Neuroscience: Positive Leadership Communication

Unlock the power of neuroscience to transform your leadership game! In this episode of the Gain the Lead Podcast, we dive into the brain science behind positive communication and how it can impact your team's performance. Discover how your words can literally rewire your team’s brains, sparking creativity, trust, and engagement. Whether it’s handling missed deadlines or turning mistakes into opportunities, we explore practical strategies to become the kind of leader who inspires action and innovation. If you're a tech leader who’s serious about leading better and smarter, we made this for you!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello leaders and welcome back to another episode of the Gate , the Lead podcast. I'm James, and today we're diving into the fascinating brainy world of neuroscience and positive communication in leadership. We've got some very cool science practical tips, fun examples and everything lined up. And with no further ado, let's dive in. So what is positive communication? Why does positive communication actually matter in leadership? Can't you just be direct, get things done? Doesn't that get things done faster? Well, sure, yes it could. And here though is the other side of it. Positive communication doesn't just make people feel good. It literally rewires their brains. Yes, science sciences, our backs on this one, when you're in a leadership role, how you communicate can either spark creativity, motivation, loyalty, good vibes in your team, and it can also shut it down completely and well, if you're like me, you're probably more interested in the big ideas and the positivity. So let's talk neuro association. Now, I found out about this topic, neuro association over 12 years ago now when I picked up a book called Neuro Communication written by the authors, Dr. Gerhard Bitner and Alka Schwartz . And I was so fascinated by this maybe the hundredth book I'd read or maybe more on communication sales and leadership that I called the authors after reading through it in one day and told them how fascinated it was . I was, we quickly became friends. Uh, I was quickly educated by them. I spent 14 days being educated in neuroscience, neuro communication and sales and leadership in all areas of life. And since then, that's definitely changed. A very big portion of the way I see the world and the way I communicate with people. And I'm very thankful to say it's really helped me become more successful and more peaceful in life. Now, neuro association is the science of how the brain learns, how the brain learns every single day and how it makes unconscious decisions. And these unconscious decisions basically are the gut feeling that we get, that we either want to do something, feel motivated to do something, or feel the opposite , um, or just feel like, okay, I'll just do the bare minimum, get it done and then , uh, stop when I've reached that. So here's what happens. One of the first scientists that worked out how neuro association works was called Dr. Donald Hep. He's famous for the heian learning laws. And one of his learning laws is neurons that fire together, they wire together. It's the way the brain learns. Basically, when we're born, we have a brain full of neurons, billions of neurons, and uh, there's very little in them. And as we learn, well, there's only one simple mechanism to learn. Things that happen together must have something to do with each other, right? So things that happen more often together must obviously have more to do with each other. So the brain starts making connections. Yeah , we see the face of the parent, they're nice to us, we're safe. We get food that happens over and over again and our brain learns. Parents equals food. You can also see that in cats and docs. Uh , you give a cat or a dog food a few times and it will keep coming to you expecting more food because things that happen at the same time in the brain become part of each other. They become the meaning of each other. This is where negative and positive communication gets very interesting. So as a child, we've heard hundreds of times, thousands of times, maybe even millions of times over our childhood, our young adulthood, and even as adults , words like, no, don't do that. Can't. And all of those words are associated to situations, especially in childhoods where we were then in an uncomfortable situation, we weren't allowed to do something that we wanted. We felt maybe put down, we felt frustrated. So the words no, don't, can't are all in our brain connected to loads of negative emotion, negative experiences from childhood. So when leaders say negative words, it doesn't just need to be no, don't and can't like any negative word. What happens unconsciously is that all of those memories get brought up into a still unconscious processing area and then connected to whoever's saying these words. And if we're the leader that say, no, don't and can't, we can't do that, we shouldn't do that, that won't work. Then all that's happening is the leader is connecting themselves to all of those negative experiences from childhood. And these words trigger in our brain mild to intense what we call fight and flight reactions. The more they happen, the more these words get connected, the more unconsciously the leader becomes part of the meaning, no , don't and can't. And the meanings of no, don't and can't . And all of those memories become part of what the leader means. And over time, months and years, that starts to make a more negative impression of the leader and generates an unconscious emotion in the employees like an unconscious gut feeling to slowly, slowly do less, be less motivated, be less creative, or if it's done a lot and with intensity that happens an awful lot quickly. 'cause our brain perceives these words of threats, even though they're not, we can switch this as a leader. Yeah , if we, instead of saying all kinds of negative words, use positive language, neutral language, always being realistic, of course, then every time we say positive words, the same principle is happening. We are being connected to the positive things in people's lives. Um, the more positively we're connected and associated unconsciously, the more positive people's gut feelings become to do the right thing , do more things, be more creative, feel more comfortable, have more fun, and basically deliver better results for you. Let's get practical. Uh , let's imagine you're at the beginning of a meeting and it's time for some small talk and we could do small talk and say, aha , terrible weather took so long to get here. Trains were delayed. Again, on a conscious level that'll be perceived, at least in Germany as a very common conversation. On an unconscious level, what the leader is doing is connecting themselves to all of this person's memory of bad weather, delays, everything. And, and all of those things are becoming part of the meaning of the leader. Um , and the more often we do that, the more challenging that is. If we switch that around and use these valuable few minutes that we might have at the beginning of a meeting for some personal conversation and we say, ask the employee what worked well last week, and they talk about successes or we say, tell like a little story about some success we had and then ask them about their successes. Or we ask them about positive things at the weekend , um, or we make positive comments about the meeting we're about to be in and ask them what they're looking forward to. Then we're using this time and instead of generating all of those negative associations, we're generating positive ones and they put people in a better space and a better place of mind. Now let's look at a different example addressing challenges. It's very easy, it's very human for us to default to saying things like, we can't do this. This won't work for us. Um, we've tried it before, it won't work. And all that's happening there is we're associating ourselves unconsciously with people's negative points, building that negative gut feeling and step-by-step, reducing motivation. If we switch these things around and say, okay, that looks challenging, however, I think we can definitely solve this, how about we brainstorm solutions or let's , uh, you know, evaluate the situation and the different options with the benefits and the challenges so we can make the best decision together. We have a very different atmosphere and a very different conversation, and we're associating ourselves unconsciously with positive solution oriented thinking. And on top of that, of course, being a very positive role model. Remember, employees will do as leaders do in very many cases the way we behave to them. They will behave to other teams, their colleagues, our customers. And this is a very important role model to take. Let's look at some other simple things that happen in everyday life where we could differentiate. Instead of saying things like, don't be late , uh, we could say, you know, let's all put in our effort to make sure we're on time, or if we're gonna say this isn't working, we could say, okay, we need to explore different solutions. Let's see how we can get it work. Or if a leader was maybe to say, Hey, we really need to take action now so we don't lose the lead, we can switch that around to saying, okay, now's the time to take action to ensure our future success so that we can stay in front of the competition. In the core, of course, a very similar message. The wording, however, can make the world of difference. The words is one part of positive communication, the way we say things, what we call the speech strategies, that's the other part of communication and the other part of positive communication, the scientific basis for this is a really cool model developed by Dr. Gerhard Bitner , Elko Schwartz called the Master Model of Emotion. What they researched was what drives gut feeling and interactions between two different people and communication to either want to respond positively or what drives people to get like this negative gut feeling to respond negatively. Maybe you can relate to this. Have you ever been in a situation where someone is talking, they may be sharing an idea or bringing up an argument, and while they're talking you are thinking about your counter arguments to that? Of course, that has a little bit to do with you. However, it has an awful lot to do with the way the other person is talking. The master model of emotion basically describes this core of our brain that drives us to either want to quickly, positively react or negatively react to things. And its history is millions of years old. Basically, our , the core of our brain, the emotional core of our brain, is there to drive our survival to make sure that we survive as long as possible. And historically there are two things that help us survive our position in our social group and how much control we have of the environment we're in. So on the positive side, our brain is constantly registering unconsciously, how much social value do I have and how much control do I have of my environment? And with control, we need things like how much choice, how much freedom of choice do we have? How safe are things? Um , how much can we influence a situation, build and create things have freedom? And from a social value perspective, what we're meaning is how accepted are we? How integrated into the group when we're sharing our ideas and how are others responding positively or negatively? And our brain is unbelievably sensitive to how much value and how much control we have in a situation. If we have it, we tend to feel relaxed and react positively. If somebody does something communicatively to try and reduce that, then we start getting these, these feelings that we want to counteract. We want to argument back, we want to maybe even fight for our cause or even worse than that in some cases. So which kind of communication leads to positive reaction? So it leads to releasing unconscious registration of control and social value in a conversation. Let's take a simple situation. Let's imagine an employee is late for a deadline. Now we might be a little bit frustrated and get the impulse to say something like, why are you always late with your work? And this has now happened again. Even if that's true, what happens there in the employee's mind is we release devalue because we're, you know, saying that they're not as valuable as, as we are or as people in the team. And because we're their manager, being in a conversation like that often leads to bad things happening. We release , uh, loss of control rather than control and freedom. We trigger a small to maybe intense fight and flight reaction in their brain and it just sparks them to want to justify themselves, come up with excuses. I had too much on my table, you gave me too much to do. All kinds of things like that. And then we as a leader, we start thinking, Hey, this employee is not good. They're full of excuses, they're full of people , whatever. And maybe even take action on that. However, the excuses and all of that in many, many cases are just because of the way the leader worded the sentence, right? Because it puts the person down. So how can we change that? I could approach the employee and say, okay, I notice a deadline's being missed very short. You had lots on your table and things were going on. This was an important deadline. How about you and me? We brainstorm and we come to an agreement of how in the future you can ensure deadline achievements. What just happened there? Well, instead of putting pressure and just triggering fight and flight reactions, what we've done is guide it towards the future. Creating a better future for problem solving rather than shutting down and ending in some form of blame and negative feelings on both sides. I mean, they can last for days as well. It's much more valuable to improve the future than dwell on the past. Plus, if you think from the role model perspective, especially if we're in sales, if we act like this towards our employees, they're likely to act like this maybe towards their customers as well. And that could cost you dearly. If they react positively towards the customers, sales can go up. Let's look at a different scenario. Maybe an employee makes a mistake. This is a classic leadership moment. We might feel the impulse to say something like, this was wrong. Why did you do it this way? Why didn't you just do it that way? Instead, we can change our phrasing to uh , see that , uh, didn't go as you planned. Let's have a look what happened. What can we learn from this? What can we do about the situation now? And uh , you know, let's take this as an opportunity to see what we can do to make sure in the future things run smoother. And really discuss that. Find out good solutions for now. Find good solutions for the future and make that a positive, positive thing for the employee. Because if we react negatively, what happens in their unconscious is we're now connecting ourselves to all of their negative memories. All of their negative situations, they're associating us with maybe negative things with their parents or other bosses and all that does the next time they make a mistake is generate this inner urge in them to hide it, to avoid that situation. And that can lead to much greater losses for you. Be much more valuable if people feel comfortably adding up to their mistakes, making a statement about them coming up with solutions, feeling comfortable with that. 'cause then you find them, you can all learn from them and you can do things. 'cause at the end of the day, mistakes are gonna happen. The question is how costly are there? And if we use positive communication and treat our people positively, consistently over time in all kinds of situations, good and challenging, we raise the chances that they'll be open, talk about them, which means we can resolve them quickly and learn more for the future. And this brings us to the summary. We all react intuitively and emotionally. Years ago, science believed we are logical beings that also have some emotion. We know now from solid neuroscience, we are first and foremost emotional beings. We use our emotion to guide us through life , uh, keep us safe, make us successful. And yes, we can also think rationally as well. However, neuroscientists like Eric Kde have shown that over 95% of our decisions and the way we act is intuitive. And as soon as someone experiences the opposite of being valued, being in control, they start reacting emotionally. They get fight and flight reactions, the part of their brain that would actually do rational and logical thinking. Most of the frontal cortex actually gets switched off. So their possibility to even think rationally under pressure goes down, it goes down rather quickly and can go close to zero. If we want people to be creative, removing that, communicating positively at the same time, holding them up to high standards, of course, qualifying them, educating them, using every situation where things don't work out as we would like them to, to educate, learn, inspire people and make them feel comfortable. Get them solution oriented and created the better results we can generally produce and it generates loyalty. People like to stay longer in a team like that, get a positive atmosphere and you end up with considerably higher output. If you want to know more details about the neuroscience and specific ways in how to apply it, 'cause it goes an awful lot deeper than we can talk about in a short and fun podcast like this, then , then please feel free to reach out to us. We're very happy to talk with you and see what might be possible until the next one of the Gain the Lead podcast. Happy leading and happy positivity.