Why Great Leaders are Unforgettable – and Bad Leaders Too!

You have probably heard the saying, “A truly great leader is hard to find, difficult to part with, and impossible to forget.” The same adage holds for bad leaders too, at least the “impossible to forget” part. Did you ever wonder why?

True story telling time: So Debbie (not her real name) is having lunch with a colleague. She has not seen her old boss in three years when suddenly, he comes through the door of the restaurant. Debbie quickly hides behind her menu. Her table mate is confused by her behaviour. Debbie is frantic that her old boss, whom she left three years ago, might have seen her. She is relieved when her table mate informs her that he dropped his keys on a table and went to the men’s room. Debbie quips out loud about her temptation to grab his keys and throw them in the trash. Her table mate is flabbergasted when Debbie informs her that they have to leave the restaurant. This really is a true story.

From a neuroscience perspective, you might be surprised to learn that Debbie’s memories, and ours too, are actually controlled by the way our brains work regarding memory storage and recall. This fact adds greater significance to a science based understanding as to why a leader’s behaviour is the singular most important predictor to a team’s performance. It is also a key predictor to employee engagement and individual performance as well.

What the Science Tells Us

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 behaviour. Research highlights why leaders must consistently monitor and manage the impact their behaviour has on the performance outcomes their teams produce and the experiential emotional memory, or EEM, their behaviour creates.

We can have immediate and vivid recall of past bad leadership experiences because our brains don’t recall memory with an associated time stamp. The hippocampus is the part of our brains responsible for memory storage and recall. Working with a memory pattern recognition system, when we experience a new episodic event similar to a previous traumatic experience (Debbie seeing her old boss after three years), our brain recalls associated memory like you reloading a document from stored, computer memory, only without a time and date stamp on the memory or the created emotion the memory produces.

Jordana Cepelewicz identifies this process in her article “How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past.” According to Cepelewicz, “the brain might in theory encode time indirectly. In their scheme, as sensory neurons fire in response to an unfolding event, the brain maps the temporal component of that activity to some intermediate representation of the experience — a Laplace transform, in mathematical terms. That representation allows the brain to preserve information about the event as a function of some variable it can encode rather than as a function of time (which it can’t).” In other words our brains are mapping the event as a function of memory rather than associating it with a time or place.

This is why as leaders we must be profoundly careful of the impact we have on our employees through their experience of our 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 your employees that experience creates associated memory, positive or negative, that makes any future experience of you affect thinking, emotion, and behaviour that 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.

A neurochemical cocktail is responsible when we continue to distrust leaders even when they make attempts to change course on past negative behaviour. Unless a leader 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.

Again, this is why we must be profoundly self – aware of the impact our behaviour, as leaders, has on our employees. Our daily choices in behaviour determine the quality of our relationships and are predictive to our performance destiny. Our positive behaviour competency is mostly born from our positive emotional thoughts and feelings. Our tendency for positive thought and emotion is intrinsically linked to our skill level of Positive Presence. We get to make a decision every day to impact people positively or negatively. The repetitive experience of us in behaviour determines the level of trust we create with others. That level of trust will determine the level of performance we create as well. That choice is always up to the leader, so choose wisely.