Daniel Goleman explains that many employees are disengaged and not in the optimal brain state for high performance. He introduces the concept of flow — an internal state marked by intense focus, adaptability, high challenge matched to skill, and positive affect — and gives leader-oriented tips to create it: clear goals with flexible means, immediate feedback, and matching/challenging skills. He then describes the "social brain" and mirror neurons (brain-to-brain resonance) as the mechanism by which emotions are contagious, emphasizing that leaders and customer-facing staff shape organizational mood and performance.
Chapters
If you ask people honestly about how they feel about their job, a very large proportion are disengaged. It's just a job. I just do enough to keep it. That's that statement is a rough index of a person having two little cortisol. They're in the wrong brain state at work. As you get such people more motivated, more interested, more engaged, they rise up this arc toward the optimal zone. However, if you give them too much pressure, too little support, too little time, too little staff, too much to do, they start to feel overwhelmed and they keep going to the right and performance suffers. So the art of leadership is to help people get and stay in the optimal state for performance. That is how you get your best return on investment from a salary and from a neurological point of view. This means helping people get and stay in the best internal state, the best state of their brain. This optimal state is called flow. Flow was discovered by researchers who asked one simple question of a huge variety of people. The question was, tell me about a time when you outdid yourself. Even you were surprised at how well you did. And they asked ballerinas and basketball players and chess champions and surgeons, business people, all kinds of people. And what they discovered was that it didn't matter what domain of skill they were involved in. Everyone who was outstanding at that moment was in the identical internal state. And that state is characterized by several things. One is unperturbable attention. Their focus is 200%. Another element is that you're completely flexible and adaptable. Whatever comes up, you can handle it. Another is that your skills are challenged to their highest level, sometimes a little beyond. Another very important element is it feels great. You get a kind of a rapture or bliss. There's a joy in being in a flow state. So the state where people are performing at their best is also a state where they feel at their best. And a smart leader, an effective leader, an emotionally intelligent leader, can help people get and stay in that state. Here's some tips how to create flow. One is clear goals, clarity about what to do, what the goal is, but flexibility in how to do it. The second is immediate feedback. It helps to know how you're doing, helps to know if you're getting closer to the goal. The third is to challenge and grow that person's skill set. Give them an assignment that stretches them, and more fundamentally, to match people's abilities with the tasks you give them. You don't want someone highly talented to be doing something that's boring for them. Then they're disengaged you don't want someone to be in the wrong domain of skill. So the leader's task from this point of view is to help people get and stay in flow. And how are you going to do that? Well, those were some ways, but you also have kind of a secret weapon. And that has to do with a new discovery. It's called the social brain. This discovery came in the last five or ten years when brain scientists stopped studying one brain in one body and one person and started studying two brains in two bodies and two people while they interacted. And it turned out that there were entire circuits of the brain that hadn't been discovered before because they'd never looked this way. And these circuits are designed to like a neural radar, to sense what's going on in the other person's brain and to lock in to that and to have a silent brain to brain conversation, no matter what else is going on. These were discovered in a very intriguing way. The big discovery is called mirror neurons. That's the radar. Mirror neurons were discovered when some scientists in Italy were studying the brain of a monkey. And they were looking at the part of the brain that moves the body. And they're studying just one cell at a time. One day they were looking at a brain cell that only fired. It was only active when the monkey raised its arm. It's the only time then one day the cell started firing and the monkey wasn't moving. They're completely puzzled, what's going on? Then they realized it was a hot day. A lab assistant had gone out for a gelato. He was standing in front of the monkey. And every time the lab assistant raised the gelato, the monkey's brain cell for the same activity fired. That was the discovery of something that happens in us all the time. Whenever we're with another person, it turns out we have cells in our brain that are matching precisely what's going on in the other person. This is essential. It gives us an immediate unconscious sense of what's going on, what are we doing. It keeps the interaction running smoothly. So the mirror neuron creates a brain to brain bridge that senses movement, emotion, intention. It's why emotions are contagious. It had been known for several years in psychology, decades actually, that if you take two strangers, have them come into a lab, fill out a little checklist, how are you feeling right now? And then sit looking at each other in silence for two minutes, and then fill out that same checklist. The person in that pair who's most expressive transfers their emotional state to the other person in two silent minutes. We never knew how, we never knew why. But now we understand. Emotions are contagious. We're constantly sending and receiving them. But there's a special condition, a special caveat for leaders. Because it's human nature that people pay most attention to and put most importance on what the most powerful person in that group says and does. The leader is the sender, for better or for worse. So when I say you have a secret weapon to help people get into that better state for performance, I'm talking about using the social brain skillfully. What does that look like? The key point for any company is that whoever in your company is at the interface of your customers or clients makes them feel better or worse. And how they feel at that moment is not how they feel about that guy or that woman. It's how they feel about your company. So managing the emotional state of people, extremely important. From the highest level to the outer fringe where your company contacts your customers.
