A new era of Management: Neuromanagement. Part #1
In 2021 SoftServe PMO made PM Good News Conf — an online event dedicated to innovations in Project Management. So let us introduce a series of materials devoted to the speech of Denys Prylutskyi, PMO Director at SoftServe.
Many things in Project Management change over time, not just techniques, methodologies, frameworks, or tools. Some conceptual things change, and even if they do not happen directly in Project Management, they affect it. One such change is neuroscience. It has opened our eyes to how our brains work and what that means regarding people management concepts.
We manage people today by trying to influence their behavior and providing an excellent reason to reach our goal.
Let us look at how we manage people now. The way we do it today is to try to influence their decision-making so that they do what we want them to do. How do we do that? We tell them a reason and try to convince them that that reason is meaningful. For example, we primarily say the primary thing: If you do not do it, you won’t be successful. That is a significant reason because success can help you to promote. It is a reason that influences your decision. Or maybe we can explain better: If you do something, you will get a promotion. So, again, we are trying to influence the decision. In this case, we want the person to choose between doing something or not doing it and just doing it because it is necessary. We provide a good reason because promotion is a good reason to make a career more successful. It is an excellent reason to make the choices we need to make.
The quality of a reasonable statement, how convincing it is, and thus whether you can readily accept it.
How to improve quality? What is the difference between good and bad management in managing people? A good manager provides the best reasons, and the quality of the cause means how persuasive it is and whether it would be easy to accept those means. It can be readily accepted if it is clear, which we need. So, we try to choose the best and most persuasive reason that will work best. If we are good managers, we know what to choose. If we are bad managers, we either do not know or may choose the wrong option. Thus, a Project Manager’s training in people management today is based on understanding which reasons are good and which are not.
To improve reasoning, we base it on facts and logic to align its perception with our needs.
What do we do to improve the reason? We believe the most persuasive arguments are based on facts tied together by simple logic. If we choose a few facts and connect them with the correct sense, we create a logical chain that aligns perceptions the way we need them. So, creating a good reason means choosing good facts and logic, which is fitting because it is a working algorithm, and as you may know, this is what all managers dream about: making management an algorithm. It sounds like an algorithm. However, it does not work very well.
We ground our convincing on reducing counterarguments by making them contradict common sense.
How do our reasons work? What do we try to achieve? By creating reasons, we try to reduce the number of counterarguments by making them simply counterintuitive. If we make all the potential counterarguments make no sense or have no common sense, whatever that means, then we are more likely to convince the person because they have no counterarguments. You cite facts and connect them with logic; everything sounds reasonable, excellent, and makes sense. If there are no counterarguments, what can you do? The only thing you can do is accept that reason. Once you get the reason, you must do the work. That is what we need to do. That is how most of us manage people today. One day, however, the rules of that game changed. So, what has changed, and what is the source of this change? The head is neuroscience.
Be ready to check Part 2 of the New Era of Management: Neuromanagement article next week. Yet, for those striving for the content and who don’t want to wait, here is the link to Denys’s speech at PM Good News Conf: https://youtu.be/uvTmC_i3Lr0. Enjoy!
