The Neuroscience of Talent Management

Today, neuroscience is providing powerful insights into cognitive and behavioral processes and is changing the way we think about thinking. There’s a new game in town, leaders who adopt the new science will quickly benefit from these new insights into what really drives employee motivation, satisfaction, and performance.

What is neuroscience?

The study of brain functioning encompasses everything from the brain’s basic unit, the single neuron, to the complex neural networks or maps that represent every concept, thought, and action we experience.

How will neuroscience affect talent management?

Neuroscience is new to talent management because the brain is at the center of everything we do, it offers a new way to understand how people approach work and respond to everyday workplace situations.

Neuroscience brings back the balance of cognition—understanding why people are doing what they are doing and whether it can be made more effective.

Our conscious mind

Thanks to the prefrontal cortex, we can comprehend abstract concepts and elements not present in our sensory environment, as well as think in three dimensions: past, present, and future. It also orchestrates and balances the functioning of most other parts of the brain. It is the only part of the brain that can inhibit other parts, such as our instincts and emotions

Our subconscious mind

Beneath the layers of the cortex are a combination of structures known as the limbic system known for their role in automating our daily functions—writing, storing, and retrieving the code of neural networks that allow us to complete so many tasks, mental and physical, with minimal conscious effort. The basal ganglia are a vast storehouse of repeatable thoughts and behaviors, integrating all our past experience with the events that present themselves each day.

In the amygdala reside the neural networks that associate how we feel about what we do, what we think, and who that involves.

Applying neuroscience to talent management

A core function of any leader is the attraction and development of talent. 

Our prefrontal cortex is critical to the conscious mental efforts necessary to execute new, complex, or challenging mental processing. Our limbic system provides the stored knowledge and behaviors associated with every conscious activity, putting it into the context of our prior experience and assisting with its interpretation. Our combined conscious and subconscious minds allow us to produce the thoughts and actions that make up our talent.

Threat versus reward

At a limbic level, our brain completes an instantaneous assessment of our circumstance and sends rudimentary signals to our prefrontal cortex: this is good or bad, a threat or reward opportunity. What follows are the thoughts and behaviors your brain has developed to deal with this situation.

Neuroscience is helping talent managers understand what drives talent throughout the employee life cycle.

Talent Acquisition

The recruitment of talent immediately confronts both candidate and recruiter with the threat versus reward dynamic. The limbic system will be on high alert for first impressions and quick signals that assist with a “gut feel” assessment of like or dislike, trust or distrust.

Recruitment policies are already introducing practices that support what neuroscience suggests about managing the threat state: use equitable, merit-based selection methods; recognize that assessment is a two-way process, with the candidate assessing the organization just as the recruiter assesses the candidate; and utilize modern technologies available to facilitate onboarding and engagement.

Talent Performance

Goal setting and planning are excellent ways to motivate performance and set achievement criteria.   Part of the reason performance management so often creates a negative experience is our strong sensitivity to social threats. This high sensitivity predisposes us to look first for the negative and to over-weight this compared with the positive.

The skill of holding constructive and empowering performance conversations is one that organizations still need to harness in their current and future leaders.

Talent Development

Designers of learning and development initiatives should work with the needs of the brain to refresh and optimize cognitive resources rather than deplete them.

The optimal arousal curve reminds us that too much or too little mental stimulation results in underperformance, whereas the right amount of stimulation allows us to be highly functioning, achieving our best.

Overstimulation induces a stress state, and a stress state shuts down prefrontal activity in favor of the survival instinct this invokes in the limbic system. In this state, we are unable to learn new information. Real learning takes time and reinforcement. Neural pathways require repetition to strengthen and for the basal ganglia to “automate” the function

Talent Succession

The management of the succession process can create a threatening environment, particularly if closed-door approaches are used. In this environment, little or no information is provided to potential successors, and decisions can be perceived to be unfair, personally biased, or preferential.

The future of talent management

Talented employees are in high demand and short supply. The more challenging our world becomes, the more this will be true. Leaders and talent managers should welcome and grasp this new information, for the insights and advantages it can create for the optimization of workplace performance and the unleashing of human potential.