Whatif… Neuroscience Informs Leadership? (Theme: Unlearning Leadership)
I was drafting notes for a post on neuroscience and what it’s teaching me about effective leadership when I got an alert for a post by Jack Ricchiuto on Substack entitled “What happens when leadership is based on the latest neuroscience?”.
That seems like the universe at work!
Ricchiuto’s primary message is that what we are learning about the brain is expanding our understanding of human behavior, motivation, and learning (you can read his post here). These new perspectives have the potential to upend some of the most basic assumptions we tend to carry about the idea and practice of leadership.
As I’ve written before, many leadership models are built on mechanistic assumptions - that the teams and organizations in which we work are predictable systems that operate like machines. However, those systems, much like our brains, are actually complex adaptive systems that are unpredictable and emergent.
Neuropsychiatrist Daniel Siegel describes the brain as an integrated system shaped through relationships: not a machine executing commands, but a dynamic network constantly adapting to internal and external inputs. Many of the expectations we have around leadership are rooted not only in assumptions about systems as machines, but also in imagining our brains as machines. When we recognize the complexity, the adaptability, and the impact of the brain, these traditional assumptions become less clear. I’ll highlight a couple here that align with Ricchiuto’s list.
Assumption 1: Learning is information transfer. The idea that how we learn is through listening, taking notes, and “absorbing” information has long shaped our educational and organizational environments. Under this assumption leadership development can often look like expert-led, short term workshops (with little to no sustained behavioral intervention).
However, our brains change through experience, not solely through information. Research on neuroplasticity from Richard Davidson’s lab has shown that emotional regulation is a trainable skill, but only through sustained practice. Exposure to ideas is not the same as rewiring neural pathways.
Annie Murphy Paul’s book The Extended Mind further demonstrates that learning is also strengthened by connection to people, to our environment, and to meaning. Learning is not something that happens in isolation from the world around us (or in isolation, like in a single workshop that never connects the work of leader development to the actual work being done).
Given this, leader development requires context (the work itself), social connection (learning with others), and time for experimentation and reflection.
Whatif… leader development programming was designed around how the brain actually learns?
Assumption 2: Leaders “control” behavior. The idea that the person with authority is responsible for something weightier is true, the idea that the person with authority is responsible for what others do is misguided. Leadership education has largely focused on how to get leaders to “motivate others” to “achieve the vision”. This assumption suggests that the leader is responsible for incentivizing people to show up and behave a certain way. This leads to micromanagers and KPIs that aren’t authentically connected the value the work creates. And, let’s face it, few people thrive in a system like this.
Our brains are very sensitive to threats. Neuroscientist Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory suggests that our nervous systems are constantly scanning for cues regarding safety versus threat. Perceived threats shift our physiological state and narrow our cognitive capacity.
Under significant stress, our brains lose access to creativity and executive functioning, which makes us less effective (and possibly less ethical as well). Stress shifts activity away from the prefrontal cortex, where our executive functioning and ethical reasoning live, and toward parts of our brain that operate from fear and protection. In other words, fear makes us less creative, less reflective, and potentially less ethical.
It’s worth noting that even a subtle threat can feel like a substantive threat in organizational environments. Our brain may respond to our boss dismissing an idea we’re excited about similarly to how it responds to threats to physical survival.
This suggests that effective leadership is about shaping the conditions under which people can do their best work. Leaders in formal positions of authority do have extra responsibility and accountability, but that is in how they help others show up to do their best work, not in controlling what they do. Leaders are designers of environments, not motivators of people.
Whatif… leaders focus on cultivating conditions rather than controlling actions?
There are many more assumptions that we are carrying that we have the potential to relinquish if we embrace what neuroscience teaches us about how the brain functions (and therefore how we function) at our best. But for the sake of brevity, I’ll stop with these two for now.
If neuroscience tells us that the brain is sensitive to stress (Porges), capable of rewiring itself through experiences over time (Davidson), and socially and contextually shaped in how it learns (Paul), then we have an opportunity to enhance both the understanding and practice of effective and ethical leadership.
Whatif…. neuroscience informs leadership? How might that shape our assumptions about how we develop leaders in practice?
If neuroscience is right, leadership isn’t about transferring knowledge or exerting control. It’s about cultivating the conditions in which human brains can learn, connect, and grow.