Overtime, management training has tended to be based on guesswork. It has been based on observations, seeing what works and what doesn’t then guessing from this what’s important & what’s not. The observational component of this has been hugely valuable and has given us a lot of information, data and great ideas of where to investigate further. The guesswork side of this however has led to some of the theories being not as flexible as they could be so there are some instances where people are limited and get a poor result.
For example the area of change, how people change, whether people change and how to best work with people that you want to change. That’s been an area that up until recently has large amount of guesswork attached to it. People have not necessarily known what differences actually make the difference and so from a personal perspective if you’re managing a team without knowing how things work and how to get the best results it can be very tricky.
Whereas with neuroscience, we could look at what’s actually going on with the brain and managing people really comes down to knowing and understanding what’s going on for a person. What’s going on with your brain? What’s going on with their mind? How can we tweak things so that we can get the result that we want? There are a couple of different components to this and neuroscience is useful at almost every stage of the process. It is key for understanding for ourselves how we work, how people can optimally manage others, how can we best program ourselves to manage others and what the key things are that we need to be aware of.
When we mange others it is very useful to know in their brain or in their mind, what is likely to be causing them challenges? For example in change management, what is it that actually cause people’s problem? What is it that we’re going to need to be mindful when taking people through a process? Rather than just guessing and going off what works before for other people or other organizations, we can look at the core of how human brains work and how minds are most likely to process certain information then you could work that in a flexible approach that we need with each individual.
Neuroscience in management training gives us more flexibility and enables us to approach things in a way that gets more targeted results than the previous styles of management training.
