Your #1 Asset

I happened upon some interesting studies regarding how the brain reacts to different situations.  In particular, about our capacity to make decisions, solve problems and collaborate with others.  The information has a profound impact on the performance of a team.  When individuals have a threat response, capacity to perform and reason diminishes and it is increased under a reward response.

Our brain is constantly evaluating whether a situation is a threat or a reward.  In social settings (working with others) there are five areas of human experience:  status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness.  These five areas activate either the “primary reward” or “primary threat” circuitry of the brain.  Each individual has unique sensitivities related to each area.

When a threat response is present, working memory function, which processes new information and ideas, decreases.  This impairs analytic thinking, creative insight, and problem solving.  Your brain becomes much less efficient.  When a reward response is present you are more effective, more open to ideas, and more creative.  You are less likely to burnout because you can manage your stress.

Understanding the five areas of human experience can be a great asset to a manager.  You can design interactions to minimize threats.  Also understanding what drives people ,you can motivate others more effectively by tapping into internal rewards.

The five drivers of human behavior are as follows:

Status is about your relative importance to others.  Certainty concerns being able to predict the future.  Autonomy provides a sense of control over events.  Relatedness is a sense of safety with others, of friend rather than foe.  And fairness is a perception of fair exchanges between people.

Individuals are uniquely more sensitive to one or more of these drivers.  Your brain will either tag what is going on as ‘good’ and want more, or will tag the situation as ‘bad’ and will try to avoid or move away from what is happening.  Someone feeling threatened will be less likely to be able to solve complex problems and more likely to make mistakes – you go into survival mode.  You’re more likely to avoid taking risks.

When a situation is full of reward responses it is closely linked to positive emotions.  You’re engaged and engagement is a state of being willing to do difficult things, to take risks, to think deeply about issues and develop new solutions.  People experiencing positive emotions perceive more options when trying to solve problems.

The next five blogs will explore each of these human experiences and talk about how threats and rewards might be managed in each.  As a manager, we are all managing situations with others, you can use these tools to bring out the best in those around you.

Take the self assessment and see what drives you.  http://scarfsolutions.com/selfassessment.aspx

Have you explored any of these before?  On first glance, what do you think your primary drivers are?  Leave your comments below.

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