As a leader in a multifamily company, wouldn’t it be great if every employee’s brain came with an instruction manual — a detailed guide specifying how they think, what motivates them, how to communicate seamlessly, and the best way to change their behavior?
While the complexities of the human brain — shaped by genetic, biological, and environmental influences — are too vast for complete understanding, neuroscience offers insights into core brain functions like threat perception, information encoding, and insight generation. Leveraging this knowledge can enhance leadership effectiveness at every level within your organization. Let’s explore how.
Individual Level: Enhancing Personal Interactions
Understanding neuroscience can help you communicate more effectively, resolve conflicts, and foster a culture where employees can have insightful moments. Although you can never know exactly what an employee is thinking, neuroscience provides tools to better grasp their thought processes and motivations, making you a more effective leader.
The human brain’s primary function is to minimize threat while maximizing reward. This survival mechanism means the brain reacts more strongly to threats than to rewards. In modern workplaces, physical threats are rare, but social threats — like feedback or performance reviews — can provoke significant stress. Even positive feedback sessions can trigger feelings of threat and avoidance in employees.
Imagine starting a feedback conversation with, “I really value your opinion. Before we start talking about your work, is there anything I could be doing better as a leader?” This approach reduces the perceived threat and enhances the conversation’s productivity.
Even simple interactions can trigger anxiety. An ambiguous “Got a minute?” text from a leader can lead to stress. Adding context, such as, “I’d like your opinion on next quarter’s budget,” can reduce uncertainty and make employees more comfortable and responsive.
Team Level: Creating a Common Language
Teams often struggle with collaboration if they lack a way to effectively communicate individual ideas, needs, and perceived threats. Developing a common language — a shared set of terminology for workplace communication — can enhance team collaboration and adaptability.
A common language helps teams articulate threats and rewards, recognize biases, and evaluate new ideas. For example, if your team is deciding between candidates for a position and leans towards a less experienced candidate due to perceived personality fit, recognizing, and addressing similarity bias can shift the focus back to qualifications.
For this common language to be effective, it must be:
Sticky: Easy to recall, with short phrases or acronyms that trigger team goals automatically.
Meaningful: Important enough for employees to act upon.
Coherent: Complementary to existing knowledge and company principles.
Organizational Level: Driving Company-Wide Learning and Change
Upskilling in both technical and soft skills is crucial for growth and innovation in multifamily companies. However, changing employee behavior on a large scale is challenging. Many change initiatives fail because they don’t align with how the brain works.
The hippocampus, responsible for embedding new information into long-term memory, is activated under specific conditions:
Engagement: Material must capture the learner’s full attention.
Relevance: Connect new information to existing thoughts and experiences.
Emotion: Triggering emotions enhances memory encoding.
Spacing: Learning spaced over time aids retention.
Social Interaction: Deepens encoding and recall and encourages action.
Effective learning programs that incorporate these elements are more likely to result in lasting behavior change. Virtual learning experiences, when designed with these principles, can be more effective than traditional in-person sessions.
While we may never have a complete manual for understanding every employee’s brain, applying principles from neuroscience can significantly enhance leadership effectiveness. By tapping into shared motivations, improving communication through a common language, and creating optimal learning conditions, leaders in multifamily companies can foster environments where employees thrive and bring their best selves to work.
Interested in exploring this topic further? Check out the latest episode of the Multifamily Mind Podcast with Terri Norvell , available wherever you get your podcasts!
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