Effective leadership and mind processes.

How many times have you been told, “Just make your team more productive?” Or, ” I don’t care what you have to do, but get them to do it!”

Unfortunately, increasing team productivity is more an art than a science.  For senior leaders, years of trial and error and a great deal of self-discovery have gone into creating their “style”, their demeanor with staff, superiors, and peers.  The most successful leaders have created a persona that is geared toward moving people toward the goals that they are strategically planning.  These strategies are not by chance; they are by design.  The question is, how did they, (and how can we), get to that point of influence as we lead and motivate our colleagues,  support our friends, and assume guidance roles in our families and communities?

I believe the first step in effective leadership is a clearer understanding of how people make choices, including the choice to support us or to lay booby traps along our path.  This means we need to acquire a working knowledge of how we process options and make decisions.  How your team and friends are thinking about an issue, perceiving, ranking, and understanding it, is vital to grasping how they will eventually respond.

Perhaps some of you are old enough to remember when NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) was the new big thing in the early seventies.  For many lay people, this was the first popular culture exposure to the idea that we could actually have input on changing our own lives through changing our thoughts and behaviors.  Although later marginalized as a “pseudoscience”, NLP played a big role in our increased general cultural understanding of the possibilities inherent in handling our thoughts with intention.

For many average people prior to this time, those without specific training or education in the field, “thoughts” were often seen as outside forces to which a persons’ psyche  was vulnerable. I remember listening to older people as a child,  telling stories about how they had been “driven” to do something by their wayward thoughts.  This sense of being carried along by a force larger than one’s self is, of course, typical of an external locus of control.

Rotter’s work in the early fifties on the idea of Locus of Control had created this useful construct to differentiate between those who felt controlled by life and those who felt they themselves had control over much of their life; those who believed in external control and those who believed in internal control.

The locus of control terminology eventually morphed into popular culture as  “internals” and “externals”.  Externals are explained as individuals who feel more vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of an uncontrollable life journey, which are external forces.  These people often use phrases such as, “get it while you can”, “ I don’t know what to expect”, “when my ship comes in”, etc.   Internals, on the other hand, speak and act with more direct speech, such as “Let’s make this happen.”. The believe that they have a significant control over their destiny, an internal sense of control.   The common analogy is to a ship sailing either under the control of a captain, or adrift in the sea.

While the model was inevitably  trivialized to fit many situations over the following decades, Rotter made a solid point and created a useful paradigm. But, it is important to understand that  the way one is socialized and acculturated directly impacts the way in which we see our ability to shape our world, our societal locus of control.

For example, locus of control in a tribal cosmology or world view is different that in a non-tribal community.

Even today, many cultures and belief systems embrace a more external position.  Gender and class distinctions also  play significant roles in the way people place themselves upon the loci. Understanding the paradigm of the locus of control is important, but so is understanding the diversities inherent in cultural, ethnic, religious, class, and gender socialization.

Obviously, there are also significant differences in applying this knowledge in a micro and a macro model.  To begin to change or redirect our own personal locus of control is certainly no easy process , but to do so for others is very challenging.  This brings us to the conundrum that managers, leaders of others, and parents also,  too  often confront.  Changing one’s self is challenging.  Changing the others’  self concept is mind-boggling.

However, if we do not engage with the locus of control beliefs held by our subordinates in a team leadership dynamic, or with our teenager in the next bedroom,  we exacerbate their feeling of powerlessness and their anger against larger forces.  Yet, as many of you know from frustrating personal experience, engaging with a very external personality can make one want to throw up a hair ball.  How many times have we all heard, “ That never works here”, or “you never let me”?

So what to do?  An important first step in finding a useful and productive leadership guidance style, is to understand a bit more than the average bear about how the mind actually works.

That big meatloaf between our ears is an absolutely amazing processor.  I am no neuroscientist, but from a lay person’s point of view, I find the whole thing fascinating.  Want to get a little taste of neurobiology for dummies?  I can highly recommend two books which explore in understandable terms some pretty amazing things about your brain and mind.  Take a read of Sebastion Seung’s “Connectome: How the Brains Wiring Makes Us Who We Are”.  Then, do make your way through Michael Gazzinga’s “Who’s in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain.”  Gazzinga’s text is slow going at times, but just absorb what you can and you will gain some exciting insights and also some that will keep you awake at night.

I certainly want to point you toward a wonderful blog right here on WordPress  that I follow, titled The Elusive Self.  GO THERE, now!  Go!.  But please come back to me.

In my next blog, I will talk about how you can begin to use this new-found knowledge on cognition, or perhaps you have only taken it out and dusted it off, to more effectively lead, motivate, and guide others.  Understanding how to use cognitive behavioral supports will open new doors for you as a team leader, mentor, parent, and fellow human being.

Remember all those early career supervision training classes you took?   Well, good luck with all of that.

The reality is that the complex unique human brain will steamroll over any pop culture  flavor of the month leadership schema, and simply leave you feeling useless and empty of ideas.  Your effective leadership and productivity ideas will grow in direct proportion to your understanding of what really motivates people.  And if you say money or chocolate I will push you out my blogosphere door!

See you next time,

Marie