What does your brain say about you?: Neuro-assessing leadership competencies

If you want to predict what would be the next big thing in leadership and HR look no further than marketing!

Many innovative ideas and technologies that marketers were first to accept, develop and deploy in the marketplace are later adopted by leadership scholars and HR practitioners for usage inside the company. Take Relationship Marketing. While marketers embraced it since the early 1990s, leadership has only recently introduced the concept of Relational Leadership. Similarly, while marketing has been obsessing with online marketing since internet’s beginnings and with social media marketing from Facebook’s day-one, digital transformation and internal social media have been added to the leadership jargon en mass much later. And don't let me get started on how customer experience programs proceeded (predicted?) employee experience ones!

Neuroscience is no different.

Marketing has been applying neuroscience for more than 20 years. In leadership, although the first strong voices for applying neuroscience appeared in the mid 2000’s (see for example the 2006 article in Strategy+Business titled “The Neuroscience of Leadership”), the field has not yet experienced the wider adoption of neurotech as in marketing. It’s a fact that many books (like “Neuroscience for Leaders: A Brain Adaptive Leadership Approach” from this article’s author- soon with a 2nd edition), and consulting and training companies (like the NeuroLeadership Institute in the US) emerged during the last ten or fifteen years. However, actual implementation of directly neuro-measuring managers’ and employees’ brain and body activity (and not just testing them with interviews, surveys or games) is lagging, regardless the increasing consensus that business needs neuroscience internally, as much as it needs it externally (see for example the January 2019 Harvard Business Review Special Issue on “The Brain Science Behind Business”).

The time for using EEG, GSR, emotional face and voice analysis, eye-tracking and other neuromarketing-related methods inside the company is now. Trizma Neuro, a neuromarketing and neuroHR company based in Belgrade, Serbia, working with people in more than 20 countries, is one of the very few companies globally to develop proprietary methods for using neuroscience in testing leadership competencies. In the last three years, more than 600 managers from around the world had already tested their leadership competencies with valuable insights into their automatic brain leadership styles. Variables tested are:

• Empathy
• Resilience
• Mindset
• Creative Problem Solving

Empathy is a core human skill which is emerging as the main answer to the much-publicized future domination of robots and artificial intelligence (see the book “Humans Are Underrated” by Geoff Colvin). Our empathy capacities are crucial for understanding others and create emotional bonding with them. From the three main types of empathy (Cognitive/Analytical, Emotional/Mirrored and Behavioral/Compassionate), we are currently measuring and contrasting the first two. This produces fascinating insights into which system of participants, automated or self-reporting, recognizes more accurately emotions of others.

Resilience is associated with our ability to recover from a setback. If something negative happens, how long does if take to return to our normal/usual state? Resilience is important for leadership due to the unpredictable and volatile nature of the modern business environment: bad things happen, sometimes daily, and leaders need to bounce back fast. In the lab, we test resilience through asking participants to perform a specific test while reading their brain responses. The task is progressively difficult and frustrating. How does the brain respond to this situation?

Mindset refers to Carol Dweck’s popular model of Fixed vs. Growth Mindsets. Since failing is inevitable, how people respond to failure is critical to their success as leaders. Learning, adaptation, flexibility and a prioritized focus on solutions are key elements of the model. We test participants brains’ reaction on various key elements of the model. Does the brain engage with fixed or growth mindset concepts? Fixed mindset promotes stability and continuation while growth mindset promotes change and flexibility.

Creative Problem Solving is associated with innovation and disruption. New problems arise everyday and leaders need to apply different thinking and solutions for their companies to survive and thrive. We give to participants Alternative Use Tests, that ask them to generate as many alternative solutions as possible. In the same time, we measure their brains for specific neural activity in specific brain regions that indicate the presence of heightened convergent creative thinking.    

We are also in the process of developing test protocols for other key competences such as Risk Taking and Focus.

Currently we are using these tests as a personal development tool. We measure teams within companies, such as top management, specific departments or talent teams, to assist individuals grow as professionals. Participants receive a personalized report with their own scores compared with those from their reference team. Our clients are offered individual coaching, team training and consulting to help participants improve their performance based on the neuroscience tests.

Apart from neuro-testing leadership competencies, neuroscience will also be applied very soon in a wider set of internal business issues: 

• Develop values and change corporate culture
• Recruitment and on-boarding
• Candidate-job matching
• Team alignment and team dynamics
• Effectiveness of internal communications
• Employee well-being and burnout avoidance
• Employee engagement and productivity
• Optimizing Decision Making
• Design brain-friendly working spaces

In their Spring 2018 MIT Sloan Management Review article, titled “How Emotion-Sensing Technology Can Reshape the Workplace”, Whelan and associates pointed to a number of both technological and ethical issues arising from the fact that neuro and bio sensing technology is coming to the office. Indeed, there are still ethical and legal concerns regarding employee privacy and consent, as well as transparency from the corporate side on how results are going to be utilized. Disruptive innovations are often followed by such concerns, which are key to a wider adoption.

Our vision is to use neuroscience methods, not only in ad-hoc research, but on a real-time, all-time basis within companies. We live in the Emotions Economy where, for the first time in human history, we are able to create emotional responsive workplaces that measure and report emotions and other neural states to people and management daily. Burnout has been just recognized by the World Health Organization as an actual medical condition. Furthermore, according to a March 2019 article in The Guardian, we live in the Age of Anxiety, with more than 30% of people in Britain experiencing anxiety within their lifetime. Creating brain-friendly and brain-based working environments is more important than ever before. China is already experimenting with EEG devices on high-stress/high-risk professions like speed train drivers and heavy industry workers, as well as school students to understand better how to optimize working schedules, brain responses and learning conditions (the school tests have been since discontinued).

Marketing is no longer the sole user of neuroscience in business. Our experience shows that leadership and HR departments are more than ready to embrace direct brain and body reading methods (in addition to existing brain-based surveys, interviews and games) in their efforts to increase employee engagement and leadership potential throughout the organization.

Are you ready to discover what your brain has to say about your leadership potential and is your company ready to create a more Brain-friendly working environment? Neuroscience is!

Dr. Nikolaos Dimitriadis is the co-Founder and CEO of Trizma Neuro, and the Country Manager for Serbia of The International Faculty of the University of Sheffield, City College. He is the co-author of two books “Neuroscience for Leaders: A Brain Adaptive Leadership Approach” and “Advanced Marketing Management: Principles, Skills and Tools" (both for Kogan Page London). He is a highly sought-after keynote speaker on issues of Neuroscience, business and society.