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- RECAP—11/8 The Neuroscience of Leading Teams with Evan LaPointe
RECAP—11/8 The Neuroscience of Leading Teams with Evan LaPointe
The human brain is a beautifully complex machine that has fascinated scientists for centuries. Yet our business practices often ignore the vast learnings our scientists have made, causing teams to underperform their full capacity. In this webinar, Evan LaPointe helps us connect the dots of the gap between what neuroscience knows and what business does.
Product Leader Virtual Speaker Series
November 15, 2024
As leaders, we’re often guilty of treating designing and running an organization much like an engineer designing an architecture—diagramming structures and flows between interchangeable nodes on a whiteboard.
What is lost is the fact that each of these nodes is a human being, operated by a human brain. An infinitely complex and unique entity with individual needs, desires and motivators.
To put it bluntly, the business world doesn’t understand the human brain.
“There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does”
This is despite science knowing better.
In his Product Leader Summit Virtual Speaker Series webinar presentation, Evan LaPointe guided us through a value-packed lesson on how we as leaders can adopt more of what science knows. He thoughtfully made some of the dense and inaccessible hard science more understandable for us so we can go back to our teams and close the gap between what science knows and what business does.
4 common business mistakes
A lack of neuroscience understanding leads to four common mistakes in how businesses lead and motivate teams.
Drive system/action mismatches—guiding teams to have the wrong part of their brain lit up vs. what is necessary to do the job well.
Ignore personality and intrinsic motivation—treating all humans exactly the same.
Employ ineffective and counterproductive mantra—boiling things down to simplistic tropes, like “fail faster.”
Believe & promote fabrications & inaccuracies—misunderstanding the science.
High-performing teams measure by headroom to optimal performance
It’s common for teams to use goals as a means to target hitting above “the floor”—the level of performance just above failure.
Really high-performing teams seek to understand what optimal performance in the given environment is and manage to minimize available headroom.
E.g. If your goal was to grow 20% and you grew 30%, but the industry is grew at 60%, you have no reason to celebrate
Everything is done in the brain 🧠
Be mindful of these things and you will improve your decision-making:
Manage your attention - Thalamus
Manage your threat response - Amygdala
Manage your memory - Hippocampus
Use your logic & creativity - Pre-frontal cortex
Use your compassion - Interior insular cortex
"Understand, don’t memorize. Learn principles, not formulas.”
Desire paths and processing centers
The brain has multiple processing centers and everyone has a different default ordering of which creates their “desire paths”—or which processing center first addresses a challenge.
Safety
Recall
Novelty
Compassion
Trust
Logic
Creativity
The most common default ones for humans are the first 3.
The best product work happens in the bottom 4.
Learning how to rewire your own and your team’s desire paths with self awareness is critical to going above your default level of performance.
Good tool: ask to reframe!
“It seems like the answer is coming from {processing center}, I would like it to come from {other processing center}”
95% of people believe they are self-aware, 10-15% actually are.
Actionable strategies
Shift thinking with shared vocabulary:
Train teams to recognize where their thinking originates (e.g., safety-driven vs. logic-driven).
Encourage rethinking by prompting individuals to consider challenges through different cognitive lenses.
Overcome the default mode:
Challenge team members to move beyond instinctual responses by focusing on the bottom-row brain functions (logic, creativity, compassion).
Develop routines that reinforce deliberate thinking.
Leverage science-based practices:
Align business strategies with scientifically validated methods to reduce inefficiencies and boost outcomes.
Teach teams to avoid harmful practices like “fail faster” and focus on creating systems that encourage long-term success.
Improve decision-making:
Create an environment where brains feel safe to innovate and collaborate.
Use logical frameworks and compassion to foster better solutions rather than relying on memory or emotional responses.
Core tools
Identify cognitive biases: Use simple prompts like “Which part of your brain is this answer coming from?” to challenge instinctive thinking.
Reframe team goals: Focus on achieving the “ceiling” of performance rather than just avoiding failure.
Apply neuroscience insights: Introduce tools that help individuals and teams manage stress, focus attention, and enhance creativity.
📽️ Watch the recording
👩🏫 Download the presentation
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