Neuroleadership is a concept that has helped dozens of leading companies and organizations take advantage of the science of the brain as a leadership tool.
Key Details
- In a recent interview with The CEO Forum Group, NeuroLeadership Institute CEO Dr. David Rock spoke about how he pioneered the concept of NeuroLeadership.
- Since 1998, his company has worked with organizations to show how the intersection of the brain and work can give leaders strategies for improving morale and emotional health in the workplace.
- Rock says that his business can help develop better leaders and accelerate the transformation of company culture within two to four weeks, dramatically improving individual thinking, development, and performance to drive better results in business.
- 64% of the companies on the Fortune 100 list have sought out his company’s help, including Microsoft and Boeing.
Key Details
As Rock points out, the world has endured tremendous stress and uncertainty over the past three years amid the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, political hostility, economic recession, and global conflict. Businesses have been forced to change to meet the outsized demands of a stressed and depressed populace.
The difference between leadership and NeuroLeadership is that it adds an understanding of the brain to leadership tasks. “If you are trying to build a strategy and don’t understand the brain, you’ll create a complex strategy that is less connected and integrated. If you begin with how the brain works, you’ll learn to defer to things like simplicity, clarity, and coherence; you’ll think about how people’s brains process your strategy,” he says.
Rock tells business leaders that the solution is to “pay attention to your attention.” There is an outsized positive effect that can be had in the workplace by learning how emotion and attention work, giving workers flexibility and challenges in a way that gives them control and space to process their emotions.
“I’ve always been passionate about how the brain works. It’s such a no-brainer to apply science to the world of organization and change. We’re all thinking for a living, so why wouldn’t we want to understand the thing doing the thinking? But I noticed my personal interest in the brain wasn’t being applied in organizations,” he says. “There is intrinsic value in understanding the brain.”