The neuroscientist on how our grey matter works, and why we fear 360-feedback
Come to work without understanding how your brain operates and you’re only doing half a job. That’s the key message from acclaimed neuroscientist David Rock, who has spent years examining the link between brain function and productivity.
Director and founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, Rock is also the author of Your Brain At Work, in which he demonstrated how changing the way we communicate and operate at work can yield huge rewards. Ahead of September’s NeuroLeadership Summit in London, held in partnership with the CIPD, he told People Management how his theories should influence recruitment, assessment and status.
You’re frequently critical of the way organisations recruit. What are they doing wrong?
We hire people as leaders who are naturally very good at getting things done and achieving their goals. We don’t put any weight on people skills. The result is that many leaders are great at achieving targets but leave disaster in their wake. Research we’ve done shows that leaders who are strong in goal-setting and interpersonal skills are more successful and more ethical.
Most current selection processes in business feed biases. They encourage us to employ people who look and sound like our current staff. We also know that narcissists interview much better than non-narcissists. People don’t like to work for narcissists, and organisations aren’t as effective when they are at the top, but they are much better in the hiring process. The tougher the interview, the better they do. We need to test for leadership capability in a way that goes much deeper than a behavioural interview.
What might such a test look like?
Any time you have the opportunity to test people’s cognitive capabilities, you should. It puts you in a better place. You want to test all their capabilities, not just their logic. Ideally, you need a simulated working environment for a week or two. You learn everything you need to know about someone within a few weeks of working with them. But it’s very hard to get that.
Are you a fan of psychometric testing?
There’s some value in it. It can help you compare people in certain limited ways. But it depends more on people’s ability to crack the code than anything else. It helps you identify smart people, which is always useful, but what’s smart about them is that they can pick patterns in a test.
The other thing these tests tell us is that people don’t know themselves. There is almost no correlation between people’s beliefs about their strengths and capabilities as stated on a psychometric test and their actual strengths and capabilities. Asking people about their strengths is very ineffective indeed.
What are the most common misconceptions about how we use our brains at work?
People think the brain is like a computer that can just keep digesting things. The way meetings, PowerPoints and work itself are all designed reflects that, but it just isn’t true. You need to respect the limits of conscious processing. So if you want to change people, don’t try and make them change in five different ways – just focus on one. If you want people to remember ideas, try never to share more than three at any one time.
What about the idea that the internet and social media are rewiring our brains – is that fact or media-propelled fiction?
Everything changes the brain. If you sit next to someone for a few days, your brain is different. Anything that you do repeatedly very quickly changes your circuitry, as well as your chemical balances. Excessive use of multimedia puts you on the ADHD [attention deficit hyperactive disorder] continuum and makes it much harder to focus. We know that quite definitively from studies. If you’re a high user of multimedia, you have a version of ADHD.
You’ve spent a lot of time rethinking 360-degree feedback. How can HR professionals improve the process?
The first thing is to recognise that your sense of social safety or danger in relation to others is hugely important to your brain. It unconsciously monitors your status all the time. One of the best ways to create a really strong stress response is to be assessed by other people. Having someone do a task in front of a panel is really upsetting for them.
The five drivers of threat and reward are status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. A 360 attacks status, and it often attacks certainty and autonomy as well, because people feel they have no control. The end result is that it attacks fairness, too.
The whole process of giving feedback is far more stressful than it should be. A 360 should create an open (or “reward”) state. For example, if you let people choose the components of a 360 process, it really increases their sense of autonomy. You can also use a 360 for development, rather than as part of an automatic annual performance appraisal.
How important are pay and job title to defining our sense of status?
They’re both important to the brain. Your brain knows exactly what your place in the hierarchy is, and reacts differently to each person you come across based on that hierarchy, whether you know that or not. When it comes to pay, there is a direct correlation between people’s sense of procedural fairness around what they are paid and how they feel about their job.
And unfairness is a much bigger problem than we realise. If you feel you create more value for the company than someone else who is paid more, it doesn’t just bug you once in a while – it tends to be a constant issue.
✶ David Rock is appearing at the 2013 NeuroLeadership Summit, which takes place in London on 24-26 September. For details or to book a place, visit cipd.co.uk/cande/NeuroLeadershipSummit
✶ Jacqui Grey from the NeuroLeadership Group is speaking at this year’s CIPD Annual Conference, taking place from 6-7 November in Manchester cipd.co.uk/cande/annual