BOOK REVIEWS
Quiet Leadership
David Rock is a legend in the field of neuroleadership. This book is a distillation of his in-depth research and deep experience.
Quiet leadership by david rock
WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT
This is a user manual for the brain. But, there’s a twist - it’s not a user manual for YOUR brain. It’s a user manual for everyone else’s brain. We know that everyone thinks differently. Quiet Leadership is a guide to understanding how people think, and more importantly, that only you thinks the way you do. This is a fact that is hard to recognise, and we tend to overlook it most of the time. David Rock draws out all the ways that fact affects our interactions with other people, and gives some guidelines for recognising and adapting your interactions with people who aren’t you.
FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS:
1. When we are trying to help a colleague think anything through, we make the unconscious assumption that the other person’s brain works the same as ours. So we input their problem into our brain, see the connections our brain would make to solve this problem, and spit out the solution that would work for us. We then tell people what we would do and are convinced it’s what they should do.
2. Diversity isn’t important only because it’s the right way to grow as an organisation. If you need a transactional justification, remember that the different wiring of other people’s brains means they see things from a fundamentally different position, and therefore will bring value that you could never have contributed.
3. You can’t advise someone to get out of a problem you didn’t advise them into. You cannot form the neural pathways in someone else’s brain that are needed for them to solve a problem. Instead, you need to help them think through it themselves, and let their brain forge the connections needed to arrive at a solution.
4. Negative feedback is easy for people to give, and hard for people to receive. Positive feedback is hard to deliver - we tend to overlook those areas where people are performing well - and it has an uplifting impact on people’s performance. Positive feedback is more powerful, and more useful, than negative feedback.
5. Email is not a good form of communication where emotions are involved. You have no way at all of knowing how the message will be interpreted.
THINGS TO GUIDE A NEW LEADER:
Challenging people’s contributions, rather than their thinking, is a challenge to their social status. This is integrated mentally as an attack, and they will defend their position rather than concede to the attack. Determining how the contribution was determined as appropriate, and altering the path from through to action, will avoid the challenge and the automatic defence.
THINGS TO REMIND AN EXPERIENCED LEADER:
People usually know when they’ve made a mistake. They can deliver that feedback to themselves. Leaders need to recognise when their team are already in a place to improve, and help them move on from there. Offering another critique on the past performance helps no one. Instead, focus on what was learned. This reinforces the mental map that people develop to avoid the mistake in the future, and increases the chances of not repeating a mistake.
THE QUOTE I’D TWEET:
If we want people to think better, let them do all the thinking, then help them think.
3 THINGS TO PUT INTO PRACTICE:
1. Stop critiquing your team’s performance. Focus instead on what was learned, and reinforcing the positive aspects of performance.
2. If your email is more than five sentences, use another form of communication.
3. Use visual metaphors to describe problems. This helps offset the difference between your approach to a problem, and someone else’s. You can both build new mental models to interpret the issues, and to develop solutions from a common understanding.
Inspired reading
The Good Listener by Hugh Mackay
LINK TO BUY
Your Brain at Work
This book is an absolute must for anyone looking to improve their knowledge about why we act the way we act and do the things we do. Rock’s SCARF model is something every leader should keep in mind.
YOUR BRAIN AT WORK BY DAVID ROCK
WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT
David Rock takes the reader on several journeys through their own neuro-circuitry to discover how our brains deal with the world around them. There are a plethora of insights in here, from the limits of working memory, to the physical effects of emotional events. David Rock uses a narrative to draw together a framework of the five things that are most important to us in life - Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness. This SCARF model can be applied to every interaction we have in life.
FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS:
1. The SCARF model. We instinctively move towards rewards and away from threats - but the away reponse is far stronger than the toward response. We will move away from threats to our relative status, for example. The components of the model could be five takeaways and a reader will have gained so much from the book.
2. The usefulness of working memory, and how distractions affect our ability to concentrate. Spoiler: you can’t multitask very well.
3. Everything you perceive is filtered before you absorb it. You have non-conscious filters that determine how you respond to everything around you without you being aware of it - but you can make a decision about your actions that overrides your initial responses.
4. We are constantly affected by - and affecting - the emotions of those around us. We unconsciously mirror the perceived emotions of others in a group. You can use this to help lift a tense mood.
5. Emotional pain is physical pain, and emotional threats are physical threats. We don’t have separate neural pathways to deal with pain. Sticks and stones may break my bones, and words will hurt too, using the same brain chemistry and neural networks as the physical injuries.
THINGS TO GUIDE A NEW LEADER:
Remember that a threat to status - me big, you small - is perceived by our brain as a physical danger. Our cognitive processes close down in order to prepare for a fight or to flee. If you start a conversation in a manner that highlights a difference in status, it’s already going to be an uphill battle. The words “can I give you some feedback” will provoke a reaction that makes the recipient anxious.
THINGS TO REMIND AN EXPERIENCED LEADER:
Advising people out of a problem is rarely as effective as we want it to be - or expect it to be. Our individual perception of problems, our desire for autonomy, and a desire to be right all combine to undermine the effectiveness of advice-giving. Instead, we are better off helping people solve their own problems, even though it’s rarely easy to do. It’s hard to avoid giving advice because it’s so easy, and our brains are hard wired for ease over effective.
THE QUOTE I’D TWEET:
A feeling of being less than other people activates the same brain regions as physical pain.
3 THINGS TO PUT INTO PRACTICE:
1. Remind yourself often of the SCARF model. People will naturally move away from any perceived threat to status, so if you want real engagement with others, reinforce their sense of importance and bolster their self-worth.
2. This book explains why Tim Ferriss’s ‘fear-setting’ works so well. Our brains are prediction engines, and fear of the unknown threatens us. By giving voice to our fears and acknowledging them, we can decrease uncertainty and dampen our ‘away’ response. Google fear setting for more.
3. Find a way to focus on one thing at a time. Distractions literally make you dumber. You can’t multi-task, and the dopamine hit from your phone is making your decisions questionable.
INSPIRED READING
Quiet Leadership by David Rock. This book was so good, I had to read his other one!
Link to Buy
Turn the ship around!
This is one of the best books I’ve read as a practitioner’s guide for doing leadership. It challenges many of the assumptions we tend to make, especially about followers.
Turn the ship around! By L. David Marquet
WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT
This might be one of the best books about leadership I’ve read in along time. It is the thoughts of a US Navy submarine commander who dared to take a different approach to leading a nuclear submarine as parent of the US fleet. The book describes the different approach taken, what worked about it and why it worked. This is a practitioner’s guide to leadership.
FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS:
We tend to operate from a paradigm of leader-follower. If we adopt a paradigm that there are no followers, only leaders, it shapes a new way of approaching our role.
If we link performance of an organisation to the leader, we forgo the opportunity to develop a long-term, sustainable platform of excellence. It can’t be a cult of personality for long term success.
Performance follows measurement. If you measure success by the number of mistakes, then all you’ll get is a culture of mistake avoidance and adherence to regulations.
We tend to act as though passing on information is the same as having someone act on that information. Rather than just passively taking information, challenge your team to interact. Rather than having a presentation, hold a question session, where everyone needs to prepare - because they know they are going to be engaged.
Think deeply about the questions you ask. Are you asking to be heard, or asking so that you can hear? If you already know the answer, don’t ask the question.
THINGS TO GUIDE A NEW LEADER:
The best takeaway from this book for a new leader - and there are MANY - is that the best way to lead is to treat everyone in the team the way you would want to be treated in their shoes. Think about the times you were overlooked or not trusted, when you knew you were ready to step up. Then give your team the opportunity to step up. If you treat people like followers - not leaders - then when they are in charge, the only pattern of learning they have to fall back on is as a follower.
THINGS TO REMIND AN EXPERIENCED LEADER:
The most poignant reminder for an experienced leader might well be that you can’t empower a team from the top. It’s an oxymoron - if you have to empower them, then you have the power, not them. Don’t empower; delegate and trust. And engage with your people at every level.
THE QUOTE I’D TWEET:
People who are treated as followers treat others as followers when it’s their turn to lead. A vast untapped human potential is lost as a result of treating people as followers.
3 THINGS TO PUT INTO PRACTICE:
Stop briefing people. Ask questions instead.
Treat your team like leaders. Expect them to behave like leaders.
Engage with everyone on the team. If you don’t know their job - ask them.
INSPIRED READING
The Language of Leadership by L. David Marquet.
LINK TO BUY
Neuroscience for leadership
This book takes the most complex organisation in the universe - the human brain - and explains how it relates to leadership. It explains both the details, and the concepts, for how and why leadership works the way it does in our brains.
NUEROSCIENCE FOR LEADERSHIP: HARNESSING THE BRAIN GAIN ADVANTAGE
By T. Swart, Kitty Chisholm and Paul Brown
WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT
This book is a deep dive into the science behind how our brains react to leadership. It looks at the brain in depth, from the molecular level of neurotransmitters, the physical areas of the brain and how it all evolved to act as a leader of follower. It is not a textbook on chemicals in the brain; far from it. The authors have done a fantastic job of taking a detailed topic and explaining how is can be practically applied by any leader.
FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS:
Trust is fundamental to leadership, because it is fundamental to interpersonal relationships.
The brain can be compared to an organisation, with higher level functions requiring more resources and having more control over outputs, while routine processes are handled easily - until something goes wrong.
Our brains have evolved to prioritise the negative in any situation, so we need to clearly communicate when we are trying to make a positive change.
if a brain can’t find meaning, it will construct meaning. Be careful what you might accidentally construe.
Emotions are not a bad thing. They are critical to motivation and meaning, and will enhance a leader’s communications.
THINGS TO GUIDE A NEW LEADER:
The brain looks for shortcuts. Be aware of your biases and mental gaps when you think you understand a complex situation.
Change is perceived by our brain as bad. You need to influence others to show why it isn’t.
We trust our own experience more than we trust external messaging. This makes it hard to simply explain a change and expect engagement.
THINGS TO REMIND AN EXPERIENCED LEADER:
Communication occurs at every level of your brain. Be aware of the message you send when you think you aren’t sending a message.
If you aren’t aware of your values, you can’t communicate them. This means you can’t align them to your organisation, or align others to your values.
Theory isn’t enough. To improve as leader takes deliberate practice.
THE QUOTE I’D TWEET:
“We do not like the word follower. It gives the wrong impression, implying that the leader is in front, forging one path, and the rest are behind.”
3 THINGS TO PUT INTO PRACTICE:
Trust my stories, and develop ones for expressing what’s important to me. Stories are influential at the most fundamental level of our brains.
Be clear. Subtlety and inference are a sure way to have someone construct a meaning I didn’t mean to impart.
Don’t downplay my emotions. Use them to connect and influence, but be aware of the fact they can have through mirroring.
INSPIRED READING
Your Brain at Work by David Rock.