Management Rewired – Not!
The disciplines of management and leadership have the most to gain from advances in the cognitive and neuro sciences that reveal how people perceive, learn, think, feel and inter-relate. Especially in the era of knowledge work where emotional quotients are more important than intelligence quotients and overall cognitive performance is a matter of competitive advantage, leaders must do what they can to understand and support the “workflow between the ears”.
And we have learned a lot about how the mind works but it does not seem to be rewiring our approach to management and leadership.
Why is that?
Jumping the gap between science and practice can be hard to do but there is no shortage of excellent books that offer a translation. For example, Goleman’s book on Primal Leadership demonstrates convincingly that given the open-loop nature of the brain’s limbic system, great leadership works through emotions.
Goleman and other have even developed an entire framework based on emotional intelligence for developing leaders that are saavy in recognizing, generating and influencing emotions in themselves and others. Yet emotional intelligence has bounced off traditional management thinking. The same can be said of learning organizations, multiple intelligences and many other attempts to reshape management based upon how the brains of people work.
I just finished reading a new book that does a great job at taking a run at this issue. Management Rewired by Charles Jacobs reviews the latest in brain science research and takes a very strong position:
“Many of the management practices we’ve taken for granted are not only ineffective, they actually produce the opposite of what we intend.”
For example, promoting logic over emotions can degrade the quality of decision-making and traditional feedback methods often make performance worse. No real surprise to readers of this blog but his explanation of the constructive nature of perception, mirror neurons, plasticity and other recent advances is a good refresher.
He points out too that the new thinking about how the minds work has not caught fire in business because the implications, although conceptually simple, are counter intuitive and often require managers to stop doing what they have always done. Changing basic assumptions and long-standing habits is very hard to do. Looks like the cognitive revolution in business is stalled on the traditional problem of change management. How ironic!
