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.
