Summary
The brain is constantly assessing what might happen next and allocating energy accordingly. When people experience uncertainty or threat more of that energy can be directed towards protection rather than thinking, collaboration and problem-solving. For leaders the question is therefore not simply how to motivate people but what conditions at work are shaping what their brains expect.
We tend to talk about the brain at work as though its primary purpose is thinking. We want people to make good decisions, solve problems, collaborate and come up with ideas.
Bruna De Palo starts somewhere more fundamental. The brain’s first job, she says, is survival. It is constantly anticipating possible danger while deciding where the body’s available energy needs to go.
This changes the way we might interpret behaviour at work. Someone who appears distracted, defensive or reluctant to contribute may not simply have an attitude or motivation problem. Their brain may be directing more of its resources towards dealing with uncertainty or perceived threat.
This is particularly relevant in workplaces where people are already dealing with considerable uncertainty. Leaders cannot remove much of this uncertainty but they do influence the environment people experience every day.
What threat does to thinking
When the brain anticipates threat, De Palo explains, attention can narrow around the problem itself. Finding solutions requires more cognitive effort.
For organisations asking people to be adaptable and creative this creates an important tension. The capabilities employers increasingly want may be more difficult to access when employees are using a significant part of their available energy trying to understand what might happen next.
This does not mean leaders should attempt to make work permanently comfortable or protect people from difficult decisions. Rather it means recognising that the conditions surrounding these decisions affect what people are able to bring to them.
De Palo argues that one of the most useful things a leader can provide is clarity. You may not be able to remove uncertainty outside the organisation or even give employees certainty about every decision inside it but you can reduce unnecessary ambiguity in your own team.
This shifts leadership away from repeatedly telling people to embrace change or become more resilient. A better starting question may be: what is making this situation expensive for the brain?
Look at the conditions, not only the individual
For a practical way into this De Palo returns to the SCARF model developed by David Rock at the NeuroLeadership Institute. It identifies five social domains to which the brain is particularly sensitive: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness.
These provide leaders with a useful diagnostic rather than another leadership technique to remember.
Does someone feel their contribution is recognised? Do people have enough information and structure to understand what is happening? Is there room to make decisions within their role rather than having every move controlled? Do people feel connected to colleagues and the purpose of their work? And do decisions and processes feel fair?
The answers can help explain why an apparently sensible organisational change produces resistance or why a team that should be contributing ideas has become unusually quiet.
Transparency is one example. Leaders cannot share everything with everyone. But where more information can reasonably be given De Palo argues that doing so can increase both certainty and the sense that people are being treated fairly.
Small elements of the working environment can have the opposite effect. Exclusion or gossip within a team, for example, may undermine a wider attempt to create trust and connection.
Forward Thinker insight: stop wasting energy on protection
This way of looking at work raises a challenge for HR.
Much of organisational life still concentrates on what we want employees to do: collaborate more, innovate faster, speak up, adapt to change. We then create programmes designed to encourage these behaviours.
The neuroscience lens asks us to look one step earlier at the conditions in which those behaviours are expected to happen.
This becomes more important as work changes. Organisations adopting AI are likely to ask people for more judgement and problem-solving rather than less. They will need employees to challenge outputs, deal with unfamiliar situations and learn as jobs evolve.
If people are simultaneously spending a large amount of cognitive energy trying to work out whether their position is safe, whether decisions are fair or whether they have any control over what happens next there is an organisational cost.
The opportunity for leaders is not to eliminate threat. This would be neither possible nor desirable. It is to notice where the organisation itself is creating avoidable uncertainty and where relatively ordinary management choices can give people more clarity, agency and connection.
And this is a rather different starting point from telling someone they need a better mindset
Key takeaways from this video
- The brain’s primary job is survival, not workplace performance
- Perceived threat and uncertainty can redirect energy away from thinking and problem-solving
- Leaders cannot remove external uncertainty but they can reduce unnecessary uncertainty inside their teams
- Status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness provide a practical lens for examining the working environment
- Behaviour that looks like disengagement or resistance may be worth examining in the context in which it occurs.
👉 Watch the full five-minute video above to hear Bruna De Palo explain what the brain needs at work and what leaders can change in practice.
And listen to the full podcast Your Brain Isn’t Built For Work: The Faulty Model Behind Modern Management – Bruna De Palo or on your usual podcast channel
Transcript
People often don't have a clear idea what is the number one job of the brain. They think it's thinking, decision making, collaborating, and so on. Understanding this is key. The number one job of the brain is survival. And survival means two things: predicting potential danger so that we can prepare for that and also distributing energy, the right amount of energy at the right time to the right organ, so that we can achieve health.
So when when the brain is in a state of threat a few things happen which you can immediately see if you think about the times where you've been in a state of threat, you can see that you you tend to have a tunnel vision on the problem. Well, when if you have a problem, what you need to have is a mindset that is focused on the solution. But the solution is very much more metabolically expensive than the problem. So that the tendency of the problem is to stay on sorry, the tendency of the brain is to stay on the problem because it's tangible and therefore easier to manage, even though it is unpleasant.
So everything that is happening around us creates this sense of not only uncertainty but perceived threat and constant fight against an invisible enemy. So it's a fight that you will never actually win. Now, what you can do as a leader is to reduce as much as possible or counterbalance that sense of threat with something else, at least in your small environment. You can't solve the problem that, you know, the sense of threat that people are having from what is happening around the world. But at least in your small environment, in your small team, you can create those conditions, for example, again as we say, by adding more clarity to counterbalance that uncertainty.
I would say the first thing is to understand what are the things that most likely might make a brain feel threatened. Again, not techniques, this is not going to be remembered, but understand what are the things that the brain is most sensitive to, because how you speak and how you behave in those areas has the power to move the brain towards a threat state or an optimal state. Optimal state is where collaboration is, you know, available, better thinking, problem solving.
So, just to wrap up in a practical way, what are these areas? Here we can reconnect with the SCARF model from the Neuroleadership Institute developed many years ago by David Rock. This is the simplest way to identify what would be best to do. So the brain is extremely sensitive to five social domains: they are status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, relatedness means a sense of connection, and fairness.
How you behave and talk or organise a change in these five areas has a direct impact on how the brain responds. So the best way, if you have a team, for example, that is not innovative enough, or a person who's disengaged, or you know, a lot of people leaving the company, or you know, people being there but not particularly active in meetings or not dissenting, you may want to look at these five areas and see how, well, am I honouring their status?
Then the need of their brain to be valued, seen, recognised. If not, then you can take some actions in that area. Am I giving them enough certainty, structure, predictability so that they feel safe from that perspective? If not, then you will find out what to do. Am I giving their brain enough room for decision, a sense of autonomy, in a container, not completely autonomous, but in a container, do I give that? No, then you will know what to do.
Relatedness, as I said, is a sense of connection, is the need of the brain to connect with others. Am I making them feel connected with me, with the team, with the purpose? Is someone feeling excluded? The last thing you want in your team is gossip or anything like that. Go kill it immediately. You know, it can be things as little as that that mess up all the rest. Like you think you're doing everything well, you're following the playbook, and then you have some gossip in your team, boom, it kills all the rest. So that's why it's important to understand this.
And fairness, it's the natural need of the brain for some level of justice, fairness. Transparency, for example, we mentioned at the beginning, transparency is perceived as fair. Can I add a little more transparency on something without giving away everything so that it feels fair.
That's the quickest thing that can be done, actions that can be taken tomorrow, or analysis that can be done, kind of a diagnostic tool to see, you know, we just rolled out this new program and it didn't work. Well, did you do it in a brain friendly way? Or as I call it, in a brain enhancing way, because you want to enhance those functions? That's probably the the quickest and most practical thing that can be done.
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