Do you want your team to be more productive, innovative or engaged?  Basketball legend Michael Jordan says it all “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.”  If you want to know how you, as a leader, can leverage neuroscience to increase trust and vulnerability to build and sustain a high performing team, this is the podcast for you.

Paul Zak is my guest, his two decades of research have taken him from the Pentagon to Fortune 50 boardrooms to the rain forest of Papua New Guinea.  All this in a quest to understand the neuroscience of human connection, human happiness, and effective teamwork.   His academic lab and companies he has started develop and deploy neuroscience technologies to solve real problems faced by real people.

His latest book, Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High Performance Companies, uses neuroscience to measure and manage organizational cultures to inspire teamwork and accelerate business outcomes.  His 2012 book, The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity, recounted his unlikely discovery of the neurochemical oxytocin as the key driver of trust, love, and morality that distinguish our humanity.   In another obsession, Paul’s group uses neuroscience to quantify the impact of movies, advertising, stories, and consumer experiences.  Along the way, he has helped start several transdisciplinary fields, including neuroeconomics, neuromanagement, and neuromarketing.

Paul is the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics, Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University. He has degrees in mathematics and economics from San Diego State University, a Ph.D. in economics from University of Pennsylvania, and post-doctoral training in neuroimaging from Harvard.  He also serves as a senior advisor to Finsbury, a global leader in strategic communications that advises many of the world’s most successful companies.

Paul’s research on oxytocin and relationships has earned him the nickname "Dr. Love."   That’s cool.  He’s all about adding more love to the world.

Thank you Paul so much for being with us and Paul is going to talk about trust and vulnerability for leaders and how important that is and also the science behind it and some tips that you as leaders can use for yourself and your organization. So thank you Paul. So Paul, tell us what is the science behind trust and vulnerability for leadership? I spent most of my professional life running neuroscience experiments to understand why some teams perform at high levels and other teams not so much. And we found that two components are necessary. One is having a trusted team and the second is your purpose. If you know where you're going, it marshals brain resources that motivates you to draw on social resources like people around you to reach goals, particularly when those are difficult but achievable stretch goals. And so when we started looking at the underlying factors that produce trust between teams, we identified eight components and one of those which I call natural, is really being yourself at work.

And a key component of that is being vulnerable. So it turns out that many studies have shown that people who are, too beautiful too perfect, we kind of hate those people because we can't believe anyone can be that great and most people aren't that great. They're putting on this mask. And so when you let that mask fall and you say, hey, you know what team, we want to do this thing, you guys are experts in this, not me. I know it's important to us. Here's why. Yeah, take a couple of weeks and start exploring whether we can do this or not. So, a concrete example, you know, my lab, we collect terabytes of brain data and we build predictive models of them and we've started investing in machine learning. So I read some books on machine learning. I'm roughly, you know, acquainted with the different techniques, but I don't have time to learn how to do them.

So I have a team and I said, you guys are super smart. You're all learning about machine learning. Here's a couple of giant data sets. Go see if you can improve our predictions using machine learning. And then all of a sudden they want to tell me about, well, we did this and support vector machines. I like, I don't even want to know if it works. Then you explain it to me. If it doesn't work, I don't care, I don't want to waste my brain power. So really empowering those people in my group to say "you are the experts in this, not me." And then come back even though I'm the leader, come back and teach me something and that's a whole different ballgame than "we have to do this and you guys have got to make this work and blah blah blah." So I think the punchline for the work we've done on building high trust teams is that everyone should be treated as a volunteer at work.

Everyone's choosing volitionally to be at this organization. So if you're a volunteer, then you need to ask them to do something you can't demand. You need to explain why they're doing something, not just scream at them to get something done. And at the end of the day, they should be thanked for the extra effort they're putting in to move the organization's goal forward. And so that's really being a servant leader or a vulnerable leader. It's a really effective way to achieve high performance in teams. I love that example of not giving the answer, but letting the team come up with that. So why is that so much more valuable then leaders telling them what to do? I think a lot of that is what we've seen in the past, that type of authoritative leadership. I need to know the answer, if I tell them I don't know, I'll appear weak.

What is it that happens for employees that makes them more willing to volunteer and be creative when you're asking them to come to the solution versus telling them what to do. Right? This is where the neuroscience comes in. So the work we've done in particular on a brain network is activated by a neurochemical called oxytocin, shows that when we asked for help as social creatures, we almost always are motivated to respond in kind. So if you asked me to do something as opposed to demand or in an aggressive way forced me to do something, most of us get this kind of defensive approach like, Hey, what the hell? I mean, even if you're my boss, don't be intimidating me dude! My recent book "Trust Factor" has a lot of Peter Director in there, who was on the faculty with me at Claremont for years.

And you know, Peter is the one who's coined the term knowledge worker. He said if you're a knowledge worker, you need to be your own CEO. Well everyone is a knowledge worker today, literally everyone. So if you're year own CEO and some dude is screaming in the office and I've worked for screamers, you'd probably have too Jill. I don't like it. And the first thing I want to do is get the heck out of there. So we all are our own CEO, so we should treat people like that. Like I'm thrilled that you decided to work for our group. Am I going to push you? Yeah. Am I going to challenge you? For sure. Am I going to talk to you when you're missing your goals? For sure, right? There's no sense in which people are not being held accountable, but I really want to have people give this intrinsic effort and I can't do that, that's internal to the employee. So by the way, I don't even like the word employee, I like colleague or team mate. I think we should get rid of this kind of weird Marxian hangover of capital and labor being at conflict somehow. So anyway, so I don't want to ask colleagues or to force them to do the things I want them to do. I want them to be passionate about what we're doing. If they're passionate about it, they're going to hit the ball out of the park, if I give them the tools to do that and help them learn how to hit the ball. So anyway, I think in the world we're in with an unemployment now, 3.9%, I think I just saw in the US, just getting bodies on board is hard enough, but getting high performers, if I want to do that, I've got to create a culture where people can really thrive and if you are authoritative, if you're aggressive, it's just not going to work and people will go elsewhere and we know that money is a very weak motivator for performance.

So let's create the conditions, the social conditions, that drawn our social brain, and in particular induce the release of oxytocin - make us want to work for the team goal. And when we do that it's anti aggressive, it's inclusive and accepting. It's challenging and it's going to be hard and we're going to make mistakes. But guess what? If I'm a leader, I'm going to make mistakes too. And I'd love feedback from you guys as well, but just all try to get better at this thing. So one of my great examples of this actually from the book is where I live near Silicon Valley. They have many, many tech companies have monthly "Congratulations, you screwed up celebrations" Let's get pizza and beer and let's talk about the mistakes we made this month and see who screwed up the biggest because if you want to innovate, you've got to make some mistakes and when you celebrate, you also share those with the company.

So if everyone is see