In the realm of leadership, understanding the intricacies of human behavior and cognitive function can significantly amplify your impact. Neuroscience offers powerful insights into improving leadership skills, especially for those at the helm of UX design teams. Here’s how you can leverage neuroscience to elevate your leadership:
Pause and Reflect: Your brain is a prediction machine. Based upon its understanding of the PAST you in PRIOR experiences, it predicts what needs to happen now and creates chemicals (dopamine! cortisol!), emotions, and more, to guide what you do next. Using the past as a blueprint helps the brain work efficiently, but it also can throw errors — because your current situation is not necessarily a replication of the past. And YOU, certainly, are not exactly who you were then. Knowing this, you can pause and assess if the way you are feeling and interpreting a situation is appropriate right here, right now. Your brain is no longer running the ship; YOU are.
Manage Your Brain-Body Connection: Your emotional swings, mood, focus, motivation, and general feeling of vitality are directly impacted by how you are managing your brain-body connection. Sleep, diet, exercise, exposure to new stimuli, and habitual thought patterns are among the levers you can pull to change how you experience your day. They have a direct relationship to feelings of stress, anxiety, fogginess, and more. You can take control of this by assessing how you are managing your brain-body system and making adjustments. (My individual and team clients do this early in our relationship to ensure they are optimizing for the work of coaching).
Cap Your Cognitive Work: Neuroscience reveals we’re capable of 4–6 hours of intense cognitive work daily. After that, brain fatigue kicks in. The impact: We make decisions that are easier, require less effort, and are, therefore, often not wise choices for ourselves or our businesses. This is why working 10, 12, 14(!) hours a day isn’t smart. More = less. More can lead to very bad decisions. Takeaway: Set realistic expectations for daily achievement or suffer the consequences.
Foster Open Exploration: We see from brain images, measuring brain waves, and studies that an open, exploratory state of mind leads to more accurate solutions to problems and a higher volume of solutions. Analytical problem-solving, which is more focused and procedural, is prone to more errors and produces less diverse and original solutions. If your company wants you and your team to generate more innovative ideas and solutions, consider how you might encourage this open, exploratory state of mind in yourself and those you collaborate with. It may feel at odds with other business pressures — like efficiency and productivity — but it’s critical if you want to foster creativity.
Establish the Progress Loop: To get the most out of your team, ensure they are each focused on meaningful work broken into a series of achievable actions. In neuroscience terms, you’ll be establishing the progress loop, the natural increase of motivation (fueled by dopamine) that occurs as you make step-by-step progress toward a goal. It’s the reason you hear the advice, “Break goals into small tasks.” It’s also why waiting to be motivated doesn’t work. And it’s why coaching does.
Connect with Your Future Self: If you want to get better at saving for retirement, taking care of your physical health, strengthening your mind, or brushing your teeth consistently…you may just need to get to meet your future self. Here’s a funny thing about people: most of us think of our future selves as strangers. And, when the 80-year-old us is an abstraction, we are less likely to invest in activities that directly improve our future state. Research shows that people who DO have a connection to their future selves have less debt, procrastinate less, have more ethical behavior at work, and have better health. Takeaway: visualize and get to know the future you (an exercise I do in coaching). She/he will thank you!
Embrace ‘Yet’: Start using the word YET. Tack it onto any sentence, and look what happens: I am not a strong leader YET, I am not good at taking care of myself YET, My team is not perceived at strategic YET. YET gets us into a growth mindset (What I can’t do now, I could do later.), reminds us that we are malleable, opens up possibility, and creates confidence. Tiny word, big impact.
For UX design leaders, applying these neuroscience principles can transform how you lead, create, and innovate. It’s about marrying the science of the brain with the art of design leadership to unlock new levels of creativity and effectiveness.
Ready to Dive Deeper?
If you’re looking to leverage these insights into tangible results for yourself or your team, let’s connect. My coaching program is tailored to help design leaders like you harness the power of neuroscience to become more impactful, innovative, and effective. Reach out to explore how we can work together to unlock your — or your team’s — full leadership potential.