Can Leadership Abilities be Detected in Brain Scans

Can leadership abilities be detected in brain scans?

Whilst the debate about good leadership source is engaging a larger and larger number of HR professionals and business leaders, and is becoming the more and more passionate in a bid to ultimately find out if leadership is an inborn quality or can it actually be learned, scientists are investigating if it is, instead, a cerebral matter.

Debate about leadership has so far being limited to two main aspects: the “human factor” and the “trainability factor”, scientists believe that leadership abilities might, instead, relate to a “biological factor”.

If a day will come in which head-hunters, in order to take decisions about recruiting senior managers, will be prompted to ask brain scans instead of scrutinising CVs and organising assessment centres is anybody’s guess. Nonetheless, the pioneering study underway at Reading University (UK), whatever the outcome and although it is too early to deem it promising, seems to be, if anything, really interesting.

The investigation is conducted by Dr Kevin Money, of Henley Business School, now part of Reading University, who explains the aims and objectives of the investigation: "We hope to look at how leaders from different sectors make decisions, what actually leads people to move from making good to bad decisions, what goes on in people's minds and how they make those choices."

The outset of the investigation has seen protagonist Sir John Madejski, a leading British business leader, who after having been prepared by a team of scientists was gently wheeled into a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan, where he spent 45 minutes.

During this time Sir John Madejski was not just passively waiting for the machine to perform its scan activities, on the contrary, he was called to perform decision making activities, by completing a number of exercises.

The activities carried out by Sir John were looked on by Professor Douglas Saddy of Reading's Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics.

Sir John was basically taking a series of financial decisions which were confirmed pressing the buttons of a special keypad put inside the MRI scanner.

"In this case", explains Professor Saddy, "what he is being asked to do is make a judgement about whether given a certain set of information a short-term reward would be better than a long-term reward".

While Sir John was performing his decision making activity into the scan, by pressing the keypad, his brain activity was measured by the cutting-edge £1m MRI scanner.

Obviously the investigation carried out with the help of Sir John will not be enough to reach reliable conclusions; he was, in fact, the first volunteer who contributed his availability to start the experiment. It must be said that Sir John was not a completely casual choice; in fact, Sir John endowing a Centre for Reputation at Henley Business School is one of its main, possibly the main, University’s private supporter.

Sir Madejski was enthusiastic about the experiment and has promised to support the study encouraging other leading businessmen to lend their brains to the University for scanning purposes.

The experiment will, in fact, be obviously replicated a number of times in order to gather a relevant quantity of results which will, then, be aggregated in order to find out if it is actually possible to draw out some significant lessons from the experiments.

More specifically, neuroscientists, psychologists and management experts at Reading University aim to examine the brains of business chief executives and leaders in other field like the military or voluntary organisations.

Dr Money, who suggests to treat the experiment with some caution at the time being, especially as for what concerns the immediate results of the study, stresses the importance of carrying out a relevant number of experiments before being able to draw conclusions: "It's way too early, we can't look at one person's brain and conclude too much. What we can do is look at different groups, say military and business leaders, and compare leadership education within those different groups."

Using technology to examine what makes a good leader is not actually a completely new technique. For decades, in fact, organisations around the world have used psychometric tests to select candidates for senior management positions, and to try to understand what constitutes a good leader.

However, psychometrics is a controversial science, having supporters and detractors as well.

Professor Peter Saville, who belongs to the former group, claims that such a technique stretches back to the techniques used by Samuel Pepys to select naval officers, and insists that psychometric tests make a valuable contribution to the process of selecting right candidates to fill available roles: "You still find interviewers who judge people on the first minute of an interview", he says (which definitely is a no-no). "All we are doing is reducing the odds of choosing the wrong person. It's science versus sentiment".

It is difficult to say today if it is, actually, realistic believing that there is a chance that the recruitment industry, which already uses psychometrics, will have the option to resort to brain scanning or other technological means in the future.

Virginia Eastman head-hunter of Heidrick and Struggles, who recruits candidates for senior roles in global media organisations, for instance, appears to be pretty sceptical. She claims that new technologies are helping to make the process of communicating with and assessing suitable leaders more rapid, but it only goes so far: "Our whole profession is built on one thing, the consensus that we all know what good looks like, and that we make that judgement. No machine can replace that".

According to Mrs Eastman, although neuroscientists and psychologists believe they can make a real contribution to head-hunters’ understanding of what makes leaders effective, those whose job it is to select leaders still believe it is more of an art than a technology.

However, it is extremely important do not forget that, whatever technology will be able to achieve and bring to the profession, brain scans (provided the final finding of the study carried out at Reading University will be successful) and tests, of whatever kind they could be, should not be used to make final selection decisions.

Both the CIPD and the British Psychological Society (BPS), in fact, recommend that tests have not to be used in a judgmental, final way. Torrington et al. (2008) stress the idea that tests results have to be used only to stimulate discussion with candidates and that every time recruiters use tests, feedback needs to be given to candidates.

The CIPD also warns that using test results to take final recruitment decision could contravene legal regulations (in the UK the 1998 Data Protection Act), so that they can only be used as part of a wider process where suggestions and indications received from tests results could be backed by other resources.

Additionally, Ceci and Williams (2000) have also warned of the risks related to the use of norm tables, pointing out that norm tables change over time, so that using an old test with old norm might very likely result to be deceptive.

Tests and scans might possibly be used with moderation and even when using them, especially if you are an experienced recruiter, do not neglect what your personal feelings and sensations suggest.

Last but not least, brain scans are very likely to be extremely expensive if you require a £1 m scanner to perform them and, very likely, also not so immediately available even once you have decided to resort to them. To cut a long story short, it is not likely that you will be able to use them any time soon.