Leadership 2020-10-11T22:03:04+00:00

Scientific lessons to increase your leadership qualities & skills

learn and practice actionable & science backed techniques that help you become a better leader in your organization

Leadership is a big and broad topic. Business schools around the world are focusing on ethical leadership, leadership management, and leadership development. Some even give degrees in “Leadership”.

Yet, even academics acknowledge that there is no singular definition of “Leadership” and no single way to be “a leader” or to become a “good leader”. Instead, leaders can employ a variety of styles and skills. Our quick fixes and micro-habits will help you get a better understanding of leadership and how to enhance your leadership skills.

This module distills decades of research about leadership into actionable mini-lessons designed to help you develop your leadership skills. The lessons have been set up to be easy to follow and implement in your daily life. They include a range of tools and tactics to help you better manage yourself and reach your goals.

By getting our Leadership module, you’ll learn how to handle and address common leadership issues and improve your overall leadership skills. Our tips will focus on some quick fixes and micro-habits about leadership and leading a team.

We’ve searched hundreds of articles from psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, cognitive science, decision theory, philosophy, and moral psychology to guide our approach and to develop the best ways for you to address leadership issues and help you lead better.

We have then summarized and explained it in a way that is easy to understand and even easier to follow. You will be given quick tactics that you can use in the moment, as well as micro-habits you can implement to improve your ability to lead over time.

What leadership is (and Is not)

Indeed, researchers generally agree that relationship-building and effective decision-making are important aspects of leadership.

Leadership is about Relationship-Building 

Often this is called relational or transformational leadership. A lot of this research comes from Education and traditional Business Schools. The idea here is that a good leader should have skills that enage, enhance, and maximize the skills of the people they lead. This is similar to the common notion of servant leadership. Leaders should be able to enhance the abilities of themselves and the group. It’s important to recognize that you work as a group and that you succeed or fail as a group (2, 3, 5).

Leadership is about Decisiveness

Often this is referred to as executive or command leadership. A lot of this research comes from Organizational Behavior research, Moral Psychology, and Applied Ethics. The idea here is that a good leader should be firm, strong, and decisive. This is part of the more traditional notion of leadership, but challenges the notion that a leader should be feared. Leaders should be able to make tough decisions and understand that you cannot make everyone happy. It also, however, means that you need to gather information and make the best decision possible for the group. In order to do this, you need to understand your team, yourself, and your projects/goals.

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Leadership and the brain

Since leadership is so multi-faced, it implicates multiple different regions of the brain. We’ll talk about one that is important for relationship building and one for decisiveness. 

A key aspect of relationship-building is engaging your ability to perspective-take and understand the actions, behaviors, and thoughts of others. There are several terms for this, but most commonly it’s known as empathy (1, 2, 5). The neuroscience of empathy engages multiple parts of the brain, but most regions are in the midbrain and brainstem. The midbrain is within the center of our brain. The supramarginal gyrus is located where the parietal, temporal, and frontal lobes meet. According to one study the right supramarginal gyrus allows us to complete complex mental activities, such as recognizing that our perceptions are different than the perceptions of others (6).

A key aspect of being decisive is being able to gather, synthesize, and properly apply information. This engages aspects of our memory, particularly our working memory. Working memory is a type of memory that allows you to use and manipulate information to solve problems or think about possibilities. The two key regions of the brain implicated here are the right Temporoparietal Junction (rTPJ) and the Prefrontal Cortex, especially that Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) (6, 7, 8). Research has shown that these areas are implicated for different decision-making activities. These include counterfactual thought, moral judgment, prospective planning, spatial reasoning, are intuitive judgments.

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Debunking the myth of leadership:

Myth #1:

Leadership is about being feared and exercising power

Some people believe that effective leaders must be feared or “rule with an iron fist”. Such leadership may be effective in specific contexts. For instance, a military leader may ensure his soldiers fight on if they know the leader will kill any deserters. And even in traditional business settings, providing clear consequences for poor performance or bad behavior can be part of an effective business culture.  

But strong leaders rarely rely on fear. Think about famous leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Alexander the Great, or Mother Theresa. They were effective not because their followers feared them, but because they inspired loyalty, led with moral authority, and made wise decisions. 

While leadership carries privileges and power, exercising privilege and power is not what makes a leader. Part of being a good leader is knowing when and how to exercise power and influence appropriately. There are many people that excel at skills that are typically good, such as public speaking, or being able to convince someone to see your perspective. But you can use such skills for the wrong things as you might see in TV or movie depictions of con-artists, or dictators. Being able to exercise right judgement and being good at decision-making is imperative to being a good leader.

The evidence

  1. Marsh, A., A., (2018).
    The neuroscience of empathy.
    Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 19, 110-5

  2. Maibom, H.L. (2020).
    Empathy
    Abingdon, Oxon, England, UK: Routledge

  3. Maibom, H.L. (2018).
    What can we learn from taking another’s perspective? In D. Matravers & A. Waldoff (Eds.) Empathy: Between Einfühlung and Attunement.
    London: Routledge, 74-90

  4. Maibom, H.L. (2012).
    The Many Faces of Empathy and Their Relation to Prosocial Action and Aggression Inhibition.
    Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science (WIRE), 3, 253-63

  5. Decety, J., & Ickes, W. (Eds.). (2009).
    Social neuroscience. The social neuroscience of empathy.
    Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  6. Klimecki, O.M., Leiberg, S., Ricard, M., & Singer, T., (2013).
    Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training.
    Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(6), 873–879

  7. Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2001).
    An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment.
    Science, 293, 2105-2108.

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