Brain-based collaboration
Friday, December 10, 2010 at 8:00AM Cheaper brain scans make new research possible. It is now feasible to study the brain's reaction to social situations and draw first conclusions about coaching, leadership and management, if it sounds interesting please read on.
Photo by X Ray Delta One Flickr CC
The Big News
The social needs are treated by the brain much the same way as are the needs for food and water! We are social animals in need of social interaction, it is as important to us as food and drink - maybe that is why the worst thing we can do to somebody is to lock the up in a prison.
Social interaction is a strong motivator, a leader would do well to study this new evidence based research.
The SCARF model
David Rock, who coined the term "neuroleadership" has proposed the SCARF model in an article published in the NeuroLeadership Journal.
The model is built around the five areas of Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness.
Status
Status is about how we relate to others, when we win a game we feel better - our status goes up. Interestingly we also feel better when we run faster than last week, achieve a better golf score or in any other way beat even ourselves.
A threat of loosing status triggers a flight response, it can be enough just to speak to your manager to spark the defense mechanism. But at the same time, we feel an improvement in status when we are studying and learning - even more so if we are publicly given positive feedback.
Certainty
Our brains want certainty, we want to make a model of the world which makes it possible to foresee what will happen. We want the coffee cup to feel familiar, because then we can grip and handle it with minimum brain resources. It it slips and feel different, suddenly we react and mobilize all our attention.
In leadership we can reduce uncertainty by making plans, strategies and risk analysis. Even if the plans seldom go as foreseen, we still feel better about it - and if we feel secure and relaxed we can handle the sudden changes much better. Any martial artist knows that the key to fast reactions is to be relaxed and cool when attacked.
Autonomy
The feeling of being in control, to not be a victim, is called autonomy. Other authors call the same phenomenon an "inner locus of control". The more you feel you control the situation the more the reward centres light up in your brain.
In studies of gambling, we feel much more at ease with games we think we know something about. We prefere betting on horses and football over numbers games, we even prefer mathematically poorer choices if we can play on things we know something about.
As leaders, we should let people set up their own goals, organize their own workflow and learning curriculums - within clear parameters.
Relatedness
Our social group is very important to us. The question of who belongs to our group, or not, is crucial. We naturally like to form "tribes" and belong to "production", "development", "finance" or any other part of the organization.
Teambuilding exercises, meetings without fixed agendas, small action learning groups are all tools to satisfy the need of relatedness when building new teams.
Fairness
Everything that we perceive as unfair generates a strong threat response. It can be things like who got the latest cell phone, or which office after the latest reorganization.
As leaders we can increase fairness by transparency and establishing clear expectations in all situations. In a class-room, a teacher even might ask the group to create the rules for expected behavior.
Do you find the SCARF model a practical tool for your work? Tell me what you think.
Reader Comments (1)
[...] they make a good basis for scoring motivation. Another way of looking at motivation is using the SCARF method with its five components, maybe a bit more complicated but it includes the important discussion [...]