By David Rock
An informal study by my think tank, the NeuroLeadership Institute (details of which are in “5 Leadership Trends to Watch in 2024,” Fast Company, December 2023), found that roughly 50% of leaders’ time is going to things they’ve never had to do before, such as AI transformation, hybrid work, and dealing with overwhelmed employees. The other 50% is spent on things leaders have always had to do, such as understanding, motivating, and developing people—but these tasks are both harder and more important than ever. This situation puts leadership in a perfect storm: It’s getting more complicated right when it’s becoming more important, and leaders have less time to focus on their development. Clearly, we need some breakthroughs in both how to lead and how to develop leaders.
I believe that understanding leadership through a neuroscience lens helps in two important ways. First, neuroscience provides a robust framework for understanding all kinds of leadership tasks, helping leaders to be more effective in the moment. And second, neuroscience points to more effective ways of training and developing leaders.
LEADERSHIP IS BIOLOGICAL
Whether you live in Mumbai, sub-Saharan Africa, or New York City, getting physically fit is largely the same process. You might do different exercises or eat different foods, but the process is basically a biological phenomenon. I believe the same is true with leadership. Both getting fit and leadership are difficult, benefit from discipline, require self-motivation, and involve developing the right habits. Both require strengthening existing neural pathways in the brain. And neither involves learning something once and then you’re done; they require constant maintenance.
Another reason I believe leadership is a biological process is that I see extremely similar people-related challenges globally, across all industries and at all levels of leaders. Moreover, if you study all the available leadership books and models, you’ll find the same few ideas over and over. I believe leadership is hard, and the challenges universal, because you need to rely on three cognitive capacities with inherent challenges that require very intentional training to improve. That makes leadership very helpful to understand from a neuroscience lens.
The three challenges to our cognitive capacities are:
- A limited capacity to hold information short-term
- The stressful nature of leadership, which reduces our ability to be calm and focused
- The difficulties of understanding other people and motivating them. In neuroscience terms, these are the challenges to working memory, self-regulation, and social cognition.
Since 2008, my team at the NeuroLeadership Institute has been publishing research about the cognitive underpinnings of leadership tasks to help improve them. We start with a question—for example, what happens in the brain when feedback really works?—and then synthesize research from many different labs to find a signal. We’ve now published more than 50 papers exploring phenomena such as feedback, empathy, decision making, and motivation, and how to improve these in organizational settings.
UNDERSTANDING THE BRAIN IN REAL TIME
Imagine learning to cook but having no words for salt, sugar, or spice, and then someone explains these words and ties them to the experience of the taste. Your cooking would soon improve. Similarly, using memorable models to understand the brain in real time makes leadership easier and is shown to be more satisfying. For example, if you understand the capacity limits of working memory, you improve all your communications. You can see, in real time, when you’ve “lost” people in a conversation because you know how easily that can happen and can recognize the signs.
Helping busy leaders understand their own and others’ brains allows them to flexibly direct their attention and switch cognitive strategies when needed. This is similar to teaching people to practice mindfulness, which has many cognitive benefits. In both cases, you practice noticing and switching your attention moment to moment, building important circuitry that improves many functions, including those underpinning the three challenges of working memory, self-regulation, and social cognition.
When educating leaders about the brain, there’s a certain level of neuroscience that’s “just right.” Too few details, and it feels like pop science (and the engineers in the group will tear you to pieces). Too much, and it becomes overly academic, too far from a leader’s day-to-day experiences. The sweet spot involves taking complex concepts and presenting them with easy-to-recall models based on rigorous scientific research—which is easier said than done. It took me three and a half years to develop the SCARF® model, which summarizes what happens in the brain when people interact socially. SCARF® stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness. It describes the five reactions your brain has (either positively or negatively) in all types and scales of social interactions. The SCARF® model was one of the first frameworks to effectively simplify complex neuroscience in a useful way without losing scientific validity.
Around 2007, when we started to integrate SCARF® into leadership programs, it became this one model that could explain so much of what goes on in our interactions with others. Since then, I’ve come to see that SCARF® provides a solid foundational theory for motivation, inclusion, reward and recognition, psychological safety, belonging, feedback, conflict resolution, teamwork, performance, engagement, and more. This makes the model relevant to roughly two-thirds of everything you might teach people in a leadership program. Having one core framework reduces something I call “model muddle” in leadership programs, where you often have 10 different ways of understanding the same idea. It also increases coherence, or the structural integrity of ideas, because you keep coming back to SCARF® from different perspectives as you address different human challenges. By paring back to basic biology, we massively simplified and connected many seemingly disconnected ideas. SCARF® helps leaders see the whole range of social dynamics in a more accurate way.
Over time, we’ve created a series of similar kinds of models that address decision making, the creative process, fluency, mindset, and more. In short, we’ve built models that summarize complex science for many of the difficult things that leaders need to do, in particular those involving the challenges of limited working memory, self-regulation, and social cognition.
BETTER LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
I’ve run the same leadership programs with and without neuroscience insights, and they are very different experiences. When we use neuroscience, leaders learn more and the material sticks longer. Why? It comes down to the strength of insight that leaders have during learning experiences, which our research shows correlates to the likelihood of behavior change.
Teaching leadership through a neuroscience lens has a packaging benefit, but this is only part of the story. Most of the world’s leaders are academically trained, either as accountants, lawyers, engineers, or MBAs. In all cases, they appreciate a more rigorous, scientific approach to learning about leadership, which is often viewed as a messy “soft” skill. It’s one thing to tell a leader, “You need to build trust with your team.” It’s another to say, “The brains of people you manage are automatically in a threat state unless you proactively take steps otherwise. People in this state make bad decisions. Here’s exactly why that happens in the brain, and what science says to do differently.”
Speaking in terms of things happening in the brain makes it easier for leaders to picture the ideas and therefore process them. The less effort it takes to hold a concept in mind, the more you can connect this concept to other concepts. This means stronger insights, which correlate to sustained change. Around 2003, when I first transitioned to leadership development through neuroscience, I noticed that leaders were paying more attention, holding complex ideas more easily, and making their own strong connections to new ways of working. In short, when we discussed leadership tasks in more concrete terms anchored in brain science, leaders had deeper insights and built more robust habits.
Another benefit is that neuroscience points to ways to make leadership development more effective. It highlights the active mechanisms in building new habits, allowing us to move away from the friction-full five-day leadership retreat toward novel, more scalable approaches. Research on building habits (“Leveraging Cognitive Neuroscience for Making and Breaking Real-World Habits,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, January 2025) suggests that participants in leadership development programs need to have strong experiences that make such an impression, these can change how they see the world. This is best delivered through a combination of storytelling, research, and activities, which can be done through a variety of approaches, including the traditional classroom setting, virtual conversations, leader-led learning journeys, or even interactions with AI. When the research component is based on the brain, we find the insights to be even stronger.
Research shows that the insight experience is likely to be more powerful in learning new habits if it happens in a social context, either in a cohort of peers or intact teams. The social pressure of being with others increases attention, and because the learning is social in nature, the material embeds in more accessible brain networks. In addition, a big insight from social science is that a major reason people adopt a new behavior is they believe everyone is doing it—it becomes a social norm (“The Most Surprising Reason People Change,” NeuroLeadership Institute, January 2022). Therefore, we believe the best way to do leadership development is not necessarily top-down, giving a few people a lot of content slowly, but what we call an everyone-to-everyone model, which involves giving a little bit of content to every leader at all levels quickly, but in bites over time.
When we build one habit at a time, over time, we get the benefits of something necessary for long-term change: the “spacing effect.” We’ve measured the effectiveness of the same content in both day-long workshops and microlearning (for example, five-minute sessions once per week), and we found that microlearning outperforms longer sessions when it comes to sustained habit activation.
LEADERSHIP THROUGH A NEUROSCIENCE LENS
In more than 20 years of developing leaders, I’ve observed that leaders who understand their own and others’ brains can respond more adaptively to both everyday and totally disruptive challenges. They maintain their cool under pressure and bring out the best thinking in themselves and others, even in stressful situations.
Likewise, leadership development based on neuroscience principles engages leaders’ interest and helps them better understand and process new ideas, leading to moments of powerful insight that can make learning last a lifetime. In an era when leaders are faced with unprecedented challenges and demands on their time, neuroscience-based leadership development can be a big help in bridging the leadership skills gap.
David Rock is co-founder and CEO of NeuroLeadership Institute, and as a consultant and leadership coach, he advises corporations around the world. He is the author of Coaching with the Brain in Mind, Quiet Leadership, and Personal Best.