More on desperate leadership: neuroleadership

An article in The Guardian (Saturday 15 September) trumpeted a ‘new science of leadership’. Apparently many people are making a lot of money with the ‘discovery’ that different emotions in the brain have different chemical mechanisms. So neuroleadership is about understanding how those emotions play in leadership and … er… well… mmmm… you know it and … well, you are supposed to be able to do something. Here is a paragraph : “We know for example that status has its own reality in the brain. When you feel your status goes up it impacts your brain chemistry in a positive way. When you feel rejected socially, the same circuits in your brain light up as when you feel physical pain’. Neoroleadership is another attempt to ‘understand’ or even ‘measure’ (you could measure different chemical brain activity) something, in this case leadership. It falls into the same category as many other things that mistake correlation with ‘understanding’ and/or ‘measuring’ in the hope that then you control the reality. So neuroleadership is equivalent to neurolove, neurolokingatapieceofart, neurbeeingveryannoyed, neuroaltrism, neurodictatorship etc. Have a brain correlation with anything and you have ‘a new science’. And as long as there is somebody buying the ‘associated services’ , the new science will make headlines. My category for this is Desperate Leadership