Neuroscience of Leadership

Neuroleadership T.R.E.A.D. ™ is about brain-based Human Leadership: leadership of human beings by human beings - by being human. This innovative, neuroscience-based Leadership program is completely customisable to what your leadership team needs. By understanding how our brains work and applying the latest key principles of Neuroscience, behavioural science & experience, we’ll transform leadership, engagement & performance at every level of your organisation – new managers to the highest level executives. Tell us what you need...you come, we will build it! Ask us how:

Leadership development based on the neuroscience-based T.R.E.A.D. ™ model. T.R.E.A.D. ™ stands for Think, Regulate and Renew, Engage, Adapt and Develop: with the brain in mind.
The NeuroT.R.E.A.D.™ program can be anything from a 1-hour keynote overview to a multi- day program spread over 12 months and including supporting individual Executive Coaching, 360° assessments, & team & peer coaching along the way.
Everything is customised to your needs, even each individual group of participants. And of course additional, highly specialist leadership training elements can be added. Tell us what you need...you come, we will build it! Ask us how:

This program was internationally benchmarked by CEB Global (Global Corporate Leadership Council) and resulted in an increase of productivity of an average of 26% in the teams of managers who undertook the program².

Using applied Neuroscience and extremely practical communication tools, this popular Giving and Receiving Feedback Leadership Development program will transform your team’s communication and leadership practices.

Applicable to day-to-day, 360° communication as well as more formal performance development and performance management conversations, it will empower, enable, motivate & promote understanding at all levels.

Everything is customised to your needs, even each individual group of participants. And of course additional, highly specialist leadership training elements can be added. Tell us what you need...you come, we will build it! Ask us how:

This program covers practical techniques to use in day-to-day communication as well as formal feedback and difficult conversations. The program is proven to improve productivity, performance and work satisfaction².

We take a holistic, 360° view that all parties - givers and the receivers - are responsible in the process of giving and receiving feedback. It’s just as important for leaders to listen & accept feedback as it is how they give it to the people who work with them.

The Giving and Receiving Feedback program has been customised to leaders at all levels, from new managers to top level executives. We’ve also had outstanding results when we’ve delivered tailored versions to non-management people across the organisation.

It’s proven to be applicable to managing up, down, and across the organisation as well influencing outside the organisation to customers & service providers - and in people’s home lives.

If you want to develop of a culture of mutual respect and understanding through continuous constructive feedback and communication, both on a day-to-day basis as well as in performance appraisals, then this is the program for you. Tell us what you need...you come, we will build it! Ask us how:

A Coaching Conversations Leadership style is the single most effective day-to-day leadership style for performance, empowerment, autonomy & engagement.

This neuroscience-based coaching program creates relationship-driven leaders who listen to, empower & engage staff through: autonomy, human connection, can-do, solution-focused thinking, empathy and superior communication. Leaders who coach for & lead to potential.

A Coaching Conversations Leadership style is also the best style to make people development conversations part of the every-day norm. It’s especially critical if you wish to reorient your managers from annual performance reviews to ongoing conversations.

Everything is customised to your needs, even each individual group of participants. And of course additional, highly specialist leadership training elements can be added. Tell us what you need...you come, we will build it! Ask us how:

Coaching Conversation-Style leaders develop more independent & self-directed employees who take responsibility for their work and the choices they make within the framework that the leader/ organisation sets. Leaders develop a more helping attitude and will steer & direct less: and hence have more time for strategic thinking.

It is particularly effective for managers leading ‘Millenials’ & ‘Gen Y’ staff - but it’s also highly effective for managers leading human beings of any age!

This neuroscience-based program delivers practical, day-to-day coaching skills to managers who want to develop a coaching-conversations style of leadership. It develops advanced team leadership capabilities and enables leaders to better empower their individual team members to take their performance to a new level, as well as improving strategic thinking.

For the very best results we recommend you run it in line with the 70:20:10 principle: as 2 separate day training days 2 months apart, sandwiching a 1-on-1, individual, targetted coaching session in between the training.

However, if there are budget constraints we can deliver an effective 1-day program, or the 2 separated training days without the supporting coaching. The 2 separate training days with the interspersed supporting coaching will of course get you the very best results.

We’ve delivered this program & got great results in leaders & managers at all levels from new managers to the highest level executives.

This course can be delivered as a stand-alone program, or as phase 3 of our Giving and Receiving Feedback Leadership Development program.

Everything is customised to your needs, even each individual group of participants. And of course additional, highly specialist elements can be added. Tell us what you need...you come, we will build it! Ask us how:

Our Emotional Intelligence programs are underpinned by practical neuroscience which not only gives people ‘the why’ it gives evidence-based strategies to improve ‘the how’. We combine the latest research & thinking with our deep experience to bring you Emotional Intelligence programs that get results.

Can Emotional Intelligence be learned? Yes - if people want to learn it, of course. We’ve transformed the Emotional Intelligence of leaders at all levels, including non-management staff and new managers through to senior Executives. Our customisable programs include different levels of group training; group, peer & individual coaching programs and Emotional Intelligence 360° & individual assessments. One-on-one Executive Coaching combined with our EQ 360° assessment tool is often recommended for senior leaders.

Everything is customised to your needs, even each individual group of participants. And of course additional, highly specialist elements can be added. Tell us what you need...you come, we will build it!

Emotional Intelligence is now a critical leadership capability at all levels. The most effective & respected leaders in this ultra-competitive world have high levels of Emotional Intelligence: it’s a must for today’s successful leaders. A lack of it can quickly curtail a promising career, increase staff turnover & reduce productivity.

Your staff are your business. Take the people away & all you have is an empty office with a sign on the door/window. There is ample research indicating a robust correlation between high levels of Emotional Intelligence and improved performance and productivity.
Our neuroscience-based Emotional Intelligence programs are carefully designed to change on-the-ground behaviours in the workplace (and out of it!) to boost performance and fuel productivity as a result. And make for happier staff & leaders, in & out of the workplace.

Not only does Emotional Intelligence impact on your staff, it also impacts on your clients. Emotional Intelligence is critical to anyone in a client/customer service environment.

Our brain-based Emotional Intelligence (EQ) programs provide staff, managers and executives with practical tools to improve their EQ and their capabilities in leading and managing, as well as their understanding around themselves, their teams, decision making and improved resilience, to name a few.
Our take on Emotional Intelligence is that it’s all about the way you relate to, react & respond to, & the impact you have on others – from a completely holistic, 360-degree perspective. Whether you are a leader, peer, or a staff member, in an internal or external client-facing role, we build Emotional Intelligence to improve the practical ways people interact to create better teamwork & respectful, harmonious, happier & more engaging relationships with staff, colleagues, management & clients alike. And hence boost productivity & fuel performance.
Understanding how the brain can help manage and develop strategies to maximise our brain's

We can build you a completely bespoke neuroscience-based Leadership Development Program from 1 day to spread over 12+ months.

An example program could include:
· NeuroLeadership TREAD multi-day program delivered over several months, each day separated by several weeks
· 360° Leadership and/or Emotional Intelligence Assessments
· Brain-based Coaching Conversations for Managers
· Smart-phone App-based Social Scavenger team building
· Strengths-based Strategic Facilitation/Team Planning
· Neuroscience-based Emotional Intelligence
· Supporting 1-on-1 post-training Coaching (to help further embed the skills)
· Executive Coaching programs: individual 6-12 hour, 1-on-1 coaching with clear objectives & measures of success

· Group and/or peer coaching

Tell us what you need...you come, we will build it! Ask us how:

Leadership development based on the neuroscience-based T.R.E.A.D. ™ model.

T.R.E.A.D. ™ stands for Think, Regulate and Renew, Engage, Adapt and Develop: with the brain in mind.

The NeuroT.R.E.A.D.™ program can be anything from a 1-hour keynote overview to a multi- day program spread over 12 months and including supporting individual Executive Coaching, 360° assessments, & team & peer coaching along the way.

Everything is customised to your needs, even each individual group of participants. And of course additional, highly specialist leadership training elements can be added. Tell us what you need...you come, we will build it! Ask us how:

Our team are experienced across a very wide range of 360-degree Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, PRISM Brain-Mapping, DiSC, Strengths and other assessments – too many to list here. Please contact us to discuss what you need.

All our assessments can be supported by 1-on-1 Executive Coaching.

Please note: for any 360-degree Leadership, Emotional Intelligence or other 360-degree assessment, we must have a guarantee of at least 6 hours supporting individual coaching (or similar). We will not administer any 360-degree assessment without this assurance. We’re very happy to discuss our reasoning in more depth, please contact us.

Leading yourself and your team are what most people think of when they talk about leadership. However, one of the most critically important skills that’s so often neglected is Managing UP.

Managing Up is a critical skill even from new manager/supervisor level. But as you climb the leadership ladder, at a certain level leading your team well is generally seen as a given (even though it isn’t always done!) & it becomes BUA (Business As Usual) - Managing Up becomes one of the key defining skills that you need to get good at if you want to be successful in your career. It becomes especially important when you move – or want to move - into senior management & executive level.

It may not feel like it some days, but we all have a brain. Each of our brains are a unique, ever-changing bundle of around 86-100 billion (100,000,000,000) neurons. To put some perspective on that, if you were to count to 100 billion at a rate of 1 number per second, it would take you over 3,171 years (actually, it would probably take a lot longer because it takes more than 1 second to say the large numbers!)

Add to that, each neuron may be connected to up to 10,000 other neurons, passing signals to each other via as many as 1,000 trillion (1,000,000,000,000,000!) synaptic connections. It would take you 31,688,087 years (approximately!) to count that high! Now maybe you can begin to see why it is beneficial to have an understanding of neuroscience if you are a leader.

Why then, do we so often lead people as if they are all the same? And more often than not, lead people as if they are the same as us? How few of us even think about how our own brain works when we are leading – let alone the brains of others?

It is time leadership is catapulted into the era of brain-based, human leadership. It is time to lead with the brain in mind: to think of leading people as people. And a brain-based coaching leadership style is the primary tool for the job.

“If it has a pulse – lead it!”

Simon Smith, Coach if the Year 2013, ICF Australia

1. Lead with consideration for your people as singular, idiosyncratic, peculiar, unique, individual human beings.
2. Lead with applied neuroscience as your foundation – leadership based on the proven scientific principles of how our human brains are wired and fundamentally operate (yours and theirs!).
3. Ask and listen, more than tell.
4. Lead with solution-based thinking (their solutions, not yours!). Banish problem thinking and blame.

Get people thinking about the thinking, theirs and yours.

Leaders: time to stop thinking of people as ‘resources’. Even human ones. Take all your people out of the building, and what do you have? Just an empty shell with the company name on the outside.

See the people around you as unique, human individuals with their own unique, individual brains and lives. Your team; your peers; your boss; the board, all are unique PEOPLE with unique brains. It’s time for unique leadership - for unique people! And leadership at ALL levels. You do not have to be in a management/executive position to lead. You can be a leader at any and all levels.

A coaching-conversations leadership style gets leaders to focus on asking and empowering people, not telling them what to do. It is solution focused and forward thinking, not problem and past-focused. Too much time is wasted with ‘post-mortems’ and blame.

Instead of asking “what went wrong?” or “why did you do that?” try questions like “what can we do differently/better next time?”; “What can we do to stop that happening again?”; “What can we do to get a better outcome?” You will get much more engaged people and much better outcomes.

Lead people's thinking towards understanding your thinking. Help them understand what the ‘why’ is, and even more so when you do have to pass down a decision. The better your people understand you and your thinking (and each other’s thinking), the more likely they are to be in a ‘toward’ brain state, which will make them come up with better the ideas and solutions as a result. Ideas and solutions they will be much more engaged in, and subsequently much more likely to implement.

Of course, these skills all rely on you as a leader having great listening skills, great self-awareness and great emotional self-control. Empathy for people as human beings - considering people with their own complex web of professional and personal thoughts and experiences - is also essential for a great leader.

Yes, consider people’s lives outside work. We are always told to check in our home lives at the office door, but the reality is very different. It is extremely hard for the vast majority of people - even those with the knowledge as to how to do it - to suddenly dump all those neurochemicals flooding through our brains and bodies as a result of that argument at home, when we walk through a workplace door.

We are all human beings. Whilst our brain is one of the most complex structures we know about, if not the most complex, our brains all work in similar underlying ways. They are programmed to run away from ‘threat’ and walk cautiously towards ‘reward’. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio sums it up: “We are not thinking beings that feel – we are feeling beings that think”.

So your job as a leader (at any level) is to help each individual human get into as much of a toward/reward state of thinking and feeling in the best way they can, so they can think and act accordingly.

A coaching-conversations leadership style is one of the best tools you can use to make that happen.