The Neuroscience of Communication

I’m often intrigued why we naturally click with some people and be on the same page and yet with others we just don’t see eye to eye and may as well be on planet Mars. Achieving effective and good communication can be frustrating and at times incredibly challenging.  I have seen many misunderstandings give rise to an environment that is conflict-ridden, aggressive or even passive-aggressive behaviours resulting in breakdown of relationships which if not addressed can damage morale and overall team performance.

New understandings in neuroscience indicate our thinking and behaviours are a combination of both our genetic wiring and learnt from our environment – both nurture and nature. This when applied to personality psychometric profiling is providing more accurate information to help us understand the differences and the dynamics at play in how we communicate and how we are perceived by others, both good and bad.

Left brain thinkers prefer to work with evidence and logic and will therefore make decisions based on fact and process.  They always think they’re right, after all their thinking is based on the evidence and data to hand. In contrast compare this to right brain thinkers who prefer intuition and making decisions on how they feel in the moment, on instinct or just on the concept of a great idea.  You can probably start to see why misunderstandings arise.

Then add into the mix behavioural preferences such as ‘Expressiveness’ where some people prefer to reflect before action, think internally and will appear quiet. Compare this to the opposite end of this spectrum where the behaviour will be gregarious, talkative, extravert, thinking out loud.  The quieter people wish the noisy ones would just zip it, and the gregarious types being uncomfortable with silence are frustrated with the quiet ones, wrongly, judging they have nothing to say!

How then do we go about working within a team that is able to debate and respectfully criticise ideas in a taking into account individual needs and deliver on team and organisational goals?

Instead of blaming the boss or other team members or even customers we should stop and ask, is the way I communicate and my behaviours part of the problem?

We need to be self-aware of our own communication preferences and understand the impact this has of how we’re perceived both positive and negative; to become adaptable and change our style of communicating and not automatically default to our preferences. 

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It Takes All Kinds of Brains to Make a Perfect Team

If your team isn't cognitively diverse, you're missing a huge opportunity

Creating a Perfect Team - Thinking out of the box

Have you ever wondered why a team of smart, experienced people aren't performing well? It's not owing to a lack of skills. More likely there's a breakdown in something deeper that precludes the group's ability to generate ideas, get things done, or perform at high levels.

This can happen as a result of many things, but in my mind, it really breaks down to two factors.

1. Does the team have the diversity of thought to come at things from different perspectives or is it a one-note band?

2. Even if there are multiple perspectives, does the team have the requisite openness, trust, and communication to allow divergent thinking and ideas to flourish?

From Emergenetics research into psychology and human behaviour, we know that thinking is manifested in four distinct areas--conceptual, social, analytical, and structural. We also know that every person's behaviour falls somewhere along a spectrum in each of three arenas--expressiveness, assertiveness, and flexibility.

Cognitive Diversity: The Golden Ring

Teams that exhibit a full spectrum of these seven attributes are the goal. We call it a Whole Emergenetics, or WE, approach to team building, and it is incredibly powerful in practice.

It's easy to see how this approach works--diverse teams have all the tools at their disposal. They're critical thinkers, innovators, and organized and empathic all at once. They can be accommodating or firm, process internally or be gregarious, and be peacekeepers or drivers, whatever the task requires.

Diverse teams have the ability to see every perspective and put the strength of each individual team member to work toward the common goal. Teams that lack that diversity are unbalanced in one way or another, and that imbalance erodes effectiveness over time.

A group leaning heavily toward one thinking preference may excel in the formation of ideas but lack the ability to formulate a clear plan and see the project through to the end. Or be great at planning and follow-through but short on ideas.

Another group may have the potential to embrace diverse speaking but not actually value or elicit all perspectives. A team led by a few driving, gregarious people may never let others speak, especially those on the quiet end of the expressiveness spectrum. Valuable thinking and ideas are lost.

How to Achieve It

Chances are, you're not going to just stumble across a cognitively diverse team in the wild. You need to be deliberate. If you have a tool like Emergenetics to uncover preferences, that's great, but if not, you can apply these tactics.

Ask for volunteers to fulfill roles. If you're a team leader, you can see inklings of how team members think. Ask the team for volunteers who can naturally bring a perspective of analytical, structural, social, and conceptual thinking to the table. Make sure they're responsible for the perspective. Do the same for expressiveness, assertiveness, and flexibility--you need representation from across each spectrum.

Put tasks and projects into a diverse approach. Any initiative the team works on can be seen through the lens of cognitive diversity. If you're having a meeting, ensure that you approach it from all seven attributes. As you come up with solutions, put each into a framework and test it against the full thinking and behavioral spectrum--does the solution speak to analytical concerns, for example? Is it resonant for structural thinkers? Ask this question for each attribute.

The potential for cognitive diversity exists for all groups and teams whether they are naturally diverse or not. In reality, unbalanced teams exist. What's important is that you as a leader are in touch with the team dynamic and take a deliberate approach to assigning work and creating teams. With conscious effort, balance can be achieved, and potential unlocked and channeled into results.

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Successful Managers - the Fundamentals

Newly promoted managers which despite their past success can often struggle with their new responsibilities. Its classic isn’t? You’re good at your job, you get promoted to the high echelons of management, and then find yourself struggling. I know what’s like having walked in those shoes.  The solution is straightforward, but before highlighting this I’d like to mention, the 5 greatest challenges managers worry about: sales, profitability, managing people, costs and competitors.

So given this, why is a common oversight frequently made, where managers focus on the ‘hard processes’ of strategy, targets and policies, to the exclusion of ‘soft skills’ of managing people?  Let me highlight the priority by asking, in your team what’s the hardest to improve or change? Is it learning new skills, or experience or changing someone’s attitude? The answer is pretty obvious.

‘The Sunday Times Best 100 Companies’ to work for have recently been announced for 2014 and it’s interesting to note the theme across all these organisations; namely, good leadership and management; teamwork and communication. It is these soft skills if applied consistently and in balance with the ‘hard processes’ make for a successful manager.

So, here are the fundamentals for new managers:

1.  Team Climate: as a manager part of your role and responsibility is to create the culture that enables high performance. This sets the foundation for everything else that follows. You can do this by ensuring people’s behaviour and attitude are aligned to your organisation’s values. Hold people to account for bad behaviours. Do be constructive and when needed be assertive with your feedback.

2.   Effective Communication: Engage all staff and aim to influence others. Listen, be in tune with what’s not being said. The grapevine is your barometer of what’s truly going on. Is your style of communication adding to your team’s issues? Are your team confident to feedback upwards? If not, why not?

3.   Build positive relationships: make the time and develop genuine rapport particular with others where it doesn’t come easy. This means building trust, respecting different points of view and holding judgement.

4.   Manage Performance: ensure clarity of objectives, forward planning, manage resources to ensure objectives are met; and communicate; go back to step 2.

5.   Manage inappropriate behaviours: get the balance right of holding yourself and others to account in an appropriate way. Without compromising trust or respect give consistent feedback that keeps others engaged, committed and motivated; back to step 1.

6.   Give Praise. Make it your mantra to catch someone doing something right every day. Doesn’t have to be complicated or over the top, a simple thank you goes a long way to influencing your team’s motivation and commitment.

And the final building block is Confidence. Believe in yourself. You can and will be a successful manager.

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What Keeps You Awake at Night?

Based on my own research what keeps leaders most awake at night are:

1 Growing sales and a full pipeline

2 Managing profitability

3 Managing employees

4  The Competition

This month I want to bring the spot light onto Performance.  ‘Management Today’ found that British Managers often shy away from having difficult conversations about performance – and if they do have to take the plunge, quite often make a hash of it.  However not managing performance more frequently results in:

·         Low teamwork

·         Conflict

·         Blame Culture

·         High staff turnover

·         Mediocre results

Is there any organisational practice more broken than performance management? Everyone hates it – employees and managers alike.  Very few do it well with the performance management programmes becoming organisation wallpaper. They exist in the background with little or no expectations for impact.

Yet despite its poor popularity, performance management at both an individual and organisational level is critical to business success. It can’t just be ignored.

So what are the 4 essentials to transform performance management so that it becomes a key contributor to business success?

1. Link performance management to business strategy

At the end of the day, you and your leadership team will be judged in terms of how successful you have been in achieving your business strategy. You need to measure the right things to establish whether you are on or off track in terms of achieving your strategy. You will only do this if your performance management system is clearly linked to your business strategy.

2. Clarity of Objectives – Critical Success Factors

The critical success factors are the key levers that need to be operating optimally if the desired results are to be achieved. You need to be able to clearly define what those critical success factors are and ensure all department, team and individual’s objectives are aligned on the same page.

3. Evaluate and Measure

Financial measures are the most common in many organisations.  It is equally important to have a range of non financial measures which focus on areas like customer satisfaction, productivity and innovation.

4. Involve people

As a leader, don't fall into the trap of developing performance measures in isolation. Often those closest to the delivery of the service or making the product have the greatest insights into what is most critical to success. Make sure you use that expertise to get results for the organisation.

At the end of the day, performance management is a practical tool and if done simply can be a real contributor to organisation success. So what steps do you need to take in order to gain real benefits from your performance management system?

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The 3 Eee’s of Leadership...Engage, Empower, Enable

Andre Villas Boas at 35 is the youngest manager to win the Europa League (with FC Porto). “Being a manager is all about emotions. I remember hearing about the Boston Philharmonic maestro whose biggest breakthrough as a leader was realising he didn’t actually make any sound himself; only his players did. He had to lead them but by harnessing their emotions.”

As a leader how do you win the hearts and minds of your team? A common theme I come across is “my team are lazy/I make all the decisions/what’s the point of delegating”.  However if you step back you just might see a different perspective.

Your leadership style is directly reflected back by your team’s performance and overall results.

Louise was excellent at her job and was recently promoted to management. She was fired up with best intentions and ideas to get more out of her team. Within a few months the team were disengaged, she was stressed, working longer hours and doubting her capability as a manager.

Her previous excellent relationships turned to mistrust, the team did not support her or the new ideas. Her boss questioned if he’d made a mistake in promoting her.

During our coaching Louise had time to reflect and see what was going wrong. The old style of management, control and command, is a fast route to a disengaged and demotivated team resulting in lower performance. There are times for this style such as crises or safety issues however, modern day managers lead by engaging and empowering their team enabling their organisation to achieve its objectives.

Louise changed her approach. She fed back to each individual what they did well, asked what were their challenges and what support did they need.

She set up regular informal one-to-ones; she learnt to listen and to give constructive feedback. She led with a coaching style of management, asking questions not telling, opening a 2-way dialogue. Occasionally Louise would fall back to old habits, however trust and rapport was now stronger and her team could give her feedback.

An engaged team become empowered and enabled to make better decisions; they accept accountability and are motivated to do more.

Invest in engaging your team and individuals. What can you do to empower them? Get it right and watch your team and the results soar.

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We think we're clever but are we really, Aristotle saw through it all

2000 years ago Aristotle wisely said We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit. So what does this really means?

Our minds think about what it is most exposed to. What most occupies your thoughts shapes your perception and reality.  Your mind will reflect whatever it gets exposed to. 

What are you exposing other people to when they look at your behaviour? Do you pollute your mind with excuses, self pity, lack of integrity, inconsistency, apathy, sarcasm, gossip, procrastination, mediocrity, fear, worry, anger? These all negatively impact your results. 

Your mind thinks about what it is exposed to all the time. What impact does this exposure have on your performance?

Sometimes we can get so caught up in the fast pace of the 21st century, new technology driving our lives but in fact human behaviour has not changed and Aristotle's wisdom continues today.

Consciously take charge and expose yourself to new ideas, stimulating conversation, and good virtuous humanity.  Expose others to your good character, sound judgement and your helpful nature. Expose people to the example you want to see.

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Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans

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