All the Brains in the Business: The Engendered Brain in the 21st Century Organisation

By Kate Lanz and Paul Brown

The power of gender difference, not gender equality, is a secret source for success. Some smart businesses are starting to wake up to this fact. This book explores why and how.

Properly valuing brain gender diversity in the workplace is one of the biggest and largely untapped sources of competitive advantage for modern businesses. Recent advances in neuroscience provide the key to unlocking it. 

Modern research shows that there are gender-based differences in the brain – it’s just not as simple as a binary between a ‘male brain’ and ‘female brain’. In fact, our brains are like a mosaic where many of the tiles are available in thousands of shades on a spectrum between pink and blue. The problem is that our workplaces tend to be governed by structures, processes and cultures that are practically pure blue. All the brains in the business that are elsewhere on the spectrum cannot thrive as they might, so sources of productivity, creativity and agility go untapped. 

Anyone who manages people needs to understand how the brain works and the impact it has on how people work together as teams. Anyone who wants to unlock the talent and productivity of all of their people needs to understand how recent findings around male- and female-type brains should shape the way they manage. 

Leading applied neuroscientists and international corporate coaches Kate Lanz and Paul Brown show you why and how to access all the brains in your business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Nov 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030221539

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2020

K. Lanz, P. BrownAll the Brains in the BusinessThe Neuroscience of Businesshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22153-9_1

1. Brain Sex and Biological Sex

Kate Lanz¹   and Paul Brown²

(1)

Bedford, UK

(2)

Vientiane, Laos

Kate Lanz

Email: [e-mail]

Kate says:

The Case for Creating Optimal Brain Conditions

During the financial crisis, I was coaching an extremely experienced, bright, delightful gentleman who had been hired to help the company in question to get themselves out of the trouble they were in. In our second session, he looked at me and said, ‘Do you know what? I have to switch myself off in the morning just to survive the day here and I switch myself back on when I get home and see my kids’ faces as I open the door’. I was horrified—what an awful way to spend one’s life. The company in question were paying him a substantial sum to help them get back on track. I found myself asking, ‘Why would you pay that brain that much money and then create the conditions that switch it off like that?’ The return on investment on his brain power was appalling.

So began my research: what does it take to create the conditions for optimal brain performance in the workplace?

Optimal brain energy flow, such that the powerful, decision-making part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, is facilitated to do its best work, is good for business. Creating innovative solutions and having the agility to move from strategy to execution fast are becoming increasingly important in the modern, global economic environment. It’s the people in the business—their brains—that either enhance innovation and agile execution or slow it down. Brains that are enabled to thrive to work optimally are brains that like to come to work and they produce the neurochemistry for performance.

The Sex of Your Brain

It became very clear, very quickly that in order to answer the question, ‘what does it take to create the conditions for optimal brain performance in the workplace?’, biological sex differences simply could not be ignored. There are differences between a male and female brain (Brizendine 2007a)—and knowing how to access brain gender difference is a source of competitive advantage. However, it is not as simple as binary male–female brain differences. The apparent sex of the person does not define the functioning of their brain.

Each of our brains is different. Modern neuroscience suggests that we can characterise an individual brain within a three-dimensional space consisting of brain structure, neural connectivity and hormone levels. A combination of our unique nature and nurture determines where our brain fits within this space. On average, male and female brains exist in different regions of this space—there are measurable differences in structure, connectivity and hormone levels. Understanding where an individual sits within this space, which mixture of female–male characteristics they possess, is the basis for helping them to thrive. In our work, we are trying to help leaders understand the diversity of brains that they have within their businesses in order to create the conditions to get the best from them.

Added to the important acknowledgement of differences between the male and female brain, it is a truly fascinating and hardly recognised fact that the sex of your brain may not be the same as the sex of your body (Moir and Jessel 1989, p. 50).

How is that? In short, it is because the way your brain develops and the trillions of synaptic connections that make us who we are determined by the unique blend of nature and nurture. There are some fundamental biological facts which determine our biological sex. These combine with the influences of our environment throughout our lives, but notably in the womb and the first two years (Schore 2001) determine how our genetic blueprint gets expressed and shapes the neural pathways that make us—us. Our unique combination of nature and nurture determines the sex of our brain. Modern neuroscience is demonstrating that the majority of us have a ‘mosaic’ brain (Joel et al. 2015) that is a mix of both male and female characteristics. Our brain patterning within this space is as unique to each of us as is our fingerprint.

Biological sex drives different behaviours, yet within these differences lies a far greater subtlety and source of significant performance potential for business. Knowing how to access the total brain sex diversity in a business is a new source of serious competitive advantage. By enabling different sexed brains to be allowed to function in a thrive rather than a survive mode, businesses can truly tap into all the brains in the business. Company-specific research is showing an increased latent productivity of between 30 and 50% demonstrating that often in modern work cultures there is significant brain power wastage occurring. This book aims to help fix that.

Before we take a look at some of the subtle differences that make everyone’s brain unique it is necessary to take a look at the overall big picture; what, on average, are some of the differences between the male and female