Duration: 2 Days
After completing this course, students will be able to:
Create your own unique leadership strategy by understanding how the brain links social connection, physical discomfort and survival
Provide strategy and leadership for your team by understanding the workplace as a social system, not just an economic transaction
Perform day-to-day team management while avoiding triggering the brain’s threat response during:
• Performance appraisals
• Setting and monitoring objectives for teams and team member
• Career development and training plans
• Challenges to authority and other interpersonal issues
• Enhance your interpersonal skills and work with difficult people
• Use self-management tools and techniques to realise greater personal effectiveness
How can I attend my course?
Course Content
The Social Workplace & the Brain
• Linking social exclusion and the pain response
• Social connection and physical discomfort
• Recognizing the brain’s “background processes”
• The learning process
• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs revisited
Leading in the Social Workplace
• The five pillars of leadership – SCARF
• Status
• Certainty
• Autonomy
• Relatedness
• Fairness
• Identifying your own leadership style
• Your shadow side
• Your leadership credentials
Dealing with Discontent
• How to deal with “difficult” people
• Types and levels of discontent
• The origin of challenges to authority
• Dealing with the threat response
• Stopping organizational values from triggering discontent
• Money
• Rank
• Respect
The Need for Certainty
• Identifying the performance impact of uncertainty
• Testing the limits of working memory
• Conscious incompetence
• Unconscious competence
• Reframing uncertainty
• Problem, challenge, or opportunity?
• Managing uncertainty to build confident, dedicated teams
• Delivering certainty through performance appraisals and objective setting
Autonomy and Stress
• Processing stress without reducing the ability to function
• Reducing stress by avoiding micro-management
• Presenting options for choice
• Time
• Organization
• Flexibility
• Facilitating a productive work/life balance
Relatedness: Trust and Empathy
• Dealing with the “them and us” reaction
• Team-work vs. organizational silos
• Building effective teams by re-engineering tasks to avoid a threat response
Playing Fair
• Fairness and the brain’s limbic system
• How the brain deals with fairness
• Encouraging trust and collaboration
• Demonstrating fairness
• Transparency
• Information sharing
• Setting and monitoring achievable objectives
• Creating the career development environment
Using SCARF at work
• Becoming attentive to the concerns of others
• Creating a “low threat” environment
• Minimizing uncertainty
• Maximizing autonomy
• Applying the SCARF model to yourself
Dealing with and Implementing Change
• The neuroscience of change
• Mitigating potential negative effects of organizational change
• Types of Change
• Individual
• Team
• Organizational
• Barriers to Change
• “Silo” mentality
• “Not invented here”
• “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM)
• Change is hard: the origin of the “social workplace”
• The neurology of change
• Cognitive science and change
The Pain of Change
• Working memory: the “holding area”
• New information vs. routine and habit
• High vs. low energy thinking
• Detecting errors: Expectation vs. reality
• Overcoming the pain of change
Theories of Motivation
• Behaviorism
• Herzberg’s theory of Motivation and
• Hygiene: “Carrot & Stick”
• Why incentives fail
• Humanism
• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
• “Person centered” motivation
The Power of Attentional Focus
• The human brain as a quantum environment
• Rewiring your brain to deal with change
• Reshaping neural connections with attention and focus
• Causing physiological change via specialization
Expectation and Reality
• Examining your mental maps
• Visual
• Auditory
• Kinesthetic
• Achieving rapid change by reconfiguring mental maps
• Ownership: The key to overcoming the brain’s resistance to change
Achieving Personal Change
• Self-management and personal change
• Using attention density for personal change
• Modeling mindful change
• Mindful change in practice
• Positively focusing attention
• Employing broad goals
• Engaging the “victims of change”
• Concentrating on insights
• Your personal change strategy