Just under one third of your cortex is called the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which sits above your eyes and behind your forehead.
It is a very strange part of the brain. First, because it only fully connects up to the rest of the brain in your early thirties. Second, it is the first part of the brain to shrink as you get older (unless you take action to build brain health and extend its life).
The PFC’s role in the brain is pretty similar to what a CEO has to do in an organization: it sets strategy, allocates goals, monitors performance, inhibits unnecessary activity and orchestrates and co-ordinates the work of the different departments/brain regions.
And above all, it is the only part of the brain that can deal with unpredicted and unexpected situations for which there is no precedent and no pre-prepared plans.
Unsurprisingly, leaders need a well-developed PFC to navigate uncertainty and complexity in the corporate world. And because this part of the brain is what allows us to time travel – reviewing the past and projecting into the future – it opens us up to regret about the past and worry about the future. These are emotional challenges familiar to every leader.
The good news is that there is an antidote to such stresses and it is called confidence. Confidence is not optimism or self-esteem – it is the belief that you can do something and that the result will be an outcome you want. Not certainly – but probably – confidence is a projection of success into the future that prices in uncertainty and accepts the (smaller) possibility of failure.
This forward time travel is only possible through the PFC and the effects of this are five fold;
- It is a mini-antidepressant and mood elevator
- It lowers anxiety
- It boosts motivation and initiative
- It makes you slightly smarter (because increased dopamine improves PFC function)
- It makes you more persuasive by raising your status.
But a warning – because confidence is so powerful, it can swerve to over-confidence, and crucial PFC-linked capacities such as self-awareness, risk perception and empathy become degraded. And when that happens, it is bad news for any organisation.
Author: Professor Ian Robertson, Academic Partner at The Leadership High, Neuroscientist, Co-Director of The Global Brain Health Institute, Author of ‘How Confidence Works’
TLH helps organisations transform people and teams, developing belief, capabilities and habits to go ‘in pursuit of better’. If you’re looking to help your team lead on another level, get in touch – contact@theleadershiphigh.com
