Leading organizational change requires inspiring people to focus attention on new goals, behaviors, and ways of working. That works best when leaders’ behavior matches the needs of our brains’ innate responses for safety, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness, according to Dr. David Rock in his book Your Brain at Work. Since we respond to these five things as primary rewards, just as we do to food and sex, having them enhances our openness to change through the creation of neurotransmitters like dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin that promote the effective functioning of brain regions that cause us to feel safe, valued, empowered, and motivated and also improve our ability to think, solve problems, trust, innovate, and execute.
Conversely, when leaders don’t behave to ensure these elements are present, employees experience a version of fear of threat, the discomfort of uncertainty, frustration, the powerlessness of constraint, sadness, the loneliness of disconnection, and anger about being taken advantage of. In these scenarios, neurotransmitter levels fall, and the brain’s emotional centers light up with a threat/fear response, bringing attention and energy from the other areas that we need to perform, resulting in feeling threatened, fearful, anxious, overwhelmed, not valued, disempowered, depressed, and not motivated to work hard, innovate or connect with the person we think is a threat.
Align Leadership with Brain-Based Principles to create a Thriving Culture
When the company culture reduces perceived threats and amplifies emotional rewards by ensuring safety, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness, it encourages all employees to feel safe and perform at their best. As a leader, understanding, committing to, and becoming skilled at leading with a focus on creating these five key elements for change enables us to foster environments where we and others learn, grow, collaborate, innovate, and thrive.
Here is a roadmap for integrating these five principles into broader strategies for optimizing a performance culture:
- Cultivate Safety by Reducing Threats: Leaders who show humility and acknowledge contributions create a sense of safety. Establish open communication where ideas and feedback are welcomed without fear of judgment. Listening empathically and sharing credit reduces status and other power-related threats and affirms employees’ worth. This encourages creativity and fosters a culture of innovation. This approach contrasts with overly directive leadership styles that undermine status, leaving employees defensive and undervalued.
- Foster Certainty with Clarity and Consistency: Predictability is critical to the brain’s need for certainty. Provide clear and consistent expectations and goals and transparency about success measures, important information, and the organization’s direction. This clarity builds confidence, unlike inconsistent or vague leadership, which triggers anxiety and erodes trust.
- Enhance Autonomy by Fostering Collaboration and Empowered Decision-Making: Empowerment drives motivation. Leaders who trust employees and teams to make decisions encourage ownership and creativity, respecting their brain’s need for autonomy. Collaboratively negotiate expectations and priorities and clearly define goals to reduce mental overload and enable employees to focus on meaningful work. Encourage employees to determine their best path to success, modeling trust and curiosity rather than being directive about strategies and tactics to ensure people have a sense of control. This enhances both motivation and problem-solving/innovation abilities. In contrast, directing, going around leaders and teams, and other micromanagement disempower leaders and signal distrust, stifling initiative, engagement, and innovation.
- Strengthen Relatedness with Authenticity: Connection is key. Genuine and approachable leaders enhance relatedness by fostering trust and loyalty. Authentic relationships and openness to others’ ideas make others feel valued as human beings beyond their roles. Lead by example to encourage humility and authentic, honest communication, and conduct regular check-ins to deepen trust, interpersonal connections, and collaboration. Ineffective leaders, by failing to connect authentically and personally, create an environment of isolation, disconnection, and mistrust.
- Promote Fairness to Build Trust: Acting with integrity by creating and keeping equitable agreements strengthens fairness. Leaders who consider employees’ needs build trust and reinforce a sense of justice. Demonstrate equitable practices by consistently treating team members with curiosity, awareness, and respect for their needs, ideas, and expectations. Conversely, those who disregard commitments, expectations, and the needs or expectations of others foster resentment and weaken team cohesion and motivation.
The Ripple Effect of Leadership
Ineffective leadership, characterized by fear of punishment, directive control, inconsistency, micromanagement, disengagement, inauthenticity, and inequity, undermines employee confidence and team cohesion with fear. On the other hand, effective leaders leverage humility, clarity, empowerment, authenticity, and fairness to create resilient and high-performing employees, teams, and cultures.
Effective leadership must focus on achieving results and fostering environments where people feel safe, connected, and motivated to succeed. Aligning leadership practices with the brain’s natural tendencies creates thriving winning workplaces and drives meaningful, sustainable change.
