Cultivating the Art of Leadership

I subscribe to Brain Work: The Neuroscience Newsletter published by The Dana Foundation and the current edition has an article called "Cultural Experience Affects Perception" by Kelli Whitlock Burton.

Researchers in Illinois and Singapore showed young and old people pictures of objects on various backgrounds. Participant brain activity was monitored and researchers found:

1. Young people of both cultures demonstrated quite similar brain activity and areas of focus.
2. Older people, however, showed much greater variation in the parts of their brains that lit up for MRIs as they viewed the pictures.
3. Americans focused more on the objects in the pictures. East Asians focused more on the backgrounds of the pictures.

This is not a huge surprise (i.e., a Western focus on the "parts" and an Eastern focus on the "whole"). Still, Denise Park, senior researcher and professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, underscored that more than preferences are involved:

"These are the first studies to show that culture is sculpting the brain" and "that culture impacts individuals on a biological level."

The researchers concluded that different attention stems from different cultural biases, with Westerners being more individualistic and East Asians being more socially interdependent and contextual. No matter how we're rigged, we're missing a part of the picture.

Integral coaching has always made these assumptions, that culture affects perception, that perception is always selective, and that perception is wired into us biologically.

The pillars of leadership model that I use distinguishes three core leadership development streams (self mastery, social competence, and leadership presence), each requiring a different attentional lens (perception) and body of practices (biology).

For example, clients who are incredibly visionary and strategic or simply very ambitious and self-serving (who never lose sight of their goals) often need help developing more attunement to context within relationships and organizational culture.

Conversely, clients with exceptional emotional intelligence (who read subtle background currents and cues) often need help clarifying their commitments and eliminating distractions.

In integral coaching, we recognize that how we pay attention is actually structural, it's in us at a neurobiological level. Different parts of our brains fire up involuntarily, depending on stimuli, based on repeated habits of attention.

That's why lasting change takes time and practice (and patience with ourselves).