What can the brain tell us about how to build great teams?

Most of us have heard that the frontal cortex is the most advanced part of the brain from an evolutionary standpoint, and that this is the seat of our higher functions including planning, decision making and working memory.  But I think that one of the most overlooked functions of the frontal cortex is response inhibition.  To demonstrate what it would be like to be without this function of the frontal cortex, imagine a two year old having a melt down because something hasn’t gone the way s/he expected.  To you, the change in routine might have seemed quite trivial –a requirement to wait a little longer before getting your attention, a refusal to give in to a demand for sweets, a change in the time that something regularly happens.

Before our frontal cortex is fully developed, the ability to inhibit previously rewarded responses is, at best, weak.  As the frontal cortex develops over the next 15 years or so, this ability becomes stronger.  Training helps – people that find out the benefit of waiting for larger, longer term, gains become better at delaying their immediate responses. But this gain in response inhibition comes at a cost – just like over-using a muscle – if we make the harder choice too often, our ability to make the next hard decision become depleted.  This has been much investigated to Roy Baumeister and his colleagues at Florida State University, and they have called this waning decision making process “ego depletion”.

Their research has also given us great insight into the causes and consequences of ego depletion.  So, they have shown that ego depletion can result from having to control our thoughts, manage our emotions, overcoming unwanted impulses (like eating when on a diet), sustaining attention, and making many choices.  When we do lots of these things over the course of a day, our egos become progressively more depleted, and the result of this that we are poorer at dealing with difficult people, or demanding situations, and intelligent, logical decision making.  Not the best state of mind for your team to be in.

So, knowing this about our brains, what can we do to help? Here again, the research comes to our aid.  It has been shown, for instance, that being low in sugar interacts to make ego depletion worse.  So that a bar of 90% chocolate (which is full of flavonoids, and therefore great for the brain) or a bowl of fruit on your desk, could come in really useful in giving a team member a much needed boost.  Humour, laughter, gratitude and other positive emotions can help to counteract ego depletion, as can feeling that you are working co-operatively towards a social goal.

Call to Action:

• At your team meetings, make sure that everyone feels involved, and that you are all working towards the same goals as a collective.
• Introduce humour and gratitude into the meeting, and encourage this in the workplace.
• Congratulate the successes and reward the best behaviours publicly.
• Provide good constructive feedback so that people can improve, and feel they are working towards a better way of doing things.
• And, when there are lots of difficult decisions to be made, and you see your team are tired, be there to hand out the encouragement, point out the higher goals, and especially, be there to give out the chocolate!

Posted Thursday, July 7th, 2011 in Brain Friendly Learning, Changing, Coaching, Communication Skills, Continuous Improvement, Facilitation, Kaizen, Leadership, Leading, Neuroscience/Psychology, Personal Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.