leadership
Hearts, Guts & Minds
In our current age of rapid change,
strong leadership skills have never been
more valuable. Many words come to
mind when thinking of an ideal leader:
rational, logical, decisive, single-minded.
But how true is this ideal image? The latest
findings from neuroscience would suggest
otherwise. In fact, new research is provid-ing
support for old ideas that great leaders
think not just with their brains, but with
their hearts and guts, too. Making the
most of these ideas is key to advancing the
field of leadership coaching.
MULTIPLE BRAINS
Usually, we think of our brains as a kind of
CEO, an executive entity at the top of our
physical hierarchy that issues commands
to subordinates below. But increasing-ly,
we are discovering that our physical
sensations and emotions unconscious-ly
influence the rational thinking and
decision-making of this executive. To il-lustrate
how profoundly this information
affects our thinking and behaviour, we
can think of ourselves as having multiple
brains, each of which responds to different
types of information:
Our left and right cerebral hemispheres
are specialized to perform different tasks,
leading to the idea that we have two
brains; our left brain prefers language, rea-soning
and linear thinking, whereas our
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HOW OUR MULTIPLE BRAINS MAKE FOR GREAT LEADERS
By Carlos Davidovich, M.D., MBA and Suzanne Hood, Ph.D.
HRPATODAY.CA ❚ JULY/AUGUST 2014 ❚ 53