Bad Leadership: The Need for Control

- by Andy Habermacher

"Leadership" is everywhere and has been so for many years now. A quick search in Amazon will spit out 108,504 book results. That's a lot of books and a lot of words on leadership. This plethora of books is packed with words, phrases and clichés inspiring "great leadership". And yet this is a conundrum: with universities and business schools offering ever more courses we should have hordes of fantastic leaders swarming over the planet. Yet ask the average business person and the answer is different. Everyone has had a bad boss and I have seen first hand the impacts of bad leadership. Trust levels are even more worrying: according to a 2012 report trust levels, standing at 23%, have never been lower! Similar results are echoed in many reports and studies [1].

We have never had more leadership advice and training and yet we have never before had such low levels of trust in leadership and in corporations. What is going wrong with leadership training then?

The answer could just lie in our emotional needs. In my recent book with Professor Theo Peters and Argang Ghadiri (“Neuroleadership”, Springer [2]) we explore the brain and leadership. More importantly we come to the conclusion that after more than 100 years of research in psychology and more recently in the brain we can clearly see what basic psychological needs we as human beings have. These human needs are prerequisites to healthy brain functioning - in business this means these emotional needs are a prerequisite to performance and hence to results. If your employees have the basic needs fulfilled they can operate to their highest potential (and be happy and fulfilled too). This is good for you and your company. In our recent research measuring emotional needs in the workplace we have come up with some interesting results [3]:

• 30% of employees have severe deficits in their emotional needs

• Only 20-30% have balanced needs, with the remaining being mixed and blocked needs

• Many leaders have well balanced emotional needs (but some are blocked)

What, therefore, seems to be happening is that many leaders are fulfilling their basic needs at the expense of their employees. An example is this: one basic emotional need (of five) is the need for control. This can be expressed as autonomy, freedom and the ability to exert an influence. Leaders in times of stress or pressure will aim to increase their own need of control but take away this from their employees. In terms of brain circuitry we can see two systems operating. One the reward and dopamine system which increases feelings of pleasure but importantly of goal-directed action. Second the stress system which lack of control stimulates. This will trigger powerful chemical reactions in the brain and body which in turn will have negative impacts on brain functioning such as inhibiting our executive centres at the front of the brain. In short this means that taking away control from employees lowers trust, motivation, engagement and enjoyment in the workplace not to mention lowering cognitive ability and decreasing ability to deal with complexity. Unfortunately this can also in turn stimulate a negative cycle by pushing leaders to further increase control to get a grip on the situation. If increasing control is not the answer then what is the solution you may ask? 

The answer is to, rather than increase control, increase the engagement of employees. Give employees a clear direction and vision - this creates security and lowers stress reactions and inhibitive brain functioning. Listen to their opinions, involve them in decisions allow them to create solutions and most importantly trust them and believe in them. That may be difficult for if your brain has activated fear centres and the negative cycle has kicked in it will feel uncomfortable [4].

It seems that many leaders do not have the awareness or ability to deal with this. They are unaware of the needs of their employees. Particularly in times of stress and challenge they are incapable of doing what great leaders do: trust their employees and enable them to really perform to their best. That is easier said than done because the instinctive human reaction will be to fulfil one’s own basic needs and not those of the employees. Control is a clear example of this and can be commonly observed. Thinking of the way a leader interacts with themselves and their employees is crucial step in being able to avoid the traps as above and tap into the potential of employees. This is the path to great leadership and is rarely approached in the libraries of books on leadership. 

A final thought: are you aware of your needs and your need for control particularly in times of stress? Are you decreasing or increasing the control (freedom, autonomy and influence) of your employees and enabling them to perform to their best? If not you may also have a problem.


1 Report quoted: http://www.interactionassociates.com/content/2012-building-trust-business-study-released Towers Watson in their comprehensive workforce study reports percentage of employees highly engaged as only 35%: http://towerswatson.com/assets/pdf/2012-Towers-Watson-Global-Workforce-Study.pdf . Berkely reported in 2008 low levels of trust http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/americas_trust_fall . Edelman Trust Barometer reported extremely low levels of trust for corporations and in leaders in 2012: http://trust.edelman.com/trusts/declining-trust/what-drives-trust/

2 Neuroleadersip - A Journey Through the Brain for Business Leaders. Ghadiri, Habermacher, Peters. Springer, 2012.

3 Results are unpublished. For more on basic emotional needs see “Neuroleadership” above or “Neuropsychotherapy” by Klaus Grawe.

4 See free ebook "Leading 100 Billion Neurons" for more information on fear and specific interventions on Smashwords or on iTunes 

The Love of Leadership

- Andy Habermacher

In my talk at TEDxZug in 2013 I spoke on a topic that concerns all of humanity. All economic systems, all political systems and all corporate systems. Indeed any system in which human beings operate. In short I said that there is one component all of these systems need to have to support humanity: the basic rationale for all these systems is that ultimately they increase the well-being of humanity (socialism and capitalism, for example, claim to help humanity but in different ways). Many of these systems do not exactly deal with this one component.

This one component is exceptionally powerful.

• If you have this as a child, your brain will grow stronger connections, you will have higher IQ and you will be more successful in life.
• If you have this component, you will have more friends and you will learn faster.
• If you have this one component, your brain will also be more adaptive, flexible and engage in healthy risk taking and exploration activities. 

But also on the negative side:

• If you don’t have this compnonent, your IQ will suffer.
• If you don’t have it, the synaptic density in your brain will be less (connections between brain cells) and even the neural circuitry of you brain will be changed.
• If you don’t have it, you will have fewer friends, trust less people and in turn be trusted by fewer.* 

We can see that this component is essential for the healthy functioning of individual human beings. At the same time all human economic and political, not to mention business systems, are made up of human beings and so this one component will become magnified in strength and its positive or negative effects also. This will particularly be true in a company, whether it be 5, 5’000 or 50’000 people.

This one component is, of course, love. 

Many may not consider love a part of business systems, strategy or leadership but that must be wrong. Love is the most fundamental human emotion right from childbirth when every single human being enters the world to a rush of oxytocin passed between mother and child. So indeed how can it not be a part of all systems in which human beings operate.

Of course we can reformulate love and its different aspects in many ways. If we look into the brain, we see the concept of attachment and bonding driven strongly by the above-mentioned oxytocin system. In business environments this translates into: friendship, trust and loyalty. These are very powerful concepts in business and every business person and leader knows of the value of trust and loyalty whether it be with employees or customers. From the viewpoint of the brain that is the same as the attachment and bonding system. In short love.

Can your business afford to be without love?

* See “Neuropsychotherpy” by Klaus Grawe for a look into attachment and its influence on mental health. Also see the (seminal) work of John Bowlby, Harold Harlow and Howard Skeels.

Trust in the Brain (and in Corporations)

- by Andy Habermacher

How important is trust in a relationship?
Conditional vs. Unconditional Trust
Trust in the Brain
Mistrust in the Brain
Corporate Trust

Yes, it’s important but it’s more than important, it’s essential - absolutely essential. There’s almost nothing you will do in life if you don’t trust it. Whether it be buying from a website, buying a car, buying new clothes, etc. There needs to be an element of trust involved - if you don’t trust the website to send your goods you won’t buy from them - simple. Now a few of you may be saying well, I’ve bought a car from someone I don’t like or particularly trust. That may be true but there needs to be some trust: maybe you trusted the brand more than the person who was selling it, maybe you trusted the person in the context of cars but not with anything else. This in itself is an important element of trust that many people and companies fail to use i.e. conditional trust:

Getting to unconditional trust is a high and lofty goal indeed - we often confuse this in business life particularly. Will we ever reach unconditional trust? We may have it with very close friends and in deep relationships - but in business? So in business we need to first focus on conditional trust and build trust around certain conditions i.e. that I can deliver that car in that quality at that time. Building trust here is essential. This is what business is about.

Trust is associated with oxytocin which has been shown experimentally to increase trust. This is important because this is a basic bonding "drug". It is what bonds mother and child but also friends. What is also interesting about trust in the brain is it stimulates the reward centers - this makes it a “happy drug”as well. Trust makes you feel good, it makes you feel safe, it will make you, literally, see other people in a different light. Though conditional and unconditional trust are processed slightly differently they are both positive.

Mistrust in the brain stimulates the amygdala. These process various emotional responses, most importantly fear and threat. So in short, mistrust is processed as a threat, as danger. This will have a host of negative knock-on effects in the mind: the rational thinking centres will be inhibited, the action centres will be subdued, and your brains monitor will be picking up more negative information than previously. Not a good thing.

The above comments are important because it who's that trust is a positive experience and mistrust a negative experience. More than that it is linked to our primitive friend or foe construct. This actually raises the stakes of trust in corporate contexts and particularly within corporations because if you have trust you will have a positive chemical environment and if you have mistrust you will have a negative chemical environment in the brain. In addition if we have mistrust, it means we have "enemies" within our own corporation, hardly beneficial for business.  What is more worrying is that according to a study by USA Today more than 7 out of 10 Americans distrust CEOs of large corporations. This shows we don’t have a whole lot of trust in corporations - which is a real shame. Remember just what this is doing to people's brains  - and unfortunately very few companies really have any idea how to change it.

The Importance of Fun in Business

- Andy Habermacher

In the model of the brain I propose to business leaders I always talk about the basic need for pleasure [1]. However there seems to be an instinctive desire to say, “We’re here to work not have fun”. Sure many understand that fun is a good part of work but only as an additional add on. It is not deemed something that is an essential part of work.

However, I beg to differ! Fun is an essential component of work. Not only that, if you do not have fun, pleasure that is, you cannot be performing at your peak. Obviously the concept of fun differs from person to person. And fun does not mean just having a party - that is the challenge to the business leader. But first let’s look into the brain and why I say pleasure is an essential part of the brain and of peak performance.

The pleasure system in the brain is actually pretty large and pretty complex (as is everything in the brain) - one of the first researched areas was that of the dopamine system. Dopamine is a chemical that operates as a so-called neuromodulator (that is it communicates between brain cells). It is released when doing pleasurable activities such as eating and having sex and can induce feelings of elation. Cocaine for example directly impacts this precise system. So far so good, however, if we look a little more closely we can see that the dopamine system circulates in the left hemisphere and to the frontal regions of the brain. What does this mean? Well for us in business this is crucial because the frontal regions control our executive functions: planning, cognitive agility, dealing with complexity and decision making. In short our cognitive processing centres are strongly influenced and driven by dopamine - dopamine is crucial for higher cognitive performance. And to top this we know that attention and ability to focus is driven by dopamine - children with ADHD normally have a dopamine dysfunction and ADHD drugs often target the dopamine system (Ritalin for example).

This is in itself interesting - what is more interesting is that recent research has shown that dopamine is not only a pleasure chemical, it is much more importantly the motivation chemical. Dopamine is what is needed not just for goal-directed action but also for actions involving delayed reward. Delayed reward means working now for a reward later. This is precisely what most business expect from their employees and need to deal with day in and day out. 

So in short the pleasure chemical in the brain is also the motivation chemical - this is a crucial take away for business leaders.

Are you having fun in business? If you are a leader, are you enabling others in the business to have fun? You may want to try it.

[1] Ghadiri, A., Habermacher, A. & Peters, T., Neuroleadership - A Journey Through The Brain for Business Leaders, Springer.

P.S. Humour in business has also been shown to lower stress & improve productivity.