Mastering the Leadership Brain

Management Expert Tricia Naddaff Offers Insights on the Future with the Leadership Forum Community

by DAVID CHMIEL
June 2020

What does leadership look, and think, like in challenging circumstances? Shared leadership could improve the future of complex companies.

You just finished a 15-minute, my-way-or-the-highway pandemic playbook on Zoom. You were sure it was just what your team wanted to hear. Now you are facing blank stares and deafening silence.

Meanwhile, another executive’s email inbox is blowing up with employee ideas and insights, the result of sending a heartfelt 150-word, where-do-we-go-from-here call to action.

You may find yourself on one side or the other of this strategy, or somewhere in the middle. Maybe you’ve been silent, terrified that your employees will see that you don’t have all the answers. Since pandemics seem to rock the globe every century or so, you can’t be expected to have all the answers. But it would help to understand how you will likely handle a crisis.

Tricia Naddaff says leaders’ responses, some more effective than others, most often come from learned brain responses than any lesson in business school. “If you are interested in leadership, I would highly recommend that you dive into the neuroscience space.”

Naddaff, President of Management Research Group, a global leader in designing assessments that foster a deep self-awareness and impact people in profound and meaningful ways with solutions for leadership, personal development, sales and service, says that leaders can dig deep to mine solutions for coping through any challenge. She served as the provocateur who led the Leadership Forum Community’s “Leading the Way Forward in Unprecedented Times,” an hour-long session on three topics she believes are central to ensuring effective leadership in the wake of a challenge like the COVID-19 pandemic:

The brain in crisis: Understanding what our brains experience in crises and how to help.
Leaders who effectively handle crisis and uncertainty
Looking ahead to Shared Leadership: Reshaping leadership for an uncertain future.

Naddaff shared a macro-level overview of the two brain’s warring factions in challenging times: The “Older Brain” (the limbic system, which triggers the ‘fight, flight or freeze’ instincts and other habits — in each of us) and the Prefrontal Cortex (the ‘most current’ part of our brain that does higher-order thinking — problem-solving, decision-making, will power and self-awareness).

She called the Prefrontal Cortex the “gas guzzler” of the brain because it requires hard work, self-awareness and a commitment to 360-degree review before creating a plan, which is diametrically opposed to the simple habitual defaults of the “Older Brain” responses in challenging times.

“If we want to be effective leaders and help support others who want to be effective leaders, we have to start from the interior,” she said. “We have to start with our own well-being. You can’t serve from an empty vessel.” That insight, and decades of MRG study, led Naddaff to review 22 leadership behaviors and 31 leader competencies. They identified three key competency clusters to review leaders:

Did they connect with people?
Were they credible and instill confidence?
Were they intellectually sharp and focused during tough times?

The research prompted Naddaff to propose the notion of shared leadership because, in ideal circumstances, peers could work together and work to be the yin to the other’s yang.

“Even before this pandemic, leadership demands had become too complex for any individual to master,” Naddaff said. “It’s time to bury the myth of the ‘Heroic Leader’ and find new models for the value of shared leadership.”

Naddaff’s presentation prompted spirited breakouts and true examinations of leadership in the 21st century. If you are interested in learning more about this session and others in the Leadership Forum’s Community Summit 2020 (a virtual event, to be held July 8-9) with its “Incubating Leadership Conversations”, an interactive, eight-session, hour-long series of Zoom events (held from noon-1, EDT, Wednesdays through July 1). These sessions connect global thought leaders and provocateurs to share insights that can help define and nurture the art and science of leadership to ensure the evolution of business and society.