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Three Things You Need To Know About The Brain To Build Great Teams

This article is more than 6 years old.

Ellen Leanse is the author of a new book, The Happiness Hack, and she explains how to exercise your brain like fitness pros explain how to exercise your muscles. The book is full of insights synthesized from extensive research. We focused on three key understandings of the brain that founders, CEOs and team leaders can use to build great teams.

Ellen Leanse

The first thing is to understand about the brain is there are two forms of happiness. One, “hedonic” happiness, is associated primarily with fast reward dopamine cycles. The second “eudiamonic” form seems to rise from longer, slower reward cycles associated with serotonin. Unfortunately, “we’ve been hacked,” says Ellen, echoing Sean Parker’s admission that Facebook was intentionally designed to hack your brain. “These days we’re all so bombarded by media and tech-driven interruptions that our dopamine-driven motivation and reward cycles seem to fire all the time.”

But, if you understand that, you can take action. “That’s the biggest ‘hack back’ in the book – differentiating between those two pleasure cycles and their physiological effect on us”, says Ellen. “Guiding ourselves away from the easy impulse gratification of ‘dopamine-flavored’ experiences, toward the deeper, slower build of serotonin-based satisfaction is a power tool for leaders.”

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The second thing to understand is the brain’s natural response to new experiences is fear. Contrary to what I was taught in college, the brain’s main job isn’t to think. The brain’s main job is to keep you safe and alive. And, since you are alive, the brain thinks to itself, ‘Great Job!’ and will work to keep you in the same routines. Fear is an act of resistance by the brain, and this means you must take explicit action in order to build a team capable of taking on new challenges.

The third understanding for a leader is “What got you here won’t get you there.” This is one of my favorite insights, because it echoes themes found in sources from swords of Beowulf , audre lorde and research on complexity.

In short, we’ve been rewarded most of our lives for 1/ being right, and 2/ being right the fastest. Fast thinking is great for solving known problems and optimizing for speed and efficiency. But optimizing for fast thinking when innovating is the wrong strategy and often leads to unintended consequences.

So what to do? You can build a culture to invite new behaviors, reward repetition until it becomes habit, and sustain these habits in the company culture. Ellen and I generated far more ideas than this space allows (please add yours in the comments!), but here’s a sampling that you can start today.

1. Declare a new hunt. Orient the brain toward a big goal to recruit more serotonin into the mix. Aligning with purpose is a core part of happiness -- ask any great sports team. So prime the brain of your team toward the higher purpose, and observe how new conversations and perspectives will emerge.

2. Curiosity is your Cofounder. As a leader, you can confound the desire to be right, fast. Model by asking different questions at your next team meeting, such as, “I’m curious, what is my blind spot in our strategic plan”? or “I’m curious about this new opportunity, so let’s design five questions to help us go deeper and learn more before we decide.” You are training your brain away from “hunting” the right answer to “gathering” more perspectives on the edge of your knowledge. This is especially effective as a recruiting mindset to build early teams with the diversity required to avoid obvious (in retrospect) bad solutions.

3. Introduce novelty into routines. The brain is quick to seize upon routines that register as safe, even if they are *novel* at first. Counteract that by creating routines that engage other sensory experiences in the brain. For example, set aside a percentage of roving desks to invite new interactions between coworkers — especially from different departments. Ellen’s favorite is a bi-weekly 3-hour, no phone, no computer, in-person collaboration. People use whiteboards, markers and sticky notes, or pen and paper while doing everything from 1-on-1’s to architecting and design sessions. “What you see is that within a few weeks, teams drop in to a very different cadence."

The brain is a learning machine—just like great teams. We can use the brain’s neuroplasticity, center our actions with real care for the people we lead, and as a result, we will activate a number of behaviors and outlooks that help people be their best.

What are the things you’ve done to rewire the dopamine-heavy circuits in your teams? What are "curiosity practices" that have been most effective in revealing innovative thinking on your team?

Ellen Leanse is a veteran of Apple, Google, tech entrepreneurship, and more than three decades navigating Silicon Valley. Today she teaches at Stanford University and coaches leaders and organizations on how to "think different."