Our Leadership Insights

Why we form habits In order to save energy, our brain constantly tries to turn our repeated thinking into habits. As leaders, we obviously want those hard-wired behaviours to be useful ones! Habits are created through a neurological feedback loop involving the repetition of a 4-step process – cue, craving, response, reward. Take this example: […]

Why our memory matters Understanding some of the neuroscience that underpins our productivity allows you to identify the optimal structure to the way you work. For simplicity’s sake, let’s focus on our two different types of memory: Working memory – driven by our pre-frontal cortex, this is where we engage in higher-level thinking, learning and […]

Why mindset matters As you may recall from our previous article, taking a traditional approach when giving employee feedback is likely to put your employees in an ‘away’ state. (Recap our discussion about why neuroscience matters here.) In an ‘away’ mindset, people are more likely to be defensive – even if we attempt to sandwich […]

If you asked most leaders how important feedback is, they’d probably say it’s critical. After all, it’s believed to be a key technique to help improve performance. Employees, on the other hand, are likely to complain about a lack of useful feedback in engagement surveys. So, what are we doing wrong? When emotions get in […]

After an extraordinary challenging 2020, many of us had high expectations for the coming 12 months. You might be feeling that you’re right on track to achieving them. On the other hand, you could also be thinking that 2021 has so far failed to deliver. If that’s the case, should you lower your ambitions and […]

Today’s workplaces represent a significant challenge for all of us. With more things to do than time to do them, how do we best figure out what we should do? With tomorrow to look after as well as today, how do we manage today so we can grab some thinking space about tomorrow? With a […]