KEY POINTS:
Learning a new job, improving confidence or increasing sales can be made easier by paying attention to a particular way in which our brains operate, says David Rock, CEO of Results Coaching Systems and author of Quiet Leadership.
"You actually can't fix a weakness. All you can do is grow another strength. If you're not confident, you can't fix that confidence. You can't get rid of the wiring that says you're not confident. What you can do is build other wiring that compensates and gets around it."
As a coach in New York, Rock studied hundreds of coaching sessions and says the key to learning and changing is facilitating new connections in your brain.
"It really is impossible to fix people in any way. You can only grow them in ways that reduce the problem."
But in some ways the brain is working against us. At a recent book launch in Auckland, Rock said the brain is attracted to problems and attuned to always examine what is wrong with us.
"If you ask 100 people to write about all their problems they'll write pages. If you ask them to write about their strengths and what they're good at, people struggle to write a couple of lines."
Rock says this is why traditional management styles are not as effective as what he calls "quiet leadership".
"Where you put your attention, you create more connections in the brain. Let's take a salesperson. They don't have confidence. By drilling down to the centre of their lack of confidence, you can't replace the component part. What happens here is people actually become more aware of their problem and it doesn't facilitate change. It often does just the opposite."
If you tell an employee they've done a terrible job, they will often argue with you and resist you. But Rock suggests asking people what their objectives were and how close they think they came to them.
"If you want to facilitate improved performance, you have to ask people about the habits they've developed in the last year and then ask them about the habits that they'd like to develop in the year ahead and find out how to help them to develop those new habits to become more successful."
The answers they generate will be more valuable than anything you could have told them because the only real answers must come from within.
"The brain loves to make connections. When we make a new connection, we're energised. If someone else makes a connection and tells us what to do then we actually resist it. It feels like a threat."
The answer of how to get people to do what you want them to do does not lie with the carrot and stick approach.
"We've been working off a model that is outdated - where the leader had all the answers and the people should just follow the system. That's not the case anymore."
Rock's research found that even modern managers are effective less than five per cent of the time. When things aren't working, recognise that something needs to change and ask the individual what they need to do to improve, he says.
"If you have a sales person struggling to sell or a manager struggling to hire the right staff, just offering them more money or trying to punish them if they don't perform, is not what's needed. It's an extremely blunt instrument."
Quiet leaders, as Rock says, are not hands-off leaders. They will set really clear objectives and will hold people to them.
"It can be a matter of telling three people around you that you're trying to build new habits and asking them to notice when you do certain things and set some targets each week around that."
From a scientific point of view, it's about forming new connections in the brain. Rock says effective coaching creates new wiring to cope with new behaviours.
"If you think about someone who has had a technical job and now they need to manage people, the hard wiring that they've developed to be a great technician is no longer what they need. They need new wiring. They need to develop completely new habits. What that activity involves is the creation of long-term hard-wired patterns in the brain. None of those patterns become possible unless there is a new connection across the brain."
One example of such a connection is learning to drive on the right hand side of the road while visiting overseas. At first it can be difficult but soon becomes second nature.
"We start to hard-wire things quite quickly. What happens is we don't stick at something long enough. The process is faster than we think. It's not that hard to create new wiring."
But Rock emphasises that this new wiring must come from within and not be imposed by someone else.
"Everyone's brain in incredibly different and what you think is the answer for someone is really just what your brain would do which has little connection to what their brain would do."
Rock believes managers and their teams spend much too little time talking about changing behaviours. He says more thought should be given to how the brain operates.
"Neuroscience was able to provide the most cohesive explanation of what was happening in good coaching. I now have a brain-based approach to coaching."
Local business psychologist Jasbindar Singh, author of Get Your Groove Back, attended Rock's presentation in Auckland and agrees that autocratic leadership is a thing of the past. She says managers need to create the culture where the employees are expected to come up with their own solutions.
"The whole leadership space is about enabling people and getting them to become more engaged. It's finding what their hot buttons are and getting them to think and find the answer for themselves."
If the boss is always telling people how to do their jobs then employees can come to rely on that and stop developing their own solutions.
"If people say, 'Oh yeah, I'll have a chat with Jim and he'll tell me what to do', that's one type of response. But if you know you're going to see Jim and he's going to get you to reflect and drill down into the scenario you're going to him to discuss, then there is a different mindset."
Drilling down into a challenging scenario is one thing, but focussing on the negative events only reinforces the negative.
"It's really easy, it's human nature to get bogged down with the one stuff-up or the bit that's not working. In fact there can be a lot of other really good things happening."
Singh says managers in New Zealand need work on highlighting the positive things that are going on if they are aiming to develop an edge.
"Kiwi managers can acknowledge the good things more," she says.
* Quiet Leadership by David Rock is published by HarperCollins and sells for $39.99.
