The owner of a graphic design firm worries that her clients have dried up despite her best efforts. Even a seemingly bulletproof marketing plan that worked in the past is now yielding crickets. What should she do? And how exactly should she go about deciding what’s best for her business?
Your problem-solving instincts may tell you that she’d better start brainstorming and making a detailed spreadsheet with a step-by-step plan. But both anecdotal evidence and published research suggest that taking a moment of inaction may be just as, if not more, important…
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The new world of work is making many companies have to rethink their employee reward practices. In many cases, organizations can no long provide a long-term home and must therefore find alternative sources of value to offer employees. For example, with either a creative set of benefits, or opportunities for faster growth. Traditional reward systems, especially those relying heavily on financial compensation, often fail to motivate the behaviors organizations hope to see, and actually turn out to demotivate when not administered properly. From a neuroscience perspective, core to these problems is the fact that reward and motivation are not the same. Rewards can be motivational in the right contexts, but simply offering a reward is not sufficient. However, building on the science of social motivation, it is possible to determine good methods for both predicting when rewards are not likely to motivate (or even demotivate), as well as what to do in order to make rewards appropriately motivating. By following the science of motivation, companies can more effectively rethink how they reward employees in a world where the whole company-employee model is being reshaped.
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Grow People Faster panel session from the 2015 NeuroLeadership Summit Accelerate Leadership
Organizations are obsessed with setting goals. Yet it turns out that standard goal setting does little to grow or engage people. You need stretch goals that do that. However until now there has been minimal research on stretch goals – why do they work, how do they work, and how do we best set them? This session explores new research that will redefine the world of goal setting and bring fresh ideas to a central aspect of talent management.
There is increasing demand for employees in organizations to change their behaviors quickly. Markets, technology, and business processes change in what seem to be faster and faster cycles. Guiding employees to adapt their behavior simply cannot be addressed rapidly enough with older approaches to behavior change, such as annual reviews, goal setting exercises, or pay-for-performance schemes. Rather, a much quicker, more flexible, and employee-driven approach to regular—as needed—change is warranted. A surprising solution comes from research into how people change their thinking. We review existing research about self-generated insight, and conclude that it may be one of the more useful tools in changing behavior.
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Thanks to our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and other devices, there is no longer a technology reason why we can’t be working every minute of every day. In principle, that should help us get more useful work done—we can use every minute for maximal efficiency. But while it’s obvious that our devices make us more productive in some ways, what’s less obvious is an important way they can actually harm our productivity: by interfering with mind-wandering, also known as daydreaming.
Characteristics like respect from peers, resilience, ability to inspire confidence and loyalty, capacity to make tough decisions, and the general attribute of being perceived as a leader can seem like elusive qualities. It turns out that these all can be influenced by a leader’s neuroendocrine systems (e.g. testosterone, cortisol, and oxytocin). Social neuroendocrinology—the study of hormone systems in social contexts—is showing a) that there might be an optimal hormonal profile for leadership, and b) that a person can influence her or his own hormonal profile in the short and long term. These findings hold across gender, type of organization (e.g. sports teams, business), and types of leadership challenges (e.g. negotiation, competition, cooperation).
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You may be tempted to write off some team members as never being able to manage themselves. They may be great at execution, but the level of handholding they need about what actually has to get done is frustrating. It would be ideal if there were a way to get everyone on a work team to be thinking about the big picture. Ultimately, we want anyone on a team to be able to prioritize appropriately for the many inevitable moments and decisions when their managers simply can’t be around.
When leaders dig into our Kill Your Performance Ratings research, many are eager to learn what a post-ratings workplace looks like. What steps did these organizations take and what are they doing in place of ratings to create a more engaging and rewarding environment? Lisa Dodge, Director of Global Performance Programs at Microsoft, will join us to share her company’s story in a Free Webinar. Discover why Microsoft removed ratings and take a deep dive into in how they transformed their performance management system for the better. Attendees will dig into Microsoft’s performance “before and after”, complete with internal research and case study data.
Rethink Learning from the 2014 NeuroLeadership Summit: Organization as Ecosystem
Work is changing, dramatically, and fast. Yet learning is barely keeping up. With all this change, there is more to learn than ever, in less time, with shrinking budgets, across virtual teams and across the globe. Developed in conjunction with CEB, we have found that in today’s digitized, just-in-time learning approaches, employees are often overwhelmed with what they are expected to learn. In fact, we are finding that employees can actually learn more effectively by learning less. In this session we will explore the key dynamics for what today’s successful learning organization looks like, drawing on both brain research into how learning happens, and case studies from organizations successful at driving learning.
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Evidence is mounting that conventional approaches to strategic human capital management are broken.
This is particularly true for performance management (PM) systems—the appraisal approaches in which employees (working with their managers) set goals for the year; managers interview others who have worked with them and write up an appraisal; employees are rated and ranked numerically; and salary, bonus, and promotion opportunities are awarded accordingly. A 2013 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management asked HR professionals about the quality of their own PM systems; only 23 percent said their company was above average in the way it conducted them. Other studies uncovered even more disdain.
According to the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), a management research group, surveys have found that 95 percent of managers are dissatisfied with their PM systems, and 90 percent of HR heads believe they do not yield accurate information.