Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

Your brain’s egg-like consistency takes cares of everything from getting you onto the job daily … to landing you that choice promotion you craved.

You’ve likely noticed though … that cutting edge workplaces keep brains alive to better performances … while toxic organizational settings tend to stomp out mental health. Simply put, approaches in any workplace look surprisingly different when rooted in recent neuroscience.

Not that peering into the brain … with its lifetime mysteries … will always lead to profitability. And few would deny that to fully understand the fast-emerging facts about human cognition, you need to dig deeper into the brain at work. Yet the employees out there who zero in on what brainpower looks like at highly successful firms … tend to act more on what the brain does. It only makes sense.

Interestingly … what’s bad for the brain is usually bad for business. Take a lack of mental flexibility, for instance. Rigid routines are particularly dreadful for brain’s plasticity. and you don’t have to look past today’s Wall Street Journal to see long-established firms sinking in shifting times. The result?

Companies such as GM will be left behind with the tide toward smaller cars ... unless they can flex faster to the rising gas crisis. A lifetime student of the brain … I remain convinced that  remarkable flexibility offers unique dividends to those who use it in different ways daily. Why does it happen?

Science is showing increasing examples of how the brain reassigns parts normally clogged with rigid routines … when we engage different ways of thinking and widely varied approaches … into regions that capitalize on differences. The opposite can be crisis in a fast changing marketplace. It's a bit like investing in one stock only and hoping for the best when the stock performs poorly.  

Is work bad for the brain at your firm? What would it take to create space for more flexibility in one low performing area?