Training

Neuroleadership

Neuroleadership uniquely focuses on the effectiveness of leadership at conscious and subconscious levels. It recognises the anthropology of human development as a tribal species, the sciences of motivation and neurobiology, and modern environments and expectations.

NEURO-M Neuroleadership Training explores 2 critical aspects of achieving broad respect and influence as a leader:

Primal Resonance

Learn about how some people “feel” like a leader to others, irrespective of title or authority. This is based mostly on “natural” attributes and instant visuals, with first impressions often highly influential. For example, someone who appears immature, small or low on confidence is at a disadvantage, where those who have “presence” about them, perhaps without even saying a word, are more likely to be instantly granted status and a base level of respect.

This intuitive judgement is quickly made at a subconscious level, heavily guided by DNA, life experiences, intrinsic motivations and situational influences. This is the more compelling aspect of leadership influence but is generally ignored in modern leadership conversations. Understanding these aspects and learning how to best leverage one’s own natural leadership attributes is an important part of effective leadership in any time or situation.

Leadership Practices

Explore the practices most reliably and universally proven to engage, inspire and motivate others in modern contexts. Gain awareness and make choices about your style preferences, each of which may be situationally appropriate. These are the most “trainable” areas of leadership but, when planning self-development in this area, it is important that changes are authentically “you” to amplify the resonance and trust they trigger in others, as well as for your own fulfilment and wellbeing. No-one need feel like a pretender.

This training module is preceded by the NEURO-M Neuroleadership Assessment as a baseline for personal development awareness and choices.

Supervisory Management

Managing teams is often difficult, complex and stressful. It typically brings many competing interpersonal and practical pressures, and all-too-often training and support feels inadequate. It is little surprise that experiences and outcomes are too often unsatisfactory, professionally and personally.

To address this problem, the focus has to be on building competence and confidence in day-to-day management practices. There are two sides to this:

Self: Developing an approach and set of coping skills that support personal performance and wellbeing

Others: Implement a transparent, open, non-conflictual style that engages the best attitudes, efforts and outcomes from others.

Our research into human motivation, supported by leading workplace motivation research, identifies Empowerment (feelings of personal competence, autonomy, knowledgeability and control) as the primary task-related motivation – and source of ongoing fulfillment and motivation – in the workplace. Simply, Empowerment triggers a self-fulfilling, self-rewarding cycle of optimal engagement, behaviour, performance and wellbeing that cannot be replicated by any other approach.

NEURO-M Supervisory Management Training is essential for all current and aspiring managers, from 2ICs and leading hands to divisional managers. It is preceded by the NEURO-M Supervisory Management Assessment as a baseline for personal development awareness and choices.

Workplace Culture

Culture is influenced and shaped by many historical and current social forces, creating a set of behaviours that people adopt in order to survive, or perhaps even thrive, in the social context they find themselves in. The greatest influences on work culture come from 2 places – personal beliefs and habits, and dominant power sources. Recruitment practices should consider cultural fit prior to employment to avoid hiring people who are intrinsically at odds with a preferred work culture. This makes the most influential source the person or people who have most power in the group, which brings culture back to being a leadership function.

This training module doesn’t proscribe a specific culture as ideal – that determination is left to participants, depending on their goals, values and personal preferences. Rather, it provides the awareness and knowledge required for managers to make informed choices, and to adapt their practices accordingly.

Considerations include:

• Physical, psychological and employment safety
• Employee engagement
• Workgroup / Organisational Identity
• Individual vs Collective
• Cooperative vs Competitive
• Person vs Roles
• Open vs Closed Communication
• Innovation vs Compliance

And more

The NEURO-M Leading with Culture Training Module is ideally preceded by a NEURO-M Culture 360 survey as a baseline for awareness and choices, but if this is impractical a provided scenario can be used.

Motivation at Work

Motivation might be the most misunderstood influence on workplace behaviour, performance and retention. Management and leadership training universally ignores the science of human motivation, instead basing itself on mythology, penalties, rewards and relationships. Even excellent scientific research generally only privileges one element of it, depending on the goals and bias of the researcher.

For an advanced understanding of motivation in the workplace, the only appropriate place to start is with human software and hardware. Once that is understood, decisions about management practices, job design, incentives, penalties and other things that shape attitudes and actions fall quickly into place. The result is a holistic, robust and vastly superior way of knowing, planning and interacting that unlocks optimal effort, engagement and fulfilment in every employee.

NEURO-M Motivation at Work Training allows participants to learn and ethically leverage the universally-true motivators of human emotion and behaviour at work. It is preceded by a personal NEURO-M Motivation at Work Assessment as a baseline guide for self-awareness and personal development prior to influencing and benefitting others.

LEADERSHIP RESILIENCE

Resilience is a desired trait for all of us, supporting wellbeing and achievement. It allows us to persevere in the face of discomfort, adversity and unhelpful impulses. Unfortunately, our neurobiology is wired and programmed to NOT be resilient most of the time, as surviving in the moment was, in evolutionary terms, more important than potentially thriving tomorrow. This makes resilience difficult for a lot of people. For leaders, resilience is not an option, as their followers expect them to be the ones to step up in the face of the biggest and most difficult challenges. Resilience is an essential leadership requirement.

As a neurobiological function, resilience is conceptually simple. It is largely a function of the brain’s motivation system with an added emphasis on the 3rd process, being self-regulation. IQ has been linked to capacity, but there are many highly effective skills and habits that can be developed. There are two main sides to this:

SOCIO-EMOTIONAL

Personal and interactional habits that support continued effort, capacity and personal wellbeing in the face of adversity.

PRACTICAL

Habits that support clarity and effectiveness in prioritization, problem solving, productivity and collaboration under pressure.

Resilient leaders will always outperform others, personally and with their team. They will rise to the challenge, inspire and succeed where others fail. They will also experience superior wellbeing and lower stress.

NEURO-M Leadership Resilience Training is preceded by a NEURO-M Leadership Resilience Assessment for awareness in personal development direction and choices.

Communication at Work

Human communication started a long time before evolution allowed for the ability to control air movement around 500,000 years ago, most likely for humming and basic sound shapes, or the ability control tongue movements and the gene that made grammar possible around 300,000 years later. The modern human brain has areas dedicated to creating and understanding speech and written language, but the parallel, and often more compelling, processing in more primitive regions remains.

THE RATIONAL APPROACH

Many people and methodologies prioritise rational and written messaging. This sees some overly relying on written instructions, policies, procedures, memos and emails on the assumption that this makes things black-and-white (literally) and not open to interpretation. It’s a logical (“left-brain” dominant) way of thinking, which sees communication as a means to an end, but often doesn’t produce the results hoped for.

THE SOCIO-EMOTIONAL APPROACH

Some people much prefer spoken, face to face and interactional communications, where voices and environments, body language and expressions, feelings and relationships, jokes and stories, and sights and sounds are involved. It sees communication as a (“right-brain” dominant) experience in itself, where a practical outcome might or might not be important or clearly defined. For factual issues, this can be inefficient and imprecise.

Effective communication draws on both approaches, making experiences enjoyable while building relationships, without neglecting practical requirements and outcomes.

NEURO-M Communication at Work Training is preceded by a NEURO-M Communication 360 Assessment as an informative baseline for personal development.

CONFLICT RESOLUTION

There are two ways of approaching how conflict might be avoided or resolved.

The easiest is to be fueled by emotions; asserting, giving in, avoiding or compromising simply to cope with the situation. This is what most of us do most of the time. It is, in the moment at least, “authentic”, and even if it feels bad it feels like we were doing the right thing, whatever that was. It’s unfortunate that so often it doesn’t look quite as “right” on reflection, doesn’t have the outcome we wanted, or has other outcomes we had never anticipated.

The problem is a simple one: our programming for dealing with verbal and social “threats” uses the same mechanisms as for dealing with physical threats, so we fight, flee or escape. Some parts of our brains have evolved to become great with language and problem-solving, but other, more compelling parts of our neurobiology still live in the dangerous world of our ancient ancestors.

The other way of dealing with differences big and small is to manage emotions in ways that allow for more constructive, peaceful, enjoyable resolutions. If people are calm, problems can be solved more creatively, quickly and cooperatively. NEURO-M Conflict Resolution Training teaches you how to recognise and manage your own emotions, and to influence the emotions of others, to more quickly and effectively reach great outcomes.

It is preceded by a NEURO-M Conflict Style Assessment for each participant as a baseline for awareness and personal development.

MINDFUL ENGAGEMENT

In the eyes of nearly everyone else, our behaviours define us. Appearances, title, role and reputation create a first impression, but its our behaviours that define the truth of who we are. The blend of habits shown in the NEURO-M Temperament Assessment form a big-picture view of “who we are” to the world, and this resource has proven very reliable – but then what?

It is one thing for others to know what to expect, or for us to understand how our actions might be seen, for better and worse. It is another for us to mindfully engage with ourselves and our image to make choices that reflect the person we’d like to be and would like to be seen as.

The unique potential of The NEURO-M model is in recognising the impact our neurobiology plays in how we behave. We are not a circle on a chart or a group of letters. Nor do we want to be – we are so much more responsive, complex and human than fatalistically being consigned to a category from a flawed and out-of-date model. That approach doesn’t work because:

• Neuroscience dictates that behavioural patterns must be mostly habitual, and therefore predictable, supporting the conceptual validity of temperament typology and allowing us to recognise patterns in ourselves and others that can easily have us feel all that therefore the information must be true.
• Neurobiology dictates that behavioural patterns in and out of stress may be entirely different, debunking the idea that an all-purpose category or spot on a chart, with generic ups and downs, can be reliably accurate. Our research has showed an average shift of 49% in behavioural patterns at times where the person is most likely to have been in a position of distress or anger, supporting this scientific prediction.

NEURO-M Mindful Engagement Training is unique in recognising that temperaments are stable yet also change in this way –not just in behaviour but in behavioural patterns – according to stress. This allows participants to develop behavioural habits that are likely to be the most helpful for relationships, reputation and practical outcomes.

A NEURO-M Situational Temperament Assessment precedes this training as a baseline for awareness and choices in developing and enhancing preferred personal behaviours and reputation.

ADVANCED ASSESSMENT ANALYSIS

NEURO-M candidate assessments provide deep, reliable insights into behaviour, motivation and performance expectations.

However, the greatest insights can be gained through combining, comparing, and contrasting responses and their patterns. Sometimes results and patterns within and between assessments are consistent, supporting and reinforcing each other. At least as often, inconsistencies become apparent that add nuance and depth, as well as providing insights into self-awareness and integrity.

NEURO-M Advanced Assessment Analysis Training teaches assessment users how to gain in-depth insights in each assessment, and then bring them together to make predictions in things like working style, behavioural patterns, potential for engagement, and cultural fit at a level of insight and reliably you have not experienced before.

A skilled analysis can also:

• Provide guidance for further questions in the interview process
• Set performance and behavioural expectations
• Predict how someone will fit within and influence a team
• Inform ongoing management practices

NEURO-M candidate assessments are unique in what they explore and how they expose information from multiple angles and levels.

BEHAVIOURAL INTERVIEWING

Interviews are often stressful for candidates and limited in the information they provide to employers. The interviewer holds the power (multiplied if there is a panel) and the candidate is trying to impress and/or not mess it up. This makes for an inaccurate, incomplete and imbalanced conversation where both parties leave with impressions and perhaps more questions, but without firm evidence.

Every hiring manager wants to know two core things – Can the candidate do the job? Will they do the job? The “can” is often verified by experiences, competence assessments, records of achievement, qualifications, referrals and so on. The “will” becomes a matter of guesswork, often relying on gut feelings, representations, and (often unreliable) reference checks. Behavioural interviewing reduces that guesswork.

There are other things often not considered at all, and sometimes overly-judged according to the intuitions and biases of the interviewer. Neither of those two extremes are ideal. These include:

• How will they fit workgroup culture?
• How will they fit the style of their manager?
• How engaged and fulfilled are they likely to be? What makes me think that?
• Do they really want this job? Why? For how long? With what goals? What don’t they want?
• How do they deal with upsets and problems?

Asking those questions in an unskilled manner, or perhaps simply describing how thing are and asking if that’s OK with them, rarely reveals much useful –or perhaps true – information.

NEURO-M Behavioural Interviewing takes a different approach. Based in neurobiology and counselling as core approaches, it creates an environment where more things can be spoken about, more accurately and with less chance of deception. It enhances the interview experience for both parties, reducing stress and optimizing mutual discovery through sincere interest, curiosity and openness. Deceptions typically expose themselves very quickly, and everyone can leave with a good understanding of the expectations of the other. This is a great platform for good decision making and long-term employment relationships.

NEURO-M Behavioural Interviewing Training is ideal for HR officers and hiring managers, and potentially suitable as an add-on skill for experienced recruiters who want to continue their professional development and skills acquisition.