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Neuroscience for Leadership – Top Tips

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Neuroscience is at the forefront of innovation in leadership. Dr Tara Swart, the  only  leadership  coach  with  a  PhD  in  neuroscience  and  a successful career as medical doctor, offers her top tips for doing more with less, for longer, without burning out!

1.  Simplicity:  We have a limited bucket of cognitive resources, so reducing choices can play an important role in how we decide to spend our cognitive resources. Don’t waste big brain power on small unimportant decisions.

2.  Hydration and oxygenation: We need to drink half a litre of water daily for every 15kg of our body mass – so get drinking! Getting oxygen into our bodies and brains also boosts our ability to think, so take 10 deep breathes before an important meeting – or get exercising.

3.  Nutrition: With our brain using 20-30% of what we eat, be sure to give it the food it needs. Brain-friendly foods include: salmon, avocado, eggs, nuts, olives, dried fruit, and vegetables. As Dr Swart says “I choose what I eat so that I make better decisions”.

4.  Sleep: We all need 7-9 hours a night… at least! The research is staggering around the neural deficits experienced when we sleep for less than this.

5.  Mindfulness: 12 minutes of mindfulness a day is all it takes to improve your resilience and cortisol levels. In a world of overload, are you strong enough to put your smart phone down and DO NOTHING, if it means you’ll live a longer and healthier life?

Dr Tara Swarts unique background and depth of experience creates an uncompromising and holistic approach to performance optimisation, which has been incredibly successful with banks, hedge funds and chief executives, as well as business schools.
Email nicky@brg.co.za or CLICK HERE to find out more about her Workshop Facilitation, Executive Coaching, Keynotes or Taras Leading Sustainable Performance program

CEO Advice – Jannie Mouton – “It’s What You Focus On”

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We hear often that the business environment in South Africa is prohibitively challenging. Undoubtedly much more needs to be done to unburden businesses, particularly small businesses, from the bureaucratic red tape. However a less competitive environment is a huge advantage. Jannie Mouton, founder of PSG…

“Yes, we have unbelievable challenges, but as I often tell people, we started a bank called Capitec in South Africa and it’s an unbelievable success. We don’t have a chance at starting something like that in America or Europe. It’s already been done there.”

Mouton feels there are opportunities everywhere. “For me the [RSA] environment throws up obvious opportunities in education, banking, the food sector, and now electricity.”  

Rather than seeing problems, how about we see opportunities. In fact, make a mental note of whatever you complain about next. Could that be an opportunity? If it’s not yours, it’s certainly someone else’s.  

Moutons advice “Formulate your plan, refer back often, adapt as things change and EXECUTE!”

Johannes “Jannie” Mouton, a qualified chartered accountant, is the founder and chairman of PSG Financial Services (now serving as a non-executive director). He is a renowned South African businessman with over 35 years experience in financial management and investment banking.

Where have the Leaders gone?

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Leaderex 2016 held in Johannesburg last month posed an important question some of South Africa’s top CEOs, heads of business school and executive teams; “Where have all the leaders gone?”

The question provided a great transition into discussions about the state of leadership in South Africa, and the world in general, and laid the foundation for a host of sparkling debates and frank discussions on leadership. It would seem, from popular consensus, that the demise of leadership in South Africa, whilst a real challenge, may have been somewhat exaggerated.  

A Local View

Prof. Nicola Kleyn, Dean of GIBS echoed the feelings of many at Leaderex – “leadership starts with self”. She highlighted that our own day-to-day lives often demand that we play multiple leadership roles. This message supports conventional wisdom, that no matter who we are, or what status we hold, we all have a leadership role to play. “We have passed the point where we can simply look on and shake our heads. We all need to stand up and be counted” said Kleyn.

But how do we get this right? How do we turn around the confusion to create clarity around leadership? According to Dave Duarte, founder of digital marketing company Treeshake, it’s all about direction. The void is simply because “many leaders are more worried about holding an office than about creating direction”. Duarte’s view was backed by Jonathan Foster-Pedley from Henley Business School who stated that “The point of leadership is to provide people with purpose and meaning, and a sense of integrity and value. A good leader will make you and me give every last thing we have in the service of something we would die for.”

Yes We Can

So the question is, are we even remotely capable?  “Yes!” That was the clear message from the University of Stellenbosch’s Piet Naudé.  “We do have leaders capable of providing direction”. But as events unfold in pre-election United States and post-Brexit United Kingdom, it would seem that we are simply part of a bigger challenge.  “The world is currently battling the wrong kind of leadership. Leaders who use populist language and draw people back into their nationalistic and ethnic self-enclosed lives, whilst [what we need is] more openness and cooperation in a global world,” he said. Leadership is a responsibility, and just like businesses have a responsibility to its own employees, customers and stakeholders, so too is there a responsibility toward playing a moral and socially conscious role in providing direction for people.  When there is political uncertainty, business plays an even more critical role in guiding the performance and morals of the people it chooses to serve and employ.  Yet, to fulfil this role, we all need to be open to learning, change, and trying different approaches to achieve results.

A Lifelong Lesson

There are thousands of books, podcasts, and training courses on the topic of leadership, so many that it becomes hard to know which one to read, believe, implement. But can the skill of leadership really be learned or is this something we’re born with?  For the most part, our leadership lives start out with mimicry. For many of us, leadership skills are acquired from our earliest role models, and we quickly play back the tapes once given to us by parents, guardians, managers, community leaders and professors. So it’s not really what we’re born with but rather how we’re raised as leaders.  A leadership development challenge is figuring out how to break the patterns of the past and provide leaders with a new set of skills, tools and techniques for leading effectively in the workplace. Yet the study of leadership is no more an intervention than winning an election is an overnight game. Leadership is a lifelong study. And it would seem that the earlier in life you start, the better.

Leadership is the pursuit of greatness, achieved through others – a task that mankind may never be able to definitively tick. There is no silver bullet for leadership, but the positive and conscious application of a leadership philosophy can cause an attitude shift that helps you discover some great ammunition for leading along the way.

Whichever leadership philosophy you choose to follow, be mindful that it is just for now. The lessons we need to learn as leaders will continue to evolve, and change, over time. Perhaps our original question is rhetorical.  It’s not “where have all the leaders gone?” but more a statement of fact, that “leadership is forever a work in progress” and we should all be striving to build our own leadership capacity.

The great minds that coalesced at Leaderex offered us some starting points. Ponder these daily, for some time, and see what unfolds on your journey:  Listen. Have strong values. Inspire others. Know your purpose. Be a role model. Strive to achieve the impossible. Be Visionary. Be bold. Be transparent. And, be kind.  We are all living examples of leadership, and we all have the power to make a positive and meaningful difference.   

Performance Management Faces Major Paradox

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Gone are the days of performance reviews. Dave Ulrich explains to Alan Hosking from HR Future how companies can resolve the performance management paradox by clarifying expectations, defining consequences, establishing metrics and standards, and bringing it all together through conversation. In what way is the thinking on performance management changing? A senior leader at a company recently said, “We have done away with performance appraisal because it causes so many problems.”

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Five Top Tips for HR Professionals

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In order to manage HR and people strategy, HR leaders need to enjoy working with people first and foremost. However, to really thrive we must be aware of the business as a whole; understanding its goals so that we can adapt people strategy to have a positive impact on the organisation.

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It’s time we rethink HR in a radical way

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Gone are the days when HR was just about salaries and employee benefits.

Human Resources professionals, regularly report a common critical challenge: they feel and experience a lack of credibility from within their business organisations. This finding dovetails with the common perception that, for years, HR has been the ‘least sexy’ end of business, proffering roles that few business science graduates are interested in pursuing. Whilst HR teams have been tasked with attracting and retaining great talent for their organisations, they have themselves struggled to draw talent to their own backyard.

Yet, recent research shows that a transformation is underway. It’s time that we wipe the slate clean and rethink HR functions, careers and value in a radical way. What would you call HR if it wasn’t already known as Human Resources? How differently would leaders and managers meet their “people needs”? Would HR really just be a cost centre, or is there a different kind of value to be added and gleaned? What could your business do differently to address the challenges of people, culture, and performance?

Global human resources guru Professor Dave Ulrich has persuasively demonstrated that HR’s traditional role is a thing of the past. He believes that, going forward, the HR function will increasingly be measured on business value, not people processes and transactions. As customers both inside and outside of the business look to leadership to secure their investment, it is little surprise that human capital is fast finding its way to the balance sheet.

Five years ago, Ulrich embarked on a research project to identify which role within a typical C-suite structure would be best suited to take over from the CEO. Unexpectedly, the HR executive appeared to be the most suitable position to step up to CEO. At that time, however, few if any HR execs were considered as candidates. But five years on, things are changing. A new trend is emerging. The people agenda has finally hit the top job and, in the US in particular, HR execs are not only being shortlisted for CEO roles, but are actually being appointed too. Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, for example, served as VP of HR for 18 months. Anne Mulcahy, CEO of Xerox for 8 years, previously ran the company’s HR operations for several years. Today, Chief Human Resource Officers often report directly to the CEO, serve as key advisors, and present regularly to the board. These HR hotshots are no longer filling a support or administrative function, but rather serving as the person who enables business strategy.

Interestingly, all these appointments have had line management experience, and usually experience in other functions too. The HR high-flyer who becomes CEO is not necessarily someone who has only ever been an HR specialist, but quite often more of a generalist who’s spent time in HR.

It’s clear that the time has come for HR to become a more integral part of the business: line and HR need to coalesce. We need to rethink the value of HR as a function, and link HR’s value to organisational performance. If you were to spend the next year securing line management experience for everyone in your HR team, what would you do, and what’s stopping you? In turn, the credibility that HR professionals in South Africa still lack will evolve, not only from their ability to consistently deliver, but because their deliverables will be perceived as strategic and valuable. Furthermore, HR departments will be better positioned to foster a pipeline of dynamic, inspirational, influential leaders for future top jobs.

Nicola Tyler is CEO of Business Results Group, and will be on stage with Professor Dave Ulrich during his two one-day events, in both Jo’burg and Cape Town, on The Future Value of HR, hosted by Business Results Group and the Gordon Institute of Business Science. For more information visit www.brg.co.za/events

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