Michael Platt - The Leaders Brain: Enhance Your Leadership, Build Stronger Teams, Make Better Decisions, and Inspire Greater Innovation with Neuroscience

When Hurricane Maria, a deadly Category 4 storm, ravaged Puerto Rico in 2017, news coverage focused on the catastrophic human toll. More than 3,000 people lost their lives, and the 3 million who survived dealt with physical devastation of their communities, job loss, lack of clean water and food, and the worst blackout in US history.

But Maria also ravaged another population. I have been studying the inhabitants of Cayo Santiago, also known as Monkey Island, for the past 13 years. The island is home to about 1,700 rhesus macaque monkeys, and it also took a direct hit from the hurricane. The devastation included severe flooding and damage to most of the vegetation. All the infrastructure was destroyed, including the rainwater-collecting cisterns that provided fresh water and the feeding corrals where researchers provisioned food that supplemented what the monkeys foraged from the island.

Since the hurricane, my team here at Wharton and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, as well as our many collaborators at other institutions, have been studying the impact of both immediate and lingering stress on the brain and on the body. Were learning not just what stress does to us but how we can fight its effects. The monkeysall of which survived the storm but exhibit classic signs of exposure to stressare showing us how we can better protect ourselves. The insights were gaining could help leaders decide how to invest in solutions that support their teams and employees and, in the process, reduce the estimated $300 billion that US companies currently spend on the health costs, absenteeism, and poor performance that result from workplace stress.

Perhaps the most important lesson the Cayo monkeys have taught us is that social support is critical to successfully navigating disasters. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, monkeys not only became more tolerant of each other but actively reached out and made new friends. This behavioral response echoes what people often do after disasters like tornadoes and earthquakes or terrorist events like 9/11. Amazingly, its been three years since the hurricane, and the monkeys continue to seek out and provide social support. Unfortunately, all for one and one for all solidarity in humans often fades as people try to put the memory of terrible experiences behind them.

As I write, were currently living through what are likely the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, which may last for many months or years. COVID-19 has led to the implementation of social distancing across the world, causing an abrupt and unprecedented impact on our behavior and our economies. The consequences of these severe disruptions to our social lives are keenly felt in our longing to be together and get back to work. Given what weve discovered about the importance of social support for mitigating extreme stress, the impact of social distancing on our ability to weather this storm is profound. As we navigate the COVID-19 new normal, there is an enormous opportunity, and real imperative, to be better leadersat the office, in our homes, and in our communities. As well discuss, neuroscience can help illuminate this new, enlightened path forward.

Two years ago, Wharton neuroscience postdoctoral fellow Feng Sheng and I gathered groups of smartphone users to see if they had an emotional and social connection with their brand. We focused particularly on two of the behemoths that seem to inspire at times fierce battles between their loyalistsApple and Samsung.

In the case of these two phone giants and many other brands, people talk about them as if they were other people: They love or hate them, and they imbue them with human traits such as creativity, practicality, sexiness, or smartness.

We know how our brains respond to the people were closely connected to, and we wondered if our brains respond similarly to brands and companies. Because smartphones are such a personal item, we decided to focus on them, recruiting groups of Apple and Samsung users who didnt own products of the other brand.

Participants had their brains scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while seeing positive, negative, and neutral messages about both brands. This technique takes snapshots of blood flow in the brain, allowing us to visualize brain activity. Apple users showed empathy for their own brand: The reward-related areas of the brain were activated by good news about Apple, and the pain and negative feeling parts of the brain were activated by bad news. They were neutral about any kind of Samsung news. This is exactly what we see when people empathize with other peopleparticularly their family and friendsbut dont feel the joy and pain of people they dont know.

Samsung users, on the other hand, showed no increased activity in either area when they were shown positive and negative news about their brand. Interestingly, though, the pain areas were activated by good news about Apple, and the reward areas were activated by bad news about the rival companysome serious schadenfreude, or reverse empathy.

If I were the Chief Marketing Officer of Samsung, I would be worried. Samsung customers brains tell us theyre just not that socially and emotionally connected to the brand, and that makes the company much more vulnerable to a potential competitor (just as a weak workplace culture can lead to higher turnover). Apple, of course, has been building the connection with its customers for years. Its customer experience is consistent across products, the app and retail stores, marketing messages, and website. The experience has deepened over time as new functions and apps allow users to, for example, pay for every purchase, navigate to physical locations, control their home electronics, identify the health value of potential food purchases, and more. Its even indispensable when youre not awake: There are apps that measure your sleep cycle.

What weve learned about how people form connections with brands could be helpful for leaders seeking to improve connections with and among their workforces. And beyond that, neuroscience is helping us discover how different people react to aspects of everyday business. Perhaps most importantly, these studies reveal that traditional methods in business that rely on surveys and self-reporting sometimes fail to capture whats really going on in the minds of our employees and our customers. Neuroscience provides powerful tools and insights that can help leaders bridge this gap to make better decisions.