This ABC gives us an interesting opportunity to revisit the history behind the CIMBA Leadership Development System and to get a sense of what may lie ahead. In several important ways, the recent history of leadership as it struggles to move from theory to more effective practice is beginning to look much like CIMBA's leadership development history over the past 10 years. In this ABC, I would like to direct your attention toward two very important new leadership books by two very eminent leadership scholars: Professors Richard L. Daft's The Executive and the Elephant: A Leader's Guide for Achieving Inner Excellence and Paul R. Lawrence's Driven to Lead: Good, Bad, and Misguided Leadership. Both authors have made significant and important contributions to the traditional leadership literature over the past 30+ years. In the case of Professor Daft, on the basis of his research, it would be fair to say that he has been at the very core in defining leadership as an academic discipline. Professor Lawrence has similarly been at the core of leadership thinking, with his academic research focusing on organizations, organizational behavior, and how leaders bring about change in those organizations. At the NeuroLeadership Summit in Boston, we had the unique opportunity to visit with both of them. We were pleased to learn of the enthusiasm and excitement they both share with us in anticipation of the impacts neuroscience is going to have on the discipline of leadership going forward. In each of their works, they embrace the essence of neuroscience and brain-based thinking. Perhaps most importantly, their stature and influence will have a significant impact on the thinking of new and current leadership scholars towards the acceptance of NeuroLeadership ideas and concepts -- stimulating a very interesting vision of what may lie ahead in this important discipline.

In that their movement toward neuroscience is very similar to ours, let's take a moment and take a look back at how we traveled to this point in time.  As most readers of this column know, the learning pathway to our leadership development system at CIMBA is an anthology of frustrations, detours, dead-ends, deviations, distractions, set-backs, and misdirections, a formidable challenge we certainly found motivating. Early frustrations largely grew out of our initial reliance on traditional informational or epistemological learning approaches to leadership development, which essentially equated leadership competency with the classroom acquisition of a set of skills.  Both of these authors made important contributions to this body of leadership literature. Theoretically, within the "Being-Knowing-Doing" framework (see Hesselbein and Shinseki's Be-Know-Do: Leadership the Army Way for a full explanation), the successful "leader" learns skills ("Knowing," CIMBA's "Knowledge") and makes them actionable or operationally effective ("Doing," CIMBA's "Rational Process"), all under the assumption that both leader and followers manifest at will the appropriate mental state ("Being," CIMBA's "Behavior"). Through observation and experience, we found the traditional skills-building approach particularly deficient in "Being," the development component needed to guide, support and assist learners to reach a deeper psychological understanding of both their values, emotions, behaviors, and thinking and those of others.  Professor Lawrence has come to a similar realization regarding the "Being" component, and, in this book, he applies the four drive theory of human behavior (to acquire, to defend, to comprehend, to bond) to the leadership realm.  In essence, leaders fail when they fail the "Being" component of Effective Leadership.

In searching for "Being" development alternatives, our experiences moved us outside the confines of the major disciplines whose "theories" were then defining the traditional informational (and other) approaches to leadership development. Through the late 90s and early 2000s, we had actively involved social psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists in building a leadership development system implemented through and supported by leadership development coaches. We identified neuroscience for its potential contributions to sense-making and, most importantly, as the natural science upon which leadership development as a struggling social science could seemingly be built or rebuilt. While we fully appreciated the importance of technically-competent leaders, effective leadership development at CIMBA has come to mean developing a leader's mind with attention to neuroscience theories and research to better assist in decision-making, emotional regulation, collaborating with and influencing others, and in facilitating change.  Professor Daft comes to the same basic conclusions:

Leaders usually know what they should do, so why aren't they doing it?  According to neuroscience, the brain has two sometimes-conflicting parts. The inner CEO is the higher part that sees the objective big picture with a balanced approach to determining the best action.  The lower part is the inner elephant, with its ego, unconscious impulses, emotions, and lifelong habits. The strength of the leader's elephant may pull him or her toward micromanaging, putting things off, tactless remarks, insisting on always being right, overreacting, finding fault rather than appreciating, and not listening or not staying focused.  Such behaviors can overpower the wisdom of the inner CEO.

Neuroscience provided us with a science-based vehicle for setting out for the learner the "What, Why, and How" of leadership development -- moving leadership development beyond its traditional focus on the "What." Learners enjoyed -- and were in fact drawn to -- learning about their brain and their ability to expressly direct its attention. In essence, we found a viable solution at the intersection of neuroscience and social psychology, overlaid it onto a more traditional leadership development system, and created a system that makes use of neurobiofeedback technology. Through that application of that technology based on neuroscience research, we are able to assist leaders in "explicating" their emotions, thereby giving the leader the ability to control them and more effectively apply the appropriate skill. Professor Daft comes to a similar conclusion:

Leaders often know what they should be doing, how to do it, and why they should do it. Yet when their intentions and behaviors refuse to align, the unwanted actions of the inner elephant take priority over the wisdom of the inner CEO. ... Most leaders know what they should be doing differently.  The challenge for leaders is how to change themselves to eliminate a flaw or bad habit.  When leaders learn how to strengthen their inner CEO and control their elephant, they will do what they know is best.

Although the research linkages between psychology and business in general and leadership more specifically are long-held and productive, the formal research linkages between leadership and neuroscience are much less developed. Still, it is evident that the contributions neuroscience research has and could be making to psychology differ little from the contributions it could make toward deepening and furthering our understanding of the leadership development process. Although prior to these two books it seemed unknown to leadership theorists, neuroscience is very rapidly beginning to uncover, define and expand the anatomy and physiology behind the social science of leadership. I strongly suggest both of these books for a good Christmas read and particularly Daft's The Executive and the Elephant for that person new to neuroscience and its applications. His thinking is very much aligned with ours.