A key focus of research on human performance seeks to understand the complexity and function of the human brain and its impact on performance in relationship to how people respond to leadership and colleague behaviour. Research highlights why you must consistently monitor and manage the impact your behaviour has on the performance outcomes of your team’s production and the experiential emotional memory, or EEM, your behaviour creates.
Rather than relating interactions with others with a time or place, our brains map those interactive events as a function of emotional memory. This is why leaders must be profoundly careful of the impact they have on their employees through the experience of their behaviour — and also why, as colleagues, you must be profoundly careful of the impact you have on your colleagues through the experience of each others behaviour. The brain stores experiential, emotional memory, or EEM, with a greater degree of recall than mere logic memory. It is why when you make a positive or negative behaviour impact on someone, that experience creates associated memory, positive or negative, that in turn makes any future experience with you affect thinking, emotion, and behaviour, and therefore impacts performance. Repetitive negative experiences have a negative effect on performance. Future encounters with you fires up the brain as if the event was happening for the first time and with the same degree of impact. As a leader, this can have a profound impact on the success (or failure) of a team.
A neurochemical cocktail is responsible when we continue to distrust leaders or colleagues, even when they make attempts to change course on past negative behaviour. Unless a leader (or colleague) advertises that they are seeking a behaviour change, our brain will not connect the positive change to previous stored, repetitive, negative memory. It is only through repeated new positive interactions, and a new awareness on our part to record those new behaviour events as positive, that we can rewire our brain with the associated memories of the “new you” and not the “old you” leader/colleague.
Again, this is why you must be profoundly self – aware of the impact your behaviour has on others, especially if you are a leader. Your daily choices in behaviour determine the quality of your relationships and are predictive to your performance destiny. Your positive behaviour competency is mostly born from your positive emotional thoughts and feelings. Your tendency for positive thought and emotion is intrinsically linked to your skill level of Positive Presence. You get to make a decision every day to impact people positively or negatively. The repetitive experience of behaviour determines the level of trust you create with others. That level of trust will determine the level of performance you create as well. That choice is always up to the you, so choose wisely.
Catherine is the President and CEO of CORPORATE HARMONY, providing virtual solutions for leadership development and organizational culture change. Her leadership and coaching experience as a Project Manager in an ever-changing, fast moving technological organization with unrelenting demands drove her to the realization that a positive mindset and strength-building behaviors are essential for today’s complex and chaotic organizational systems. CORPORATE HARMONY’s virtual platform of programs, coaching and performance measurement, is an innovative online technology of tested proprietary content. The world-class content of CORPORATE HARMONY’s Positive Presence Program develops the skill of ‘Positive Presence’ and the necessary ‘Positive Presence Behaviour Competencies’ for maintaining a positive and energized mindset and increased performance in today’s complex work environment, and leading to a culture of collaboration and connection. Catherine’s vision for Corporate Harmony is to bring the skill of “Positive Presence” to the corporate world as it becomes more complex, ambiguous and chaotic. Catherine is uniquely positioned to impact organizations’ productivity and long term success, with her powerful vision of eliminating bad stress from every workplace around the globe, bringing purpose into the people equation to promote healthy, productive and meaningful work cultures and turn the tide on the neglect of mental health on a global scale. Catherine is author of the book: “CORPORATE HARMONY – The Performance Link for Today’s Modern Organization” Catherine can be reached at: Catherine.Osborne@corporateharmony.ca or go to ‘contact us’ on our website www.corporateharmony.ca. Catherine is available for consultation, and can be reached by 519-695-3407.