Why Great Leaders are Unforgettable - and Bad Leaders Too!

Why Great Leaders are Unforgettable – and Bad Leaders Too!

You have probably heard the saying, “A truly great leader is hard to find, difficult to part with, and impossible to forget.” The same adage holds for bad leaders too, at least the “impossible to forget” part. Did you ever wonder why?

True story telling time. So Debbie (not her real name) is having lunch with a colleague. She has not seen her old boss in three years when suddenly, he comes through the door of the restaurant. Debbie quickly hides behind her menu. Her table mate is confused by her behavior. Debbie is frantic that her old boss, whom she left three years ago, might have seen her. She is relieved when her table mate informs her that he dropped his keys on a table and went to the men’s room. Debbie quips out loud about her temptation to grab his keys and throw them in the trash. Her table mate is flabbergasted when Debbie informs her that they have to leave the restaurant. This really is a true story.

From a neuroscience perspective, you might be surprised to learn that Debbie’s memories, and ours too, are actually controlled by the way our brains work regarding memory storage and recall. This fact adds greater significance to a science based understanding as to why a leader’s behavior is the singular most important predictor to a team’s performance. It is also a key predictor to employee engagement and individual performance as well.

What the Science Tells Us

A key focus of our research on human performance at The Frisina Group and The Center for Influential Leadership, seeks to understand the complexity and function of the human brain and its impact on performance in the relationship to how people respond to leadership behavior. It is why we warn leaders consistently to monitor and manage the impact their behavior has on the performance outcomes their teams produce and the experiential emotional memory, or EEM, their behavior creates.

We can have immediate and vivid recall of past, bad leadership experiences because our brains don’t recall memory with an associated time stamp. The hippocampus is the part of our brains responsible for memory storage and recall. Working with a memory pattern recognition system, when we experience a new episodic event similar to a previous traumatic experience (Debbie seeing her old boss after three years), our brain recalls associated memory like you reloading a document from stored, computer memory only without a time and date stamp on the memory or the created emotion the memory produces.

Jordana Cepelewicz identifies this process in her article “How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past.” According to Cepelewicz, “the brain might in theory encode time indirectly. In their scheme, as sensory neurons fire in response to an unfolding event, the brain maps the temporal component of that activity to some intermediate representation of the experience — a Laplace transform, in mathematical terms. That representation allows the brain to preserve information about the event as a function of some variable it can encode rather than as a function of time (which it can’t).” In other words our brains are mapping the event as a function of memory rather than associating it with a time or place.

This is why as leaders we must be profoundly careful of the impact we have on our employees through their experience of our behavior. The brain stores experiential, emotional memory, or EEM, with a greater degree of recall than mere logic memory. It is why when you make a positive or negative behavior impact on your employees that experience creates associated memory, positive or negative, that makes any future experience of you affect thinking, emotion, and behavior that impacts performance. Future encounters with you fires up the brain as if the event was happening for the first time and with the same degree of impact.  

This neurochemical stimulation explains why thinking about a former, highly effective leader produces such strong, positive emotion and why thoughts of a former, toxic leader produce such negative emotion. Your brain is associating past experiences of that individual as if that experience is occurring again, since our memories are not stored with a time stamp association.  Think about this – the brains of your people light up positively or negatively based on how they think about you as a leader. Their performance reflects their thinking. Behavior has to follow from the way a person thinks. You light up the brains of your people for performance when you walk into the room or when you walk out.

 Leadership is Neurochemical Bartending

This neurochemical cocktail explains why we continue to distrust leaders even when they make attempts to change course on past negative behavior. Unless a leader advertises that they are seeking a behavior change, our brain will not connect the positive change to previous stored, repetitive, negative memory. Our associated memories are only negative and only through repeated new positive interactions, and a new awareness on our part to record those new behavior events as positive, can we rewire our brain with the associated memories of the “new you” and not the “old you” leader.  Again, this is why we must be profoundly self - aware of the impact our behavior has on our employees as leaders. Our daily choices in behavior determine the quality of our relationships and are predictive to our performance destiny. You get to make a decision every day to impact people positively or negatively. The repetitive experience of you in behavior determines the level of trust you create with others. That level of trust will determine the level of performance you create as well. That choice is always up to the leader, so choose wisely.

Trust and Collaboration

No other aspect of effective leadership is more apparent than the loss of trust through bad behavior. Building and sustaining trust is critical to accomplishing tasks, achieving goals and creating a performance driven culture. This is true for any enterprise, whether for-profit or not-for-profit. In this way, trust is an operational and collaborative imperative. A lack of trust in any organization leads to below-average safety, quality, and overall low performance.

Influential leaders are acutely aware that trust and collaboration are inseparable. Trust and collaboration share the same purpose, and without trust any collaboration becomes a farce. After all, people - not processes, policies, strategies, tools or methods – make up the collaboration, and trust is critical in motivating people to do the actual work.

Influential leaders also know that trust begins and ends with their own behavior. Technical mastery, intelligence, personal and professional drive, past accomplishments, and vision are admirable and necessary leadership qualities, but they alone do not inspire long-term trust and collaboration. These qualities must be complemented by interpersonal and behavioral competencies. A leader’s high degree of credibility is the sum of both behavioral and technical skills, and this credibility is what sustains trust. Trust, in turn, leads people to support the concept of collaboration at first and then, ultimately, to fully participate in or pursue collaborations. Trust is the ultimate starting point that makes everything else work. When trust is operating at its best, then the collective intelligence and talent of people can come together in a network of performance capacity that drives goal achievement to the highest levels.

In the absence of credible leaders, people will still perform their tasks and abide by organizational rules. They only do so, however, because they want to keep their jobs, and they perform at the lowest acceptable level possible. Obviously, this response is a narrow perspective that produces superficial results. A collaboration that is built on trust has a deeper meaning and thus has long lasting power. It energizes, engages and awakens passion and commitment, even in health care, where many workers suffer from compassion fatigue – the stress, isolation, pain and apathy felt by caregivers in practice cultures fraught with fatigue, cynicism, and loss of personal worth and value.

Influential leaders are not just passive recipients of trust; they are also proactive givers of trust. They view trust as a mutual practice: They work hard to earn and keep it, and they expect and demand others to do the same. By displaying trust- worthy behavior every day, influential leaders serve as a model to their people and key stakeholder partners. For example, influential leaders spend time contemplating the qualities and qualifications of candidates for a senior leadership position. They do not hire quickly to expedite the recruitment and hiring processes, especially when the position has been open for a long time. Their goal is to find the most ideal match for the organization and its culture. Seeking to hire people who believe what the organization believes in core values and purpose, this reflective practice accomplishes two goals: 1) it lessens the risk of hiring a selfish, uncooperative leader who could undermine the collective success of the leadership team, and 2) it sends a message to the entire organization that the influential leader is serious about building and strengthening trust within the culture.

At The Frisina Group and The Center for Influential Leadership, we have experience with organizations possessing great potential for creating high levels of organizational performance excellence. Unfortunately, the one key ingredient for excellence, trust among the senior leadership team, was missing. This reflected in the safety, quality, service, and financial performance indicators of the organization. The impact of the low levels of trust ripples through the entire organization. Influential leadership is inextricably linked to the trust intangible. When a disparity or misalignment exists between the convictions and core values organizational leaders profess and the actual behavior they exhibit, they create confusion and distrust among team members. Consequently, without trust there is no influence, and without influence there is no opportunity to reach peak performance in personal and organizational achievement. That is worth thinking about today.