Leadership skills are like creativity. Historically, they have been considered in terms of “have” or “have nots.” You were either leadership material or your weren’t. You could think creatively, or you couldn’t.
But we now know that this can’t be the case, because at the level of your brain, leadership is a multifaceted concept. It spans from having expertise to showing dominance to rising to a challenge, with many stops in between.
Training your audience to see leadership not just as a proper noun, but also as a word with many different manifestations, is critical for ensuring that everyone in the room leaves with the belief that they have the potential to show leadership. They just have to discover what kind of leader they are going to be.
A Socially Intelligent Approach to Leadership
Although hierarchical leadership is often shrouded in aggressive tactics, it doesn’t have to be. They are many roads to achieving the same goal of good leadership that are equally, if not more, effective.
Take the phenomenon of social dominance. It is an example of a leadership paradox where outwardly, the person is independent, self-sufficient and values their own opinions and abilities over others, but internally, their brain is actually paying close attention and learning from other successful leaders around them, picking up on what works best and assimilating it into their own leadership style. Training your audience to be attentive to these subtle social signals, which can be so easily missed, can facilitate the emergence of this highly effective style of social dominance.
In addition, instead of being heavy-handed to accomplish this assertive control, effective leaders choose to employ more socially intelligent practices. They avoid using threats, they appeal to reason, and they use clear and direct body language and eye gaze strategies to deal with conflict. Although this approach may, at first, seem like a “softer” form of dominance, science has shown that it can be as effective as more aggressive approaches. In addition, it helps to foster the openness, creativity and empowerment that can be so readily destroyed by a more authoritarian stance.
Cohesive Leadership by Thinking on the Same Wavelength
Employing these socially intelligent practices not only allows leaders to effectively persuade, guide and influence, but it also helps generate a sense of cohesion between them and the members of their team. This cohesion can be seen at a neural level. For example, studies of interpersonal neural synchrony have shown how brain activity between two individuals becomes synchronized when they collaborate on a shared task or during face-to-face communication.
Research has also shown that an individual’s ability to synchronize their brain activity with other members of a group can actually predict their emergence as the leader of a group by facilitating their ability to communicate the right thing at the right time. This phenomenon further emphasizes the idea that a socially dominant approach, where the leader becomes tuned in to the mental state of others, can facilitate and reinforce his or her position as a leader.
Expertise as Leadership
Leadership isn’t just about leading a team of people. It can also be about showing leadership in one’s field of expertise, and expertise is ubiquitous. What differs among individuals is what they are experts in.
Although some fields of expertise are more relevant to work, having everyone in your audience identify their personal expertise allows them to see that they already have the potential for showing leadership and provides the starting point for helping them translate their most valuable skills to their workplace.
From the brain’s perspective, expertise often results in structural changes that fine tune the relevant neural pathways over time – another of the many examples of how the brain isn’t a fixed entity but instead is malleable based on experiences. It is also an example of the significant cognitive investment that is required to become an expert in a field through longer-term training strategies.
Leadership For All
While the hierarchical structure of an organization often lends itself to viewing some people as leaders and other as followers, the capacity for leadership is in everyone. The trick is to develop each individual into the leader that he or she has the potential to be, rather than casting a one-size-fits-all mold of leadership across the wide diversity of individuals who work in your organization.
Dispelling the myths of what makes a good leader, and instead focusing on what the human brain tells us about dominance, expertise and social intelligence, can help carve the way for ensuring each employee in your organization has the skills and knowledge required to become a leader in his or her field.
