Abstract
In Neuroscience for Organizational Communication: A Guide for Communicators and Leaders, Laura McHale, Psy.D., writes that her purpose in authoring this book is to show how the application of neuroscience can change how we communicate in organizations and will help transform them for the better.
After years of working in the field of corporate communications, McHale went back to school to pursue a doctoral degree in the new field of leadership psychology. The neuroscience of leadership (also known as neuroleadership) is an interdisciplinary field that explores the neural basis of leadership and management practices. Neuroleadership is touted for its ability to use empirically proven brain research as a basis for understanding and promoting more effective leadership behaviors, particularly for business people, who are more inclined toward “hard” science.
In the book, McHale provides a survey of how neuroleadership studies can be applied to organizational communication. The book is a relatively quick read of 10 chapters. McHale, who is the founder and managing director of Conduit Consultants, a leadership consulting firm based in Hong Kong, begins with a comparison of Aristotle’s three rhetorical appeals—ethos, pathos, and logos—with David Kantor’s theory of structural dynamics. McHale states that exploring the relationship between Aristotle and Kantor’s work helps to ground the Aristotelian framework into an empirically proven model.
In Chapter 2, McHale reviews the current state of the communications profession by considering different types of communicator roles, whether communicators speak the same “language” as their colleagues, and why there is a curious lack of lateral mobility of these professionals in organizations. Extending her discussion of Kantor’s structural dynamics, McHale claims that most for-profit organizations communicate in Power domain, which is the language of action, accountability, and completion of tasks. McHale claims that a problem occurs when organizations are too dominant in one domain, such as Power. Because of this dominance of the Power domain, McHale suggests that the overall goal for organizations should be about developing fluency and versatility in all three domains of Kantor’s domains.
In Chapter 3, McHale examines a case of brain injury to explore the role of emotional processing in decision making. In doing so, McHale challenges the Cartesian framework, which she claims is dominant in the fields of leadership, management, and organizational communication. For most of human history, it has been generally assumed that decision-making is largely a cognitive function, devoid of emotion. However, the story of Phineas Gage, a young railroad foreman in Vermont who was involved in a freak accident in 1848 and additional cases that Antonio Damasio studied, led the former to conclude that emotional processing and reasoning come together in decision-making.
McHale uses this discussion of “Descartes’s error”—the overreliance on cognition in decision-making—to explore how we communicate in organizations. By questioning this assumption, McHale claims that we can recalibrate this Cartesian bias to promote more prosocial behaviors in organizations by improving and expanding the communication that we use around our emotional experience at work.
In Chapter 4, McHale extends her discussion of the emotional aspects of communication with an examination of how damage to the communication centers in the brain can lead to several conditions, namely, aphasia, prosody, and aprosodia. McHale builds on this discussion to argue that one of the key problems we have in organizations is that we unintentionally induce an aprosodic-like syndrome through our organizational communication, which she refers to as occupational aprosodia. McHale claims that organizational communication is aprosodic to the degree in which we take communication outside of its emotional context, and this occurs primarily through an overreliance on electronic communications, especially email. McHale claims that the cure for occupational aprosodia is prosody; it is allowing that emotional intent to be imbued in the communication.
Chapter 5 explores the somatic experience of work and discusses how and why communicators can play a much more powerful role in workplace redesign strategy. The discussion is not so much about communication but the effects of workplace layout on our bodies and mood.
In Chapter 6, McHale introduces two models from the neuroscience of leadership (or neuroleadership) that are especially useful for communicators. The SCARF™ model reveals the primary threat and reward triggers in the brain, and the SCOAP model looks more holistically at human needs. The key takeaway from this discussion is understanding that humans, at work or anywhere else, are primarily emotional beings. The chapter includes examples of how each model may be applied to organizational communication. McHale also explores some of the potential pitfalls of neuroleadership approaches. Her insights here are particularly valuable in our understanding of leadership, which is often oversimplified in neuroleadership studies. According to McHale, leadership is extraordinarily complex and, in the words of Barbara Kellerman, is best understood as a system not a person. At the very least, leadership is a co-created process between leaders and followers.
In Chapter 7, McHale introduces the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC), considered to be the brain’s “braking system” and explores the neuroscience of stress, and three interventions from neuroscience that can activate the RVLPFC and interrupt the stress cascade: mindfulness, affect labeling, and cognitive reframing. She then discusses how to apply these interventions to organizational communication. McHale ends the chapter with a discussion of storytelling in business communication as a way to promote trust in leadership, enhance leader–follower dialogue, and create psychological safety.
In Chapters 8 and 9, McHale explores the use of pronouns in what she calls the “Neuroscience of Pronouns.” She begins with a brief introduction to intercultural competence and cultural neuroscience, then explores the psychological construct of self-construal, and how self-construal can be primed in the brain by using “I” or “we” pronouns. McHale then introduces the concept of neurocultural leadership, and explores how a more agile and strategic use of pronouns can make organizational communication more effective.
Finally, in Chapter 10, McHale explores the concept of vicarious traumatization and how it can be an occupational hazard for professional communicators. In doing so, she explores post-traumatic organizational growth and the psychology of grieving and loss. She discusses how communicators can use awareness of these concepts to serve as change agents and help unlock energy in their organizations. One of the best ways they can do so is by embracing a more expansive view of emotional experience at work, she argues. This position appears to be a driving theme of the book.
Ultimately, McHale tries to show that communications often fail to convey complex organizational realities and this is because the way we approach communication in organizations is fundamentally flawed. Communicators strive for narrative elegance and to reduce complexity in order to communicate more succinctly and economically—especially in today’s age of information overload. But in so doing, we tend to sanitize and whitewash differences, rather than enable conversations about them.
Moreover, McHale claims that our approach to communication mirrors weaknesses in our approach to management and leadership, more generally. This flawed approach to leadership is one of the reasons that so many leadership development programs fail to produce actual leadership skills, she argues. As Kellerman pointed out, at least part of the problem is because leadership is a system, not a person. If we understand leadership as a system, we realize that we need to develop both individual leaders and the human systems they are embedded in. If we understand organizational communication similarly—also as a system—we see new possibilities for what it can enable in terms of dialogue and its ability to stimulate collective intelligence.