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Leadership analytics: The new 'lean'

Are great leaders born, or can we learn the behaviors of good leadership? In this podcast, which originally appeared in knowIT, Associate Professor Pierre Balthazard explains how he has applied information technology to the biosciences to identify the neuro-pathways that result in leadership behaviors. He has spent the last five years developing a norm of leadership -- a database that records the brain patterns of high performers. Eventually he hopes to develop exercises that would utilize the brain's plasticity to remap those neuro-pathways in people who want to improve their leadership capability.

2010-06-24

Are great leaders born, or can we learn the behaviors of good leadership? In this podcast, which originally appeared in KnowIT, Associate Professor Pierre Balthazard explains how he has applied information technology to the biosciences to identify the neuro-pathways that result in leadership behaviors. He has spent the last five years developing a norm of leadership — a database that records the brain patterns of high performers. Eventually he hopes to develop exercises that would utilize the brain's plasticity to remap those neuro-pathways in people who want to improve their leadership capability. (16:45) [podcast id="1"] Transcript: Knowledge: Are great leaders born, or can we learn the behaviors of good leadership. Associate Professor Pierre Balthazard has brought information technology to the biosciences to identify the neural pathways that result in leadership behaviors. He has spent the last five years developing a database that records the brain patterns of high performers. Eventually, he hopes to develop exercises that would utilize the brain's plasticity to remap those neural pathways in people who want to improve their leadership capability. You are an IT researcher and IT professor, however, your area is to examine neuroscience and leadership. Can you tell me how those two come together? Balthazard: Very good. Well, I started off always eclectic in my career; a mixture of information technology and systems engineering. So I was always fascinated with numbers. Fascinated why things worked the way they did. Unlike other engineers, I was not really interested in the physics of it, but on the human element of it and see if the engineering formulas applied to human systems as opposed to physical systems. Throughout my career, I was always intrigued by things like cognition and how we related to things. Why is a piece of software of interest to a person and then the other person not like it? That type of issue was always of interest to me, and I also liked to look at issues of people working together, or and brains better than one. I always had more of a cognitive interest in my research for whatever reason. Now, you ask a very good question about neuroscience and neuroscience and leadership. Neuroscience really starts as a biological phenomenon. It's a three plus or minus pound gelatinous thing that we've got in our scalp called the brain. We all know that it's pretty much responsible for everything that we do. In my case, when you are trying to find the common cause — the root cause of an issue, if somehow you could study the brain, it would be interesting. Now the brain itself, the biology, leads to what us humans call the mind; things like decision making, things like your traits and states and personalities. It's all defined by ultimately the biology; and your behaviors, which is a derivative of your mind, which is a derivative of the biology in your scalp. For many years, I was always intrigued with people that made right decisions and were in leadership positions. I found that the study of leaders, by looking at their brain, actually used a lot of my formal training in systems and technology because it's inherently a huge mathematical issue. We're dealing with billions of neurons. To understand a pattern that exists in a billion of things going on is the ultimate database for somebody that loves databases. Knowledge: How did you approach — how did you approach studying leadership? Balthazard: Leadership really is an interest of my coming back to my own dissertation. When you write a dissertation of a research project you need two things. You need subjects and a task for them to do. The task that I had chosen was by a company — afterwards I found out — that was very much into psychometric instruments. Okay? People that assess either individuals, leaders or organizations. My curiosity was explaining why certain phenomenon occurred and learning more about psychometrics was the way to do it, so it really built upon my formal training. Leadership came about by studying individuals that were in decision-making situations, so by studying leaders, I knew that business decisions are made top down, and the influence that good leaders and bad leaders have on how well or poorly their organizations run. For a long period of time, there was always this sidebar in my research that dealt with examining the phenomenon, very complicated phenomenon of leadership. What's interesting is, a little known fact in the field, is that the W.P. Carey School probably has the largest concentration of leadership researchers in the world; people that have got incredible research records in the field of leadership. Here I am, a person with an IT pedigree, starting to interact with individuals like that in their turf, trying to learn more. That's where you get synergies and really my research agenda is all about synergies across disciplinary type of research; what President Crow would call fusion. Intellectual fusion means I've got ideas. I look at a phenomenon from a different perspective as people with a different formal training, and if we can at least get a conversation going, then fantastic ideas can occur. What we're talking about today is, in fact, the fantastic idea that is a direct descendent of across disciplinary conversation. Knowledge: Okay, so how have you been able to apply IT to investigating leadership? Balthazard: Okay well, there is one variable that's missing. Okay, so we've got leadership, but neuroscience. I did not start this project by seeking neuroscience. Neuroscience found me. Just serendipitously, I was giving a keynote address. I'd say about 12 years ago, and one of the people presenting at the same conference had a topic fairly similar to mine dealing with leadership, but their topic dealt with the brains of leaders. This person knew very little of leadership; was a practicing neurotherapist, and he just asked questions. Wouldn't it be interesting if we could use these tools to help people become better people? That just started a multi-year conversation about what if, and what would happen if; and from that, we ran a little pilot study, and it was very clear to me that I needed to learn more about neuroscience. Again, what is neuroscience? Okay it's biology, it's neurology, it's cognition, it's emotional intelligence, it's a variety of things that somewhere, somehow there is a pattern in how your neurons are used in your brain that indicate this. We've got billions of neurons, and if we are — in my case a lot of my research deals with electrical impulses, i.e. every time that there is a biological reaction in the brain, it produces a differential in energy, thus it produces electricity. Also electricity that if you could put all of this together, you could probably light a 20 or 25 watt light bulb with the electricity of the human brain. It's only three pounds but it basically consumes the overwhelming energy that your body produces. The thing is, every time you're looking at any behavior, you're looking at literally millions of data points because it's a real-time time series of how your brain is reacting to all types of stimuli; may it be somebody touching you, hearing something, seeing something. There's a variety of very complex systems that when you take a look at them, you've got these huge databases that tell you where this reaction took place in the brain and what are the characteristics of that particular reaction. Oddly enough, in that big, big pile is where you will find the little twig that you're looking for, which might be a pattern that would predict a specific behavior. Knowledge: It seems to me that one aspect of the research would be actually collecting the data from the brain and then the IT part of it — or the other part of the IT part would be the storing, and mining the data, and drawing some conclusions out of it or finding the patterns, right? Balthazard: Yeah. Yeah. It really falls into the two big categories. What you described is certainly what I spent a great amount of hours every day doing. I refer to this as the new lean. Okay, lean business has been co-opted by our people in operations, but to me lean is leadership analytics. To me it's a study of the brain phenomenon which is at the source of all leadership behaviors. That's a lot of stuff but not only will we be able to assess somebody's leadership skills, but the concept that really got me hooked on neuroscience is a concept called plasticity or malleability. People that are in the life sciences have proven very clearly that you can actually teach your old brain new tricks. You can change the pattern of how your neurons fire. For a person in the business school, knowing that somebody has leadership abilities or not, that's one thing; but that to me sounds like, I don't know, more like social engineering. I'm not interested in social engineering. I'm not interested in figuring out okay you're a failure; move to the left. You've got potential; move to the right. What I'm really interested in is part two: If in fact, you don't have a profile that's conducive to being a good leader, but you really want to be a good leader; well, you now have the potential through this brain plasticity to adopt a new set of neural pathways in your brain. Not necessarily to magically become the leader that you're not, but certainly to get one of the necessary conditions for you to improve your leadership skills. At some point, sooner rather than later, my project will move into a phase where we're going to be developing software based on the analysis that will provide a set of exercises. Neuroscientists call this neural feedback; kind of like on the same concept of biofeedback. If you go to the gym, and you lift weights with your right arm, eventually you're going to have a well-toned right arm. Same thing. If we do exercises with the brain, you can change the profile. It is used every day. Knowledge: You know what I'm thinking of is cognitive therapy. Are you familiar with that? Balthazard: Absolutely. Knowledge: That's what this is sounding like. Balthazard: This is it. Knowledge: Yeah. Balthazard: But it's not just cognitive. See for the last 50 years, people in all forms of research have over emphasized cognition. Do you know that cognition explains very little of leadership. In fact, in some newspaper articles, some people have quoted me as saying there is zero relation. That's not true, but it's not an important relation. It is significant, but maybe it explains now 10 or 12 percent of the phenomenon which means there's 88-90 percent phenomenon that's not explained by how good you are in terms of cognition. A lot of research has looked at emotional aspects of the brain, and that's fascinating for somebody that is looking at leadership. There's several books that have been written that deal with emotional intelligence. Yes, emotions do explain in relationship more about who is a good leader than the cognitive aspect of the brain; but there are other aspects of the brain. I'm looking at things like instinct and will and volition. These aspects of the brain may end up predicting more of leadership, so you see, this lean aspect — this leadership analytics, because I am so well trained in trying to find patterns in huge databases, I'm bringing something to the table that your life scientists are not interested in, and your behavioral scientists are not necessarily interested in these issues. What constitutes an excellent leader, not just from a behavioral perspective or a mind perspective, but from the biology; since you could change the biology, we can probably infer that we might be able to at some point improve people's leadership skills. Knowledge: Wow that's really interesting. How far along down the path are you? Balthazard: My goal for the last five years has been to develop what I call a norm of leadership. That means a database that indicates what is to be expected in the human brain of people that are high performers. If I know what the high performer looks like, and I know the mean and the variance of all the patterns in the brain — of somebody that is a high performer. Then I've got somebody that doesn't have that profile, but we have the tools in neuroscience to get the profile closer to what you want it to be. I still don't know if we're going to be successful, but I know that through inductive research if this does that, and this does that, and this does that. The people in neuroscience have done a lot of work with clinical and pathological issues. We've got people that have bullets in their brain, a lot of dead cells, and they've relearned how to move their left arm that's been dead for three years by changing the neural pathways. I'm doing the same thing, but I'm applying it to a positive aspect of psychology. Nobody's taking care of the positive issues; how to make better decisions; how to be a better leader; how to get an organization to be more productive; how to be more efficient; how to interact with people better. That's what our project is all about. Knowledge: Absolutely amazing. Balthazard: See the next 20 years are clearly going to be the 20 years of the brain. Now the reason for that, in these ten years what I've been most successful at doing is to create what we call the professional social network. It's a lot of work to get a bunch of people with very, very different backgrounds to want to collaborate on a complex issue. This is a complex issue, and it's multidisciplinary and there's a team. Knowledge: I think that's an issue in academia in universities. Balthazard: Absolutely we are islands. Knowledge: Yes. Balthazard: I don't see myself as eclectic. I see myself as looking at a strategic management issue as opposed to an operational management issue, and it requires the brain thrust of different individuals. That's a big deal, but the other thing is that was really eye opening to me is, the neuroscientists, and I went straight to the source. I went to people that were heads of research projects, 20-30 years ago, developing the brain instruments, and they are excited because they say finally we have our second generation of brain researchers. I go, "Please explain." Well from their perspective, they talked to their own friends, and they're all engineers that develop devices and stuff to measure things in the brain, but I'm applying their microscope to a new problem. Knowledge: Right. Balthazard: And that excites them, because they see their 20 and 30 years worth of developing the infrastructure that allows us to do interesting life science and social science study and management study finally coming to fruition.

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