Concluding Remarks

Neuroscientist are expecting that the next two decades will be seminal in revealing even more
intriguing insights and facts about how our neurons fire, interact and impact on our behavior.
What we currently know is probably just the tip of the iceberg. Keep an eye out though, and an
open mind, for new findings, new research, new applications of neuroscience and behavioral
sciences.
The main point here is that all pillars of the BAL approach will almost certainly improve and
expand in the future:
 Leadership is an attitude; neuroscience has helped increased our understanding of
leadership
 Human are not rational creatures; emotions play part in decision making
 Willpower is a key leadership characteristic
 Multitasking, ego depletion and the long-term syndrome of burnout are serious threats to
the modern leader.
 Brain power is crucial for leadership since it is directly related to increased self-control,
meaningful engagement and effective task completion.
 Our brain loves patterns and aims to apply them to all situations
 Thinking is the means to an end and the end is survival. And if survival is the aim then
the brain will use all its functions to support it.
 Dopamine injects excitement and joy when the brain finds a pattern in a complex
situation where there is urgency needed
 Team work and Groupthink is not always beneficial for us. It is important to have
moderate cohesiveness within groups.
 We should always ask questions in every situation as this opens up our brain and leads
our brain to think rather than just keep on doing.
 One should ask questions with the right attitude
 It is important for us to be aware of our internal ape and try to control it
 A brain without emotions is a malfunctioning brain and this is something that
organizations, leaders and managers have to understand quickly in order to calibrate
better towards a brain-based leadership approach.
 Emotions help us think faster and with morality, move ourselves and others and boost our
cognitive capacity for advanced performance.
 Being aware of your emotional styles and moods, and applying a holistic approach that
takes into account both the internal and external worlds, can help you bypass the outdated
notion of incompatibility of emotions and business.
 Good mood good thinking. Moods are not as fixed as emotional styles and personalities,
but they can set themselves in for a long time if not challenged.
 Leadership is primarily an emotional skill and CEO truly means Chief Emotional Officer
in any organizational level.
 Leaders and managers need to understand the basic emotions and separate them from
feelings, moods and styles in order to be able to work with them more effectively in
various challenges.
  Being aware of the automatic reactions’ emotions have on behavior, leaders can better
steer their actions and the actions of others. The oversimplified and sometimes offensive
model of the carrot and stick are a thing of the past, incompatible with modern
neuroscience
 Adopting your brain’s automaticity processes as key elements of what can make
you a great leader can drastically improve both your understanding of yourself and
others, and remarkably enhance your performance.
 Using priming to positively prepare your brain and the brains in your team,
establishing which work habits you need to abolish and which to promote and
creating a physical environment to master the brain’s automatic responses.
 Becoming a true expert in challenging times requires you to combine this
knowledge of how intuitions and habits work together with fast analytical, clear
and targeted thinking.
 Persuasion is a core leadership skill and modern leaders need to be able to influence
behaviours in order to achieve their organization’s goals. In this direction, we need to
‘speak’ to all three main functions: thinking, feeling and behaving in order to achieve
important results.

 Emotions have to motivate and the environment facilitate the desired course of action.

 Your increased persuasion power, if used appropriately, will have a significant positive
impact both on your, and other people’s, work.
 Thinking will become smarter. We will spot biases, false patterns and ego depletion
faster than ever due to self-assessment applications and better analysis of data from the
world around us.
 Feelings will become more meaningful. Our capacity for emotional intelligence will
increase due to feedback technology that will allow us to understand better what we and
others feel at work.
 Brain automations will work more to our advantage
 Relations will become stronger and more motivating. Social media are already
revolutionizing the way people connect, work and live, inside and outside organizations.

From all the new developments in the wider field of neuroscience, the one that will have a
profound impact on the way we perceive and deal with the brain, is brain-interacting or brain-
altering technology. It seems that not only naturally occurring neuroplasticity can improve our
brains, but also electrodes implanted in our heads and sensors on the top of our skulls.
Technology will be able to bypass our executive brains for example:
Direct brain to brain communication, Image reconstruction.
The BAL approach will be a significant step towards strengthening our knowledge and therefore
our individual and collective leadership potential, and unleashing it into the world.