Unlocking the Neuroscience of Leadership: What Makes Great Leaders Thrive

Neuroscience, the study of the brain and nervous system, offers valuable insights into how leaders can rise to these challenges. By understanding the neuroscience of leadership, executives can enhance decision-making, manage emotions effectively, and create environments that foster engagement and innovation.

“It’s important to understand how your brain works and when it doesn’t work well for you in complex, stressful situations,” says Meg Poag, a Vistage speaker and CEO and founder of Mission Squared and the author of The Adversity Hack. “People tend to believe every thought they have and think they can’t control their brain, and that gets them into a lot of trouble. Once you understand the processes of your brain, you can manage your brain better, you can manage it better.”

It may seem intuitive that learning to manage your brain more effectively leads to more effective leadership. However, understanding the role of stress is equally important when studying the neuroscience of leadership.

“I dive into the science behind why people follow, and one big aha moment that I came up with is the connection between leadership and stress,” says Terry Wu, PhD, a neuroscientist, Vistage speaker and founder of Why The Brain Follows. “Often, we talk about stress in the context of health. You know, stress causes diabetes, headaches, hypertension, stomach ulcers, all these illnesses. But very rarely do we connect the thoughts between leadership and stress.”

Based on his pioneering research into the neuroscience of leadership, Wu has found that the easiest way to reduce stress is to give it to someone else. And leaders are in a position to transfer that stress to their team members because they have the power to do so.

“The stress occurs because we lack a sense of control, we lack predictability, we lack progress, we don’t have social support, and we don’t have outlets,” he says. “Why is a stressor so stressful? Because we lack what I call safety signals — a sense of control, predictability, progress, good outlets, and social support. So, when you look at a stressor, if you have these safety signals for that stressor, it will not cause you much stress.”

The Brain’s Role in Leadership

The brain is your central control center for decision-making, emotion and behavior. Different regions of the brain are responsible for different components. When leaders understand how the brain operates, they’re better equipped to lead more resilient companies where people want to be a part of the culture.

The Prefrontal Cortex: The CEO of Your Brain

The prefrontal cortex, often referred to as the brain’s CEO, is responsible for judgment, abstract thinking, creativity, and decision-making. It’s the part of the brain that separates humans from other animals and enables leaders to plan, analyze and strategize.

“The frontal cortex is heavily involved in reason and logic,” Wu says. “Another very important part of the frontal cortex is emotional regulation.”

From a neuroscience perspective, leaders who develop their emotional intelligence are regulating their frontal cortex. In Wu’s work, this means recognizing when you’re under stress and intentionally finding ways to reduce it, thereby avoiding the stress from being passed on to someone else.

“That’s what emotional regulation is all about,” he says. “You don’t get angry at someone else, and you don’t blame yourself. You analyze the situation. When the frontal cortex goes offline, we do dumb things.”

Using the prefrontal cortex is an energy-intensive activity. Leaders must be intentional about using it. Critical thinking, forecasting and strategy require pushing past mental fatigue and into focused effort.

“Most of us are not even tapping into our prefrontal cortex 90% of our waking hours,” Poag explains. “Research shows that when someone is using their prefrontal cortex, their brain waves mirror someone being dumped into a tank of ice water and told to stay in as long as they can. It takes enormous energy — 300% more — than when your brain is in automatic thinking mode.”

When faced with a big decision, leaders must be intentional and move beyond comfort into discomfort and exhaustion to think critically, forecast the future, and make informed, judicious decisions in complex situations.

The Amygdala: The Emotional Sentinel

The amygdala is the emotional sentinel. It processes fear, threat and strong emotional responses, often before rational thought can catch up. That’s because it is responsible for unconscious memory, which the Cleveland Clinic describes as the type of memory that allows you to perform specific tasks without thinking about them.

“Our amygdala is like a powerful database,” says Poag. “When I’m faced with a situation I don’t like, it says, ‘Here’s how you’ve responded before.’ It doesn’t analyze or engage your prefrontal cortex. It just pushes you down the same path you’ve always taken.”

The problem is that this creates repetitive outcomes, often unhelpful in today’s complex business world. Worse, when emotions escalate, the amygdala can hijack the brain.

“The more emotional you become, the lower your IQ drops,” Poag notes. “When negative emotions build, the brain shuts down higher reasoning, and you end up functioning at the level of a four-year-old.”

When the amygdala becomes overactive, the brain can learn a new fear, Wu explains. It might be a fear of someone who is aggressive, looks different, or even a new product launch.

“When the amygdala is hyperactive, it leads to the state of anxiety,” Wu says. “We do things repetitively because we feel like we want to have more control. This impacts learning, which is closely tied to the brain structure known as the hippocampus. The hippocampus shrinks when people are under chronic stress, so if you don’t mitigate stress, you cannot learn new behavior patterns.”

Wu adds that the stress dynamic is related to the amount of cortisol and adrenaline in a person’s system and the skills or tactics to calm stress.
“Stress can be very contagious, and you can compound someone else’s stress,” he says.

This is why learning emotional intelligence (EQ) is now considered the most critical leadership skill. Leaders who manage emotional reactions remain rational and empathetic, even under stress.

“Research shows us the number one predictor of a leader’s success is going to be in their emotional intelligence, their skill level of emotional intelligence,” Poag says. “One of the biggest barriers I see in leaders’ emotional intelligence skills is poor self-management or poor regulation.”

Harnessing Neuroplasticity for Leadership Development

Chances are, you’ve heard the cliché, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Research has shown that this is untrue. With support and practice, you can learn to change the way your brain is wired.

Rewiring Your Brain for Success

The brain’s tendency to default to familiar patterns can either help or hinder leadership. Poag uses the metaphor of covered wagons on the frontier: once grooves were carved in the trail, wagons followed them because it was easier. Neural pathways work the same way — repeated thoughts and behaviors become automatic.

“The neurons that fire together wire together,” Poag explains. “That makes it easy to survive, but problematic if your default reactions damage culture or results.”

Fortunately, neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to rewire — means leaders can build new, healthier pathways. For example, a manager who defaults to micromanagement can rewire toward curiosity by practicing new beliefs and responses.

“You can rewire a path so that when someone makes a mistake, you approach it with curiosity instead,” Poag says. “Ask: what resources or tools haven’t I given them? What support did I miss?”

Continuous learning and coaching equip leaders with tools such as mindfulness, reframing, and affirmations to rewire unproductive patterns into constructive habits. Vistage focuses on lifelong learning and development, incorporating neuroscience principles to help leaders grow.

Adapting to Change and Overcoming Cognitive Biases

The human brain is adept at interpreting and recalling information about a person or a situation based on an individual’s pre-existing beliefs or values.

“There are over 200 ways our brain can distort things,” Poag says. “Everything you see is filtered through your biases.”

One of the most prevalent cognitive biases Poag sees among leaders is confirmation bias. Once a decision is made about a person or a situation, the brain filters out all contradictory evidence.

“You need to know what the biases might be,” Poag says. “Start learning about the tricks your brain plays on you, like confirmation bias or the fundamental attribution error, where you always assume that when someone does something that you don’t like, some unsavory behavior, you think it’s a flaw in their character, but when you do that same thing, it’s because of something that’s not your fault.”

Poag says that strategies to overcome them are to learn about different biases that exist, admit you’re following them, and proactively watch for them in your everyday thinking.”

However, Wu sees the cognitive biases differently — as a buzzword that doesn’t mean anything because you can know your biases but still behave the same way.

“A lot of people may disagree with me, but cognitive biases come from stress because under stress, we lose our capacity to slow down and think about the situation,” he says. “The stress response evolved to force us to think faster without looking at the whole problem. But when we’re in a relaxed mode, we can engage the frontal cortex, think about our options and bounce ideas off someone else, like other Vistage members or a Vistage Chair.”

It’s also important to seek out resources to become aware of your biases and develop strategies to mitigate them.

Stress and Leadership: Impact on the Brain

The correlation between stress and health conditions like heart conditions and diabetes is widely known. However, ongoing stress can also negatively impact the brain and, as a result, interfere with a leader’s ability to make sound decisions.

The Neuroscience of Stress and Decision-Making

The brain can’t function under chronic stress. If you drew blood on someone whose nervous system is dysregulated, their body chemistry is different, according to Poag. When your nervous system is dysregulated like that, it’s much easier to fall into an emotional state where your amygdala hijacks the rest of your brain.

Chronic stress impairs brain function, particularly decision-making and can affect your memory.

“When leaders get stressed out, the frontal cortex goes offline, and people become impulsive and make decisions without thinking carefully,” Wu says. “Vistage plays a good role in allowing leaders to take a step back, talk to others who will help them think rather than plow through making one impulsive decision after another.”

Both Poag and Wu find stress relief in physical activities, such as biking and running. For others, activities such as reading a book, going fishing, or listening to music are enjoyable. Vistage’s CEO Health and Wellness Resource Center offers a wealth of resources to help leaders discover stress-reduction strategies, enabling them to perform more effectively in high-pressure situations.

“Get yourself distracted or spend time with family,” says Wu. “That and having social support. Loneliness is a huge stressor. We spend almost 24/7 interacting with screens, and our brains have not evolved to do that. It evolved to interact with human beings.”

Building Resilience Through Neuroscience

Leaders can enhance their resilience through several brain-based techniques. But, Poag emphasizes that it’s important to understand the difference between resilience and grit, two terms she sees people use interchangeably.

“I think people confuse grit with resilience,” Poag explains. “Grit means you’re good at taking a lot of hits and being persistent. That’s not resilience.

Resilience is when there are huge obstacles in front of you and you’re able to stop, be conscious and intentional to figure out a way to overcome that obstacle quickly while maintaining positivity.”

One strategy Poag recommends for developing resiliency is to reflect on the type of leader you want to be and what would make you most proud.

“Think about your values and what kind of influence you want to have on people,” she says. “Whether you want to admit it or not, you’re influencing people right now. Being intentional and focusing on what we truly care deeply about is what fuels us through times of adversity.”

She also recommends resiliency-focused brain training approaches, such as identifying your insecurities and using affirmations, meditation, and trying new techniques like Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) tapping, and the Insight Timer app to clients, which features resources on tapping if you’re really stressed out and other ways to activate your parasympathetic nervous system to release and de-escalate emotions.

“These are things we can do with our brain and nervous system that can calm us down so that we can access the smart part of our brain,” she adds. “That also keeps a healthy, regulated nervous system so that we’re not starting each day revved up.”

The Neuroscience of Creativity and Innovation

When leaders are in survival mode, creativity is impossible. The amygdala resists risk, clinging to old solutions, while the prefrontal cortex is where innovation happens. To access it, leaders must quiet emotional reactivity and create an environment that fosters curiosity.

“You can’t be creative when you’re focused on survival,” Poag explains. “Creativity is risky by nature. The brain resists anything new. Leaders have to calm the amygdala and lean into complexity to generate new ideas.”

Physiology matters too. Sleep, hydration, and oxygenation are essential for brain function. “I’ve worked with clients getting four hours of sleep a night,” Poag says. “You can’t expect new thinking when your brain is depleted. You’ve got to address the physiology of it in addition to your habits.

Unlocking Creative Potential Through Brain Science

Leaders interested in nurturing creativity in their thinking and in their teams spend time understanding how the brain generates ideas. One factor in this process is the default mode network (DMN). Psychology Today explains the DMN as “a system of connected brain areas that show increased activity when a person is not focused on what is happening around them.”

Research has shown that when the brain is daydreaming or engaged in reflective, non-linear thinking, creativity increases. Ever notice how your best ideas come while you’re in the shower or taking a walk? Neuroscience reveals that when the mind has space to wander, it is more creative.

For leaders, recognizing this pattern is powerful. By alternating between focused attention and “mental downtime,” they can encourage breakthrough ideas. For example, one CEO in a Vistage group shifted her leadership team’s weekly problem-solving sessions outdoors into walking meetings.

The result? Discussions that had been stuck in a loop began producing new, actionable ideas simply because the environment supported the brain’s natural creative rhythms.

Encouraging Brain-Friendly Innovation in Teams

Physiologically, the brain needs psychological safety and collaboration to innovate. Leaders who micromanage their teams or allow tensions to build in the workplace, stifling creativity and innovation.

When individuals feel safe from judgment, the amygdala quiets down, allowing the prefrontal cortex to engage in higher-level thinking. Leaders can foster brain-friendly innovation by creating environments that encourage experimentation, refraining from mistakes as learning, and rewarding curiosity.

For example, consider restructuring team meetings so they finish with time for “what if” dialogue. This can offer employees a psychologically safe place to suggest unconventional solutions. Over time, the practice can help boost morale and reveal new processes, products or services.

The result is teams that not only feel empowered to innovate but also have the neurological conditions in place to generate bold, practical solutions that move organizations forward.

Leading Smarter with Neuroscience

Being an effective leader who inspires teams is more than charisma or strategy. Leaders who understand how their brains work can regulate emotions, make better decisions, rewire unhelpful habits, and drive greater innovation in their organizations when they grasp the neuroscience of leadership.

Ready to start leveraging brain-based strategies for enhanced decision-making, emotional intelligence and team collaboration? Vistage membership provides access to unmatched brain-based coaching and advisory support, unlocking their leadership potential.

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