaker 4:Now we could go into you know each of these, but one of the things that we've done is we wanted to give ourselves the discipline of how clear can we be? So at the end of every chapter we've got what have we learned so far? And then, how are you going to apply it for yourself? That's personal and professionally, suggestions, and in that way we hope to be able to give people very practical suggestions as to what they could have a look at, what they might want to take a bit of time to investigate and how they could get to know members of teams, if they're in that situation, rather better and draw out more of the potential that's there. Because, to go back to your HR point, you know I think it's really tough if you don't have a way of determining, well, what could the potential even be?
Speaker 4:Here we're using certain kinds of distinctions which were never necessarily designed to ascertain that. And well, you know you make the best of what you got and well you know you make the best of what you've got. But if you start from an understanding that, my golly, this person, their brain, is in some ways rather like a muscle, if you use it you get a lot of a return, otherwise you lose a lot, there you go, and it's actually true, it's not just a metaphor. So could we begin to understand that we have an extraordinary amount to get curious about? And that allows us to also think about what is it? I'd really like to be doing that I don't do. Why might that be worth doing? Because it will be fantastically stimulating the brain development by back to to Trish's granddaughter. Oh, new neural connections, oh, new neurons. Oh, it's there for everybody.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I notice is this tendency and I think this goes back to your earlier discussion about how out of date our understanding of the brain is. But there are models out there in the business world and I mentioned this one before we came on but I'd like you to maybe talk a bit about it. Trish, is this contingency theory thing where you know task versus relationship and you know, you know you have to be able to navigate, you know there's a you draw one on on the x-axis and the other on the y-axis and then everybody should be able to just jump into that top box. And when I sat, you explained this and you sort of and I'll let you explain it that it's maybe not as easy as people would think. When you just look at a diagram in terms of how people are somewhat wired towards a propensity to one or the other as their natural preference, it doesn't mean they can't do the other, isn't that right?
Speaker 3:So this is one of the places where the brain does something very unintuitive, and it's lovely you start with this idea that leaders should be really good people, people, people, um. But they should also be good at getting the job done and the the way that the brain works is that it brings together the, the areas of the brain that it needs to fulfill a particular goal, and the areas that you need to fulfill a task are very different from the areas that you would need if you're going to think about others, but you're going to be. You know, think think about, um, how I get my team to be doing their best, and you know that kind of is obvious that you've got different, different networks that do those two types of of job. The thing that's slightly less intuitive is that when one of those networks is operating, the other one is turned off, so you can only do them one at a time. You can't do them simultaneously.
Speaker 3:And if you're in an organization and I'm just reflecting on your organization where they're saying, well, if we take a break at half past four, then we won't get home till eight, it sounds as if and we hear this in many organizations it's task, task, task, task, task all day. So you're going to be really great at refining that network and making it work really well just because of the experience you're having, but at the expense of the one that you're inhibiting. You will become less good at being a people person. So how do you balance those two networks so that you're actually able to use both effectively? And this is where taking time comes in, because your brain, while it can't use them both simultaneously, can use them sequentially if you give it sufficient time and space to think that's a beautiful summary.
Speaker 2:I hope our listeners are fantastically curious now about how to do that, and and it'll be revealed in the book, I guess. Um, there's another, another thing that, and we're not too far away from the end. But there's another burning topic at the moment and and in the times we live in, and this is whole idea of uncertainty and rapid change, and, um, how can leaders apply principles from neuroscience and nlp to adaptable manage stress and help their teams navigate uncertainty more effectively? Maybe, trish, you'd like to explain what uncertainty does to the brain? To get started on this.
Speaker 3:Okay. So there's a very wide range of individual differences in our tolerance of uncertainty, and some people are almost enjoy situations that are uncertain and put themselves in new situations, often because they they um, get a bit of a buzz out of that. Other people are very much. I like everything to be familiar. I don't like uncertain. It's not. It makes me uncomfortable, and so, first of all, it will will depend on where on that spectrum people sit.
Speaker 3:But if you're intolerant of uncertainty, if uncertainty bothers you, then that can be a precursor to anxiety and the anxious mind is not functioning at its best. Stop people. We can't change. Well, you can, but it's better for leaders to recognize that they're going to have a range of tolerance to uncertainty within their team. How do I, as a leader, deal with that? I give people as much certainty as I can. I give them. You know, if I'm describing a new task, I tell them what I know, what they need to know, what to know, how I want them to work together. Anything that you can do to increase certainty is going to reduce the intolerance of uncertainty for that job. So it's a really basic principle of leadership that you should provide as much information as you can, and that will include saying and here's the things that I'm uncertain about, because if you're uncertain about it too, then I don't need to be so worried that I'm uncertain about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because that gives certainty that you're uncertain. Basically, and the concept of allostatic load. You know, it often occurs to me that if a boss has a massive bandwidth then some of their people don't with and some of their people don't. There could be terrible mismatching and misunderstandings going on in terms of the stress and ability to handle a lot of ambiguity, complexity, etc.
Speaker 3:Exactly. I mean, I think of stress as coming into a bucket, and the bucket has lots of different places where stress is added. So it can be added at the work, it can be added at home, it can be added through your friends and family, it can be added through things that you're doing outside of all of that, and at work you tend to only see the stress that's added from the workplace, so you don't know what else is in the bucket. So leaders have to be really careful that they're not just A imagining that everybody has the same size bucket. They don't. B that they all have similar ways of emptying the bucket, because as the stress comes in you need the ways of releasing the stress. Different people do that less well. And. C that the sources of stress are wide-ranging and come from outside world too. So not everybody is going to be able to do what somebody who finds that they thrive on stress can do. You need to kind of figure out what people's particular tolerance of stress might be.
Speaker 2:And Ian in your conversations with a lot of leaders. What are you hearing about this whole uncertainty and change and stress?
Speaker 4:I had a very interesting conversation very recently with a leader, uh, who had had the experience of his business going into administration, um, quite a few years ago now, and the business came back and it was it's thriving, and now it's a really tough time, it's expanding. And he was having the same kind of feelings as then and it was it's thriving, and now it's a really tough time, it's expanding. And he was having the same kind of feelings as then. And I was saying no, no, no you, this is not the same experience. He'd already told me it wasn't the same experience. He said, um, this is uncharted territory. So it's like, oh, you haven't been here before, but you're having the same kind of anxiety that you had associated with a different experience many moons ago. So it's really important to understand that I may be having a certain kind of anxiety, but is this the same kind of experience or am I just failing to make a sufficient distinction between what was then and what was current? Now? And very often we are in a situation where the kind of fast thinking is such that the brain goes, ah, this is like that, and suddenly the past is running the present, but actually the present is different. What? What was then was pretty scary. This could be scary, but it's in an entirely different way, and have you noticed the difference of being able to make those distinctions is going to be critical.
Speaker 4:Uncertainty comes in many forms. One of the things that's really striking to me is how sometimes there can be great relief in somebody telling you that there's so much that is unknown but you'll know when. I know good leaders do that, but. But that can also take the form of uh. The I suppose, extreme example is is churchill, when he became Prime Minister, addressing the House of Commons very early on in the Second World War. He becomes Prime Minister and he says I have nothing to offer you but blood, toil, sweat and tears. And the entire House of Commons breathes a sigh of relief. Okay, now we know where we stand. Do we want to play Actually? Yes, yes, we do. Now let's get on with it. So there is something about just telling it like it is can be enormously relieving for people and that makes a difference, and a leader who has the courage to do that has a profound impact on others.
Speaker 2:And it wouldn't be surprising, given the brain's tendency to sort of take these shortcuts, that the person that you're talking about would see things as the same. It might be just the brain trying to be efficient, because it kind of goes well, I see the familiarity, and just being efficient as a brain saying you know it must be the same and maybe that's another aspect of being aware of how your brain is processing a situation is useful. I have a quick question for you here Will you be offering any courses or training in neuro-effective leadership?
Speaker 4:Well, in a funny sort of way, we already do once a year. Well, in a funny sort of way, we already do once a year. Mid-march is usually the time of year. We run the Supplied Neuroscience Program, which is a 10-day program, but not all in one big chunk. We deliberately want it in weekend segments, two days each over five months, and in that program we start to explore how can you be neuro-effective, so that it will complement the book rather nicely. Will we be offering additional programs which give a taste of a particular application? Absolutely, and indeed we already do. Sometimes we just like to get it out there and we'll do freebies. We did one recently on rumination which was kind of fascinating, and that's covered in the neuroaffective book as well. So yes, and if anybody's interested, I think, just be in touch with us through our LinkedIn addresses.
Speaker 2:Okay, so, coming to the end, and this is just some final thoughts, so for leaders maybe especially young or even emerging leaders understanding how their brains work for and against them could be a real game changer. For leaders, and, based on your research and experience, what are the most important things leaders need to know about their brains? If there's one key takeaway that each of you would like to leave us with from your work, that you'd like the audience, the listeners, to remember, what would that one thing be? Do you want to go first Chris.
Speaker 4:Oh, for me it would be neuroplasticity, because if you understand that the brain has this extraordinary just like plasticine, it's malleable, it has the ability to adapt continually and is designed to do so. It makes sense that a lot of people are actually kind of understimulated, which doesn't mean they should be subjecting themselves to pulsing lights and throbbing speakers. It's more just. Is there enough in your life to stimulate you and to keep it interesting? Are you doing what you love? All of that will be fantastically growth-promoting, literally in your brain, and sky's the limit. How would you like to be? Well then, get curious about what would help you move in that direction. What would help you move in that?
Speaker 3:direction. And I think if I was to choose one thing, it would be that not to be afraid of listening to your emotions, because they're giving you such a wide-ranging access to information, not only about how you feel, but often emotions arise because of contagion with others. So if you can catch an emotion and think where did that come from, it can give you a real sensitivity to something that's changed in the room and that will actually allow you to think about not only why am I feeling like that, but is there somebody in the room that's feeling like that and how might I then want to do something about that? And here now we start talking about real leadership leadership of self and leadership of others.
Speaker 4:Leadership is like charity it begins at home.
Speaker 2:We could spend a whole other podcast just talking about the contagion effect, which we won't for today. We'll invite you back on later. How do people get in touch with you and do you have anything special you'd like to offer them?
Speaker 4:yes, I think what we'd like to offer them is the opportunity to to participate in, let's say, the annual program. Please be in touch and we'll find a special for you. Everybody loves a special, so we'd definitely be able to do that. How to be in touch? Be in touch on LinkedIn, probably the easiest way.
Speaker 3:And just to say that the book is out. It's published with Rutledge and it will be out in June and people can pre-register in May on the Rutledge site.
Speaker 2:Great, so thanks, trish and Ian, for sharing your insights, tips and wisdom with me and my listeners here today.
Speaker 4:It's been a pleasure. I feel like we're only just beginning, exactly.
Speaker 3:Great fun. Thank you for inviting us. Thank you, Jerry.
Speaker 1:Coming up on Leading People.
Speaker 5:And if that's the case, then how well suited are our organizations or our leaders for that new way of dealing with uncertainty? And what I kept found and continue to find all around me is they are very, very, very poorly equipped to do so. We are still hanging on to the notion that forecasts can be reliable. We still imagine that we can plan three, five years ahead and in many, many areas, we're still extremely poor at innovating or innovation as a continuous process within any kind of organization.
Speaker 2:Next time on Leading People. We welcome Margaret Heffernan, acclaimed thinker, author and speaker, to explore how embracing uncertainty is the key to unlocking creativity, innovation and resilience in leadership. We've just spent time in this episode discussing how your brain deals with uncertainty, but what happens when leaders and organizations try to eliminate uncertainty altogether? Margaret argues that this pursuit of certainty is an illusion and that real leadership comes from learning to thrive in the unknown. So if today's conversation sparked your curiosity, you won't want to miss this next episode. And remember, before our next full episode, there's another One Simple Thing episode waiting for you A quick and actionable tip to help you lead and live better. Keep an eye out for it wherever you listen to this podcast. Until next time.
