The Neuroscientific Evidence Of A Left-Brain Bias

What has this got to do with management and leadership?

As long ago as the time of Hippocrates in the first century BC, it was known that the brain was divided into two halves with each half performing different functions and being responsible for different types of thinking. At that time, it was known that the left hemisphere was responsible for rational, analytical and logical thought and was considered to be the essential part of the brain. The right hemisphere was thought to be the lesser half - at best passive, at worst a remnant of an earlier stage of human development.
 

This view of the brain persisted until the 1960's, when the physician Roger Sperry discovered that the right half of the brain was responsible for different types of thinking. As a result of Sperry's Nobel Prize-winning work we learned that the left hemisphere reasoned sequentially, excelled at analysis and handled words and speech. The right hemisphere reasoned relationally, recognised patterns and interpreted emotions and non-verbal expressions. Since then we have learned how these hemispheres are themselves divided into different regions, but for the purposes of this article it is sufficient to consider only the left and right halves.

So what has all this got to do with management and leadership?

In Daniel Pink's thought provoking book 'A Whole New Mind', he describes how left-brained thinking has dominated the growth of organisations since the Industrial Revolution. During most of that period, organisations have been wrestling with the logistics of achieving consistent production processes, developing economies of scale and implementing sophisticated control mechanisms. More recently, they have been automating processes using computer systems, itself an intrinsically logical technology.

Pink argues that by making everything so logical, liner and process driven, we run the risk of becoming victims of our own success, in that many people are employed to perform tasks that are readily automated. However, computers are not very good at performing the relational, spontaneous and more instinctive processes associated with right-brained thinking, which is where people can add value over computers and machines. 

Parallels can easily be seen between the types of thinking described above and the types of thinking employed in management and leadership tasks. As John Kotter, Emeritus Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School says, "leadership is about knowing what to do, management is about knowing how to do it".  In other words, management is a largely left-brained discipline associated with tasks such as planning, controlling, and putting appropriate structures and systems in place.  On the other hand, leadership has more to do with anticipating change, coping with change, and aligning people behind a common vision – tasks more commonly associated with right-brain thinking.

At MyBrain we use a specialised questionnaire to measure people's preferences for different styles of thinking. The results provide an indication as to which parts of their brain are more dominant than the others, and therefore which thinking styles the person concerned prefers to use. When the results are aggregated for large groups of people in commercial organisations, they tend to be relatively balanced with a slight left-brain dominance; 52% left and 48% right. However, when we profile senior management teams, the results tend to be more extreme, with a typical team profile showing a much stronger preference for left-brain thinking.

Moreover, we find that this is not a one-off bias affecting senior teams; it is a trend within businesses that sees left-brained thinking becoming increasingly dominant at successively higher levels in the organisational hierarchy.  The only possible explanations for this statistical bias are; either that organisations place a greater value on left-brain thinking than right-brain thinking, and are therefore more likely to promote people displaying that bias, or alternatively, that the nature of the roles of more senior people requires a greater emphasis of left-brain thinking for those people to succeed.  A left brain bias at the helm of the organisation also sets the tone, resulting in a more left brained culture, approach and style.

The irony is, that although most organisations would claim that they place a greater importance on leadership skills at more senior levels, the research results of MyBrain International suggests that in practice they do the opposite.

This dichotomy occurs because most of the personnel evaluation and assessment tools and instruments deployed by organisations are biased towards left-brained criteria, unsurprisingly this therefore forms the basis of most promotional or succession based decisions.

Neuroscience can therefore play an important role in redressing the balance by providing organisations with both the knowledge and understanding to enable them to develop better assessments of leadership skills. LE

Author Bio

Alistair Schofield is a founding Director of MyBrain International, the developers of the world’s first neurometric profiling instrument.  Visit www.mybrain.co.uk Connect Alistair Schofield