The Science Behind Great Leadership

At the end, he paused, and he looked at Jack Welch, and he said, you know, Mr. Welch, for over 30 years, you've had use of my hands. Said, if only you'd asked, you could have had use of my brain, too. On this episode of Executive Edge, Simon is joined by Mike Mears, former chief of human capital at the CIA, best-selling author, and founder of the CIA Leadership Academy.

Mike shares why great leadership isn't about style. It's about aligning with human nature. I think we should rethink what we're doing on the executive management level and start applying more kind of tricks and tools that you can use to pull people in, produce those chemicals as we were talking about, but get better results, happier workforce, higher motivation, more satisfaction, and better profits at the end of the day. Hi, everyone.

Welcome to another episode of Executive Edge, here with one of your co-hosts, Simon Rycroft. I'm excited to have with me someone you're going to learn a lot about, you may not have heard about in the past, but someone with an amazing background. And we're going to have a great conversation broadly on leadership, but also with a focus on the nuances of what works in leadership with some background in neuroscience and psychology. So Mike Mears, really, really excited to have you on.

Appreciate you coming on the show today. Thank you. Simon, I am absolutely delighted to be here. So I'm going to give an introduction, because we always do that.

It's a good setting. But I think it's pretty important this time around as well. So Mike's a leadership expert, best-selling author, and the former chief of human capital at the CIA. Before joining the CIA, Mike served as an SVP at General Electric GE Investments.

He not only earned his Six Sigma Black Belt, but also got to work with the leadership legend, Jack Walsh. Excited to learn a bit more about that experience as we get into the conversation. Mike's latest book, which I encourage everyone to go out and get a copy of, is titled Certainty, How Great Bosses Can Change Minds and Drive Innovation. The book reveals how leaders can instantly become more effective by aligning their leadership approach with human nature, leveraging insights from both neuroscience and psychology.

And I think, as you can hear from this introduction, Mike's got a very unique experience, an expert-backed position on that topic. Currently as the founder of the CIA Leadership Academy, Mike is a keynote speaker, advisor, and trainer. Focuses on helping executives around the world to master their leadership skills. Last but not least, Mike earned his bachelor's at West Point, but also has an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Mike, thank you again. Where do I start? So normally when we're having these conversations, I've got the script, I've got things. I know this conversation could go on for hours, but this isn't the Joe Rogan podcast.

But we have to start somewhere. So let me jump in with just the time that you spent with Jack Walsh specifically, and then perhaps how that compares a little differently to experiences of leading human capital at the CIA. I mean, not me, but tell us about those two kind of polar opposites. Well, it was a fascinating time for me, because Simon, I just happened to hit it.

I worked for Welch for almost nine years, and it was right at the peak of GE's influence, power, everything. It was the 1990s, basically. And while you can't, I wouldn't advise any executive to use Jack Walsh's style today, what I find astounding is I've rerun the tapes about my time there as how many things he did do that have a profound positive effect on positively getting things done. And I'll give you a quick example.

He started something called Workout. I call those quick wins. It was just simply a method of getting employees together without the boss so they're not fearful. They brainstorm minor, small solutions to problems at the grassroots level.

He used that for years, and the reason I bring it up is going to the neuroscience of things, we all crave a little piece of the pie at work. We want to participate somewhat. And so he was enabling that. And then you mentioned Six Sigma.

He did the same thing there, which was he copied all this from Larry Bossidy at another company and then brought Six Sigma in. And what we quickly discovered is you have to pull in the employees to be part of this process. One, because they know how process really works. Looking down, you really don't know the complexity.

But number two, what we discovered is employees who are participating in the solutions are bought in, and that gets you away from change resistance. So long-winded story, but he did so many things that were absolutely fascinating below the surface that fit human nature instead of just blindly trying to push against it, like many of us do. So there were a lot of reasons for his success other than just his style. And by the way, at CIA, it's all exactly the same because human nature is human nature.

People are the same, whether they're working for a British automotive company or they're working for Silicon Valley company. Deep down, we've got the same emotions, fears, instincts, drives, and so on. And that's what you just have to align with when you're leading and managing a company. Yeah, I love that.

I think one nuance I was interested in kind of doing a little deeper on was obviously within the intelligence community, there isn't the gratitude that just human nature chases down of kind of public profile and recognition and feedback loops and all those kinds of things that work in the private sector and within business that are missing. Is that a nuance that changes how leaders have to operate and perhaps how they're motivated? Or the CIA are just hiring people that understand that that's always just isn't an element that's going to be part of the work that they do, and therefore you don't have to lead them differently because of the onboarding and the selection process, I guess.

Well, one thing, if you lead them well, it's an easier job in CIA. And the reason is you just mentioned onboarding. The selection process is the highest validity selection process in the world, simply because it's not just a layman interviewing you like you would do for a regular job. But you've got everything else.

You've got the polygraph in there. You've got psychological interviews. You've got a psychiatrist session. You've got medical interviews.

You've got repeated other interviews and psychological assessments. So the validity of selection is super, super high. So you're starting off with a really good base, and that makes leading people a lot easier because you've got fewer disengaged employees. But that's really the only difference.

Maybe another one is that CIA is obviously a very mission-driven organization. You don't have to tell people what the mission is. I used to collect data on the culture there all the time, and mission was always first. And so that gives you a savings in that all you have to do now as a leader is be able to link the people to the mission so they understand the impact they're having, praise them for that, which is an interesting process on the neuroscience of the brain, which we can talk about in a minute.

But it's all the ABCs of basic leadership 101 that push these things and give you better results. There is something I discovered about a year ago, though, a cognitive bias that all of us have, but it plays out with executives in that we tend to give short shrift to the soft side of things, and we tend to pay more attention to what are the hard issues of structure, processes, policies, which is just something I'd warn all executives on. Be careful of that tangibility bias, it's called.

Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely been an increase in awareness of the need to effectively assess and then also help improve workers' soft skills. But I wonder how much of that's actually done in reality, because the awareness of the fact that it's important in a role versus the actual follow through sometimes can be quite a big gap. There's a huge negative associated with that, too, if you don't.

I'll give you a couple of examples of that tangibility bias. It's a tendency, you'll see an executive come in and want to change culture. Instead of doing the ABCs of how you change culture, especially working through those frontline managers that are crucial, they will tend to, say, reorganize the organization. So it's a hard solution to a soft problem.

You can see it in our own biases. Look at your to-do list, any of us, and what you'll see is a lot of hot, administrative, pressing administrative things that we have to do. But you don't see anything on the soft side, like tell Jennifer she did a wonderful job on XYZ and it produced these results. So it's really incredible that the brain will gravitate to the concrete and not the soft.

So another big one, I've never been in an organization in public or private sector where they don't say, we hire our frontline managers for their technical skills and their people skills. Everybody says that. When you drill in, and I have, I have yet to find a company, except for about 3% of the companies in the world, who actually do select for those people skills. They give it lip service, but they will always hire the best salesperson to be the sales manager.

And the old saw is then you've just lost your best salesperson and you gained a bad sales manager because you weren't looking at the people skills side. So there are a lot of things that we all tend to overlook because of this tangibility bias and our focus on concrete. But there are ways to get around that. I've got a couple of things that I tell executives they can do.

One of them is weekly reflection. They absolutely have to take 30 minutes off Saturday morning over a cup of coffee and think through the soft stuff. What am I going to do this week? Who do I praise?

How will I get the message down to frontline managers? How will I apply soft accountability to change their behaviors? So that's one thing, the weekly reflection. Another thing I learned, I learned this from the National Reconnaissance Office.

People put up spy satellites, copied this from them. Everybody does budget reviews. Remember, that's a hard solution. That's a tangible solution to things.

But nobody does leadership reviews. Think about that. That's stunning. So I have my clients doing, and they want to do them every 60 days or every quarter, that's fine.

But it's a time to have positive discussions about soft stuff, about the leadership stuff, about culture, about motivation, all that good stuff. No gotchas. It's not like a negative budget review that primes the brain to close in. It's the exact opposite.

But those are ways at least executives can kind of escape this tangibility bias. There's a tagline right there from rocket launching or satellite launches to leadership reviews, right? That's a lovely connection. Why don't we try and tie back to your book as well?

Because one thing that fascinated me was just the title around certainty and how important that is and how much is actually often overlooked, right? I mean, just again, back to the human nature of needing comfort and certainty and security that a lot of people look for. And they look for it in personal relationships. They look for it in their own built environment, right?

They create homes. They make these homes secure, right? They live in locations. They feel more comfortable.

But also at the workplace, how important is it for leaders to really take it on as something that they need to do to help calm people's nervous system, right? In order to allow them to focus and be productive. Because the world, I think it's always been uncertain. But I think now with social media, there's a greater sharing of the uncertainty and the noise around the world.

It feels like there's more chaos than has been. The reality is I think it's just more visible now. But what is the role of the leader in creating certainty where they can? Thank you for that question.

I love that. Because first off, I'd say there are two kinds of certainty. There is the certainty we normally think of. And the Department of Defense calls it VUCA, this volatility, uncertainty of the environment we're in.

Every CEO I know is swamped with where is AI going to take us? What's the future? I'm not talking about all that strategic uncertainty. Because you can't, as a leader, I contend, solve that in the employee brain.

I mean, you can give them a vision, a broad vision and so forth. But you're not going to take away the angst that we all have over the train that's coming at us. I'm talking about local certainty. Because that's what's key.

And that's what makes us operate efficiently or not efficiently at that atomic level, at the work level, basically. So the reason I, and look, I'll shamelessly hold this thing up. But the reason I titled the book Certainty was, again, working with cognitive scientists, our brains are still where they were 10,000 years ago in terms of the survival instinct is paramount. That's what the brain just wants to keep us alive.

That's job one. And so all this stuff, most of it operates at an unconscious level. But we're always examining things in terms of fear or reward. This is going to hurt me.

This is going to help me. The boss comes out with a new proclamation. Alarm bells will go off inside my head unconsciously. Oh, my gosh, what does this mean?

Is this change is usually not good? Which is why the assumption for all CEOs should be just accept the fact that the human brain is designed to be risk averse. We're locked in the status quo because the status quo is safe. So any kind of change will.

So how do you release that? How do you change that locked in state of the human brain? And it goes back to what you brought up, which is this local certainty. You've got to produce some level of psychological safety, number one.

And that's pretty simple. That's the front line manager coming in and smiling at you in the morning. So you get all these crazy, unconscious, angsty things in your head, like is the boss mad at me? That stuff can go away with a kind word from a boss for a few days, anyway.

So number one is you want to get the psychological safety locked in. And we discovered this at CIA in 98 to 2001 with some studies we did. And about the same time, I think it was Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School, started her work on psychological safety. And it's all underneath the surface.

We're not aware of it. But that's step one. And only then can you move to the next step where you're building trust with people. And that's the law of reciprocity, a repetitive giving of your gifts of time or advice or data or whatever someone responds to, to build trust.

And only when you get through those three do you ever get to clarity, which is a meeting of the minds about what expectations are. You can write KPIs until you're blue in the face. But all they do is apply more stress to people. Whereas if you can reach the stage of clarity, of just two-way conversations that are casual between frontline managers and employees, boy, that's when you put it all together.

Psychological safety, then you've got trust. Now you've got the clarity on top of that. Now you can push people to unbelievable limits without increasing all the stress that we tend to increase in the way we run things now. What about the, and that's fascinating.

I mean, it really applies a completely more progressive lens to some of the old studies, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But taking it to the next level, I think, makes more sense in my mind. What about the individual or the individuality of those safety needs? And how important is it for leaders to, probably, to an optimal level?

Because, and I know this for a fact, you can go down too much of a rabbit hole about caring too much about what every single individual wants. And there's safety nets to the point at which you're doing one-on-ones and catching up with people and getting their feedback. That just becomes overwhelming. But at the same time, if you don't do any of that, and you just talk to everyone as if they're the same, and you don't really, truly understand what they're thinking, you're missing out.

So where's the sweet spot in making it an individual approach? You know, that's a great question, too. Because it almost hurts me to talk about this soft stuff, Simon. I mean, look at me.

I'm an old spy. I spent half my time, CIA time, covertly operating behind the Iron Curtain in denied areas. I started out working against groups that would kill you in a heartbeat if they knew who you really were. And so you can imagine me selected for that job and my attitude toward all this soft, fuzzy stuff.

And yet, over the years and looking at the science and so forth, I'm now a proponent of it. But you are exactly right. It's got to be moderation in all things. And I'll give you an example.

Needless to say, I score lower than you do on empathy when I take a psychological test. And the reason was because of the nature of the jobs that I did as a lone wolf and so on. Somebody's got lower empathy, not higher. Actually, psychological assessments on leadership acumen ability were discovered, oddly enough, by the OSS, CIA's predecessor, in 1943.

It's one of the three biggest discoveries, I think, in psychology in that century. And what they were trying to do is they were parachuting teams in France that were breaking up because of bad leadership. So the psychologist went to General Donovan, who headed up the OSS, and said, look, chief, we think we can put together a psychological assessment that can give us a better feel for how well someone will lead. It won't be perfect, but we can do that.

So he said, go ahead. They did it, top secret, till 1948. But here's the interesting. Gallup today, and companies like Talent Plus and so on, will give psychological assessments to see what your leadership acumen is.

And it doesn't mean you can't get better. But about 8% of the people that they give assessments to turn out to be what they call natural leaders. And you've probably worked for them. I certainly have.

When you get up the top of that 8%, it's like breathing oxygen. You just love working for that person. And you get hyperbolic talking about it. But anyway, what are the attributes?

It turns out, in all the companies I've looked at, the number one attribute, kind of first among equal, is leaders have a real drive. They have a passion. Obviously, we wouldn't follow them if they didn't have that. However, let's go back to your question.

The leader has to have some degree of empathy to offset that drive so that they're not just an autocrat. And you can see, if you just had the drive, you'd be a dictator. But if you have some empathy, you're going to inadvertently signal that to people. And they unconsciously think, well, this leader probably has my best interests at heart, so I can trust them even more.

And again, it sounds soft and mushy. And I'm not talking social worker levels of empathy. But going back to that sweet spot you're talking about, having a degree of empathy when you deal with people is absolutely crucial. So not too much, not too little, but shoot right for the middle.

If you find yourself talking, spending 80% of your day on two-way conversations and placating people, you definitely are in the wrong end of the spectrum. If you find yourself doing none of that, you're at the wrong end of the spectrum. Yeah. And I also wonder if empathy as a character trait can allow you to better connect and honestly understand people's needs and wants.

But you don't necessarily have to agree with them and then change your approach. Exactly. Back of that, it isn't. I think that's where it's often misunderstood, that the empathy makes you super soft, right?

If we could use that phrase, and therefore someone who's just going to bend over and backwards and do whatever an employee wants. If anything, it allows you to gain their trust enough that you get full transparency on what they want, but also then allows you to communicate what's possible. Like, this pay rise is not going to happen because we have budget limits. But now that I know how important it is to you, I can make sure it's very clear on when the next promotion cycle will happen.

I can keep you completely apprised of where you are on that list. And just that honest conversation, understanding and empathizing with their need, doesn't mean you have to concede and suddenly give them the pay rise that they're looking for. But it allows you to connect in a way that they would trust you. So I can see that that.

I know that empathy is misinterpreted, right? And it is extremely valuable. So there's kind of those nuances. What do you think then, I mean, this question I had in my mind, and I think everything that we're talking about is answering this question.

So I just feel like it's almost just the premise of the recording from the get-go. But what else have we not talked about that you learn and or instilled that's probably still in practice today within the CIA and how they approach leadership and leadership development as well, not just the selection, but how they also then improve existing leaders or ones with promise to become better leaders that you think is missing in the private sector, but could be, should be used and is really overlooked.

Is that 50 things? Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that the, I just happened to be writing a book now on, my first book was more science-based on human nature. But the next book is gonna be on what CIA taught me about human nature. Because again, going back to this, it's how does the organizational, all those activities in the organization, how do they mesh with human nature?

And in most cases, in most organizations today, they don't mesh well. And the reason is the organization is looking at, again, those hard things like policies and processes and so forth on this level. And over here, the human nature side is emotional. It's not logical.

It's emotionally instinctual and so forth. So they don't really mesh. So I was writing this, just starting to do the outline. And so the director of operations, which is the spy side from where I sprang, really takes a close look at human nature and looking at frailties and where are certain misfires.

And the reason is you're trying to recruit people while quite often to spy for you. And so that kind of the, maybe the human weaknesses and foibles are what you look at. On the, in the directorate of analysis, it's the opposite. What they're looking at are how does the human brain trick itself with cognitive biases?

And we have loads of them. You know, we've got several hundred that are just shortcuts that help us get through the day and help us survive, but they can often get in the way of how a CEO manages. So anyway, it's a fun exercise, but so I'm relearning a lot of things by just going through what the CIA knows about, about human nature. But one thing is interesting is, we haven't talked about stress.

There was a study in the UK called the Whitehall study of tens of thousands of people, basically. What they found is that lower you are in a hierarchy, more stress you're under. So automatically CEOs should understand this, that the bottom is, has a certain level of stress already. Then secondly, how do you drive that, that fourth step I called the challenge.

How do you challenge people? If you challenge them before they're psychologically safe or trusting of the, of you, you're gonna increase stress drastically. So it's a huge, huge issue. I did a study, you'd be interested in this.

I did a study a couple of months ago where I took, I took two of my little AI bots and had them go out and say, okay, what is taught in MBA programs? And it came back and when you take out the splashy stuff like AI and modern technology, you take out all that stuff. It's right back to the basics of performance management that I learned decades ago of how do you communicate top down, what are your extrinsic reward systems, the metrics that drive behaviors and control systems and all this stuff.

So I gathered all that data and then I went out to this little coterie I have of psychologists and neuroscientists and they said, what type of brain chemicals does these actions, what type do they produce? And it was absolutely fascinating in every case, except for one minor exception, I'll get to, but in every case they produce, not to get geeky, but they produce cortisol, compounded cortisol and adrenaline basically. So just like when I was in combat in Vietnam a million years ago, the same stress chemicals are produced in the modern workplace.

All we're doing is taking the old curve and stress curve and pushing it harder and harder until people finally get up there, can't take anymore and they either drop out or resign or burn out or get disgruntled and become disengaged. What's missing again is this leadership element of friendly check-ins from a manager, weekly praise, two-way conversations to get all this little angst out of people's brains on a weekly basis, that's missing. If you have that, that's the stuff that produces the positive hormones that allow you to push that pedal harder on the challenge side so that that standard stress curve doesn't reach its max limit until later.

And I'll give you a quick one here, quick example. I looked at, as you know, a lot of leaders will just say, okay, well, we've got a great HR program to recognize people. Well, they do. And I've seen clients do that to a fault.

But what happens is when you get, let's say, a certificate from the HR, what it is, it gives you a little pop of dopamine for a very brief period of time. And it's just a warm and fuzzy signal from the organization. But here's where this stuff gets a little spooky. When you look at, first off, all cultures I discovered, prehistoric and all cultures today, hundreds of them, all have leaders.

So what that tells you is that our willingness to give up autonomy to work for a leader is pretty primal. It's close to the brainstem, right? And so when that, and I'll take the frontline manager and the employee, when that frontline manager now decides to give recognition, they pull the employee in, they give a specific positive signal, praise, and they link it to something that helped the organization's mission. This is what's really wacky.

Not only do you get the dopamine hit, you do, but significantly more. But you also get oxytocin, serotonin, and those are both the safety and trust chemicals. So in one fell swoop, remember I mentioned psychological safety, then trust and clarity, and then you challenge. So in one fell swoop, you've taken all this stress of performance management and change management, and you've now brought in these positive chemicals so that you can now push people even farther.

So I hope I'm not sounding Machiavellian with this, but the science helps me understand why we should be doing this. Yeah, no, I think it's fascinating. This is all stuff that's really been formally studied in the last probably 50, 60 years. I mean, even psychology is a formal science, right?

It's only been around for 80-plus years prior to that. It was all philosophy-based, right, which was just starting to scratch the surface of how the humans operate. Yeah, I mean, what I'm picking from that is that leaders ultimately are kind of the modern-day alchemists, right? And they just figure out the right way to create the right chemical balance, which is different for every individual, but by not understanding, this is what I love about what you're explaining, but by not understanding what techniques work, what effect they have, and how important they are as a kind of chemical reaction and formula to get the end goal, which is a financial target or a project completed, almost missing it, right?

Well, you don't understand, 20 years ago, I did this and this worked, but it's not working now, and the team don't respect me, and I'm new, and I'm one, I create change, and I'm not getting the same results. Well, that's probably because what worked before had a different group of people, right? Maybe you were at a different level, and there's just so this, individuals, humans are just so complex themselves, but if you break it down to the component parts, I think, and then appreciate everyone is unique, and everyone needs, like, I need dopamine, I need oxytocin, right?

Exactly. And I'll give you a quick Jack Welch story to tie that back in. I'm talking kind of precision of, geez, if only we could inject these chemicals in each employee brain, we'd have certainty, the fear and reward go away, they'd have certainty, and then they're ready for change. Well, we can't do that.

But here's a story that when I was at GE circulating, I don't know if it's true or not, but what a great story, because it sums all this up. So Jack Welch was hosting a dinner for the retiring union chief at GE, and of course, the union and management back then were always at odds. But the dinner went very cordially. They actually gave the guy the proverbial gold watch.

And at the end, he stood up, and the union chief, and gave an impassioned talk about how great the GE employees were, how much he appreciated being employed at GE. He was able to send his kids to college so they wouldn't be blue collar workers. He talked about all that he had learned at GE and was thankful, and then at the end, he paused, and he looked at Jack Welch, and he said, you know, Mr. Welch, for over 30 years, you've had use of my hands.

Said, if only you'd asked, you could have had use of my brain too. So I've always wondered about that story. Is that what triggered Welch to get into the workout thing of using all the employee brains, and then later Six Sigma to get at those employee brains? Did he suddenly realize, oh my God, I'm the CEO, I'm the executive, and all the brains are at the top.

Is that how you really run an organization? So that's kind of a broader way to look at what you and I were just talking, which is how do you rally all those brains? And I contend, if you want to be competitive, the more employee brains you got working in your direction, the better off you are. And yet Gallup numbers continue to show only 25% roughly of employees are engaged, and that's held constant for the last 15 years.

That's not good. If you engaged another 10% of your employees, employee performance statistics would go through the roof. So I think we're ready for, I don't want to say a revolution in management, but I think we should rethink what we're doing on the executive management level and start applying more kind of tricks and tools that you can use to pull people in, produce those chemicals as we were talking about, but get better results, happier workforce, higher motivation, more satisfaction, and better profits at the end of the day.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's important to the ultimate goal of the shareholders, but at the same time, creates kind of a win-win environment. I think what's super interesting, and I'd love your perspective on this, is how things are constantly evolving, right? So like how you might apply certain techniques in order to create those chemical reactions and generate change and get support from your workforce is probably different this year than it was three years ago, maybe different two years ago than it was five years ago.

I mean, there's so many things that have changed, right? Recent is obviously the technology evolution, with AI I think is causing perhaps a need for more regular certainty in some environments. I'd say COVID probably had an impact, but then you've also got the new generations coming into the workforce. Gen Zs are going to get those chemical reactions in their brain in a different way, right?

Because of the way that they've been brought up and their use of technology. So do you need to not just understand the individual, but also their quote unquote, kind of their personality traits, which could vary. It's a moving landscape. It's not an easy topic.

If anything, it's extremely complex. Boy, you just opened up Pandora's box on that one. And AI alone, you know, think about what that's going to do. So what I look for are what things could executives do that number one, don't cost any money.

And number two, generally save time, not use up time. And the exception would be that thing I mentioned about reflection, 30 minutes of reflection a week on soft issues. That does, I just stole 30 minutes of your day if you're an executive. But the rest of the stuff actually would save time.

So I'll just throw out a couple of concepts that are helpful in AI world, I think, is one I call precision delegation. And all this is, is instead of dumping, that's what delegation is in our brain, if I say the word, it's sort of dumping the work down. If you pick a small group of employees, you're a frontline manager and some project plopped on you, you give the project down, it's below your pay grade, give it to this little committee and let them work out. They know who's good at detailed work.

They know which employee is really good at outreach with customers. They know which employee is good at writing and let them analyze the thing. This is really this kind of this idea of full inclusion, but let them look at it and break up the work themselves. And that's precision delegation where suddenly you have an increased stress because each is working on a strength that they have or with a strength.

And that's empowering. So it's an interesting way to reduce stress, it's technique and get better results. I mentioned soft accountability, worked with CISA, the Cyber Infrastructure Security Agency, and we revamped their frontline manager leadership training. And the big problem, big secret is nobody applies training, leadership training after they leave the sessions.

This has been going on for 20 years with bringing our hands. They'll do one thing maybe, but it's habitual behavior stops them. So what we did is we taught them how to do under five minute check-ins each week with each employee, what questions to ask, how to keep it positive and so forth. But soft accountability, we knew they aren't gonna, only a handful would do it.

So what we did is we set up an evergreen report that each Friday they have to write three bullets of either what they learned from doing check-ins about themselves that week or what they learned from employees. So it's not punitive, it's not, did you do your check-in? What was it? Not specific, it's a mental process of learning.

And then we ran that for six weeks and then we killed the report. And the only reason is what we're doing is we're using a soft accountability like that to push the new behavior, to make it habitual. So an amazing number now have actually retained that. I mentioned the leadership reflection.

Another one, if you wanna get into it is what I call insight prompts. We mentioned the reflection time for leaders and this one's really bizarre, but if you wanna change your culture, you wanna use insight prompts. And here's the reason why. Two neuroscientists, John Kunios and Mark Beeman were co-discoverers of the brain's insight mechanism not that long ago.

And so I started working with Kunios and here's what I found is this is, it sounds like voodoo in your head when I describe what happens when you have an aha moment. But what happens is that first there's literally, well, first you have to be in a reflective mood like the 30 minutes Saturday morning and that creates an alpha brain state. So suddenly the frequency will go higher, we don't know why, to a gamma. And when that happens, there's an explosion of energy in the brain when you have an aha, much like the cartoon light bulb going off.

And it's right above the right ear in a tiny spot, instantaneously new neuron connections are made. I mean, it's actually a bizarre process. So I asked Kunios, I said, what chemicals are released when you have an aha moment? And he said, oh, this is interesting.

You know, you've got 30 some chemicals sloshing around your brain. And he said, when you have an aha, they combine in a certain way to give you a complete sense of certainty. Now, isn't that interesting? Remember certainty is the missing ingredient to get us to change.

So when that insight occurs, you're absolutely sure of it. So you can now take your pen, not your pencil and fill in your Sudoku or your crossword puzzle, or it's a bigger one and you know, I'm gonna marry this person or whatever the insight is, you are bought into it and you're willing to change. So how would you use it in the office? And I'll tell you a real quick story, a Bin Laden story.

Remember the hunt for Bin Laden? This is some years ago when Leon Panetta was CIA director, he would have Friday meetings, no, Wednesday five o'clock meetings on, how do we catch Bin Laden? It was called the Bin Laden meeting. And one session, everybody's in there and he turns to this one hapless operations officer and he says, so Jim, what ideas have you had this week to catch Bin Laden?

And the hapless guy said, chief, I don't know. I'm out of ideas. Everybody here is out of ideas. And so Panetta flared up, but then he did the right thing that leaders should do.

He apologized immediately and said, Jim, I'm not mad at you. It was just the situation. And then he said, let's do this. Let's break this meeting and you guys come back next week and bring me 10 ideas to catch Bin Laden.

So he gave what I call an insight prompt. This is mental homework to subordinates with a deadline. That's the accountability and has some teeth in it because they got to come back and talk to the CIA director. And so a week later they come back and they've got 37 new ideas to catch Bin Laden and they're bought into all of them.

So there's not gonna be any change resistance. So that's an example. And so I've started using this in some of my public sector clients like State Department. We turned around a toxic unit in 60 days using this technique of getting people to pull up ideas and present them that could radically change the culture of the organization or reduce backlog.

And it was a really powerful method. I've used it also with some private sector clients in the financial industry and we're finding it's a great way if you can, there's sparking insight and therefore certainty in somebody's brain. You can go a long way to changing culture. Yeah, I love that.

I mean, it just naturally people wanna be involved. They wanna be heard. The fact that that creates the perfect storm of chemical reactions as well in the brain just makes a lot more sense, seriously does. Well, I think, I mean, I wanna say thank you again, Mike.

I've known of you for a while and always wanted to be able to have the opportunity to kind of sit down and I hate the phrase pick your brain but that's exactly what it is. I think talking to someone that's active and constant study and then application of the applied approach of using neuroscience and psychology within leadership or within business but also in the private sector, I think it's an appropriate analogy. So I wanted to say thank you again for coming on and again, reminder to everyone to get a copy of Certainty, your first book and also keep an eye out to hopefully pre-order the second one when it's ready for release.

But yeah, thank you again for coming on. Absolutely, and by the way, best wishes on yours, Negotiation Science because it's interesting how this approach can give you a lot of great solutions to all kinds of basically soft problems, right? Yeah. Thank you, thanks very much.

Fascinating, thank you, Mike.