What's good for your workers is also good for their brains

BOOK REVIEW: Shine: Using Brain Science to Get the Best from Your People. By Edward M Hallowell. Harvard Business Review Press. €24.99

HELPING YOUR people perform at their highest level isn’t rocket science – it’s far more complicated than that. That’s the premise of the author of this book, a psychiatrist and former instructor at Harvard Medical School.

Edward Hallowell, an ADHD expert and author of the best- selling Driven to Distraction, combines brain science with performance research in his latest work to come up with a five-stage process for helping organisations to get their people to excel.

Hallowell believes the pressures of the modern workforce are overwhelming and suffocating the human brain, extinguishing not only human experience but also neurons in the cerebral cortex.

People’s best efforts often fail, not because they are not working hard enough but because they are working too hard, attempting to process too much information.

However, one of the more positive findings from recent neuroscience research is that the brain is remarkably plastic – it has the capacity to grow and change.

It is also competitively plastic. You get better at what you practise and worse at what you don’t. The good news for managers is that you are never stuck with who you are or who your employees are.

Challenging a person in an area where she is skilled is good for her brain and makes it grow, much like a muscle. Overwhelming her with more than she can cope with has the opposite effect. Instilling optimism and hope into your organisation, therefore, is not only good for people’s emotional health, it is also good for their brains.

Work/life balance and on-site exercise programmes are not mere pleasantries but have been proven to boost the bottom line.

Sleep expert Robert Stickgold has found that a nap with REM sleep improves people’s ability to integrate unassociated information for creative problem- solving while many studies have shown that sleep boosts memory.

The modern workplace leaves people feeling disconnected – emotionally alone, exhausted, anxious and afraid. Employees are too mentally overloaded or too stressed to converse, a problem compounded by the fact that they are often not in the same location as their co-workers.

To combat this, managers need to actively promote what the author calls “purposeful engagement”. A positively connected workforce, in which people naturally make friends, has huge pay-offs. Research by Gallup has shown that having a best friend at work is a major predictor of superior performance and that people who have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be positively engaged with their work.

Fear can be one of the most toxic forces in the workforce but a certain level can sharpen performance. Research known as the performance anxiety curve has shown that as anxiety increases, performance improves up to a certain point. Beyond that, the curve starts a rapid decline, as performance deteriorates while anxiety continues to rise.

Managers need to keep employees off the descending slopes of this curve by coaching, reassurance, supplying additional resources or, if nothing else, simply joining the person in their worry, applying the maxim of halving a trouble through sharing.