About ‘Leadership Weekly Digest’ (LWD): The goal of this weekly newsletter is to highlight quality articles from the past week –in a condensed format– that discuss leadership, with a focus on employee engagement. Much of the content comes from those we follow on Twitter, and members of the Employee Engagement Network.

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Physics, psychology, and ‘management science’, pretty much cover the full spectrum from the ‘hard’ to the ‘soft’ sciences. Engineering usually tries to find application for the ‘hard’ sciences, but this engineer isn’t a hard-science bigot, I use what works! I mean, who can ignore a study that finds “Men without money desire heavier women than are desired by wealthy men”; someone has to find a practical application for this research! Now seriously…

The Biology of Business: Homo Administrans @ The Economist

I am not sure why The Economist doesn’t identify their authors. It may be to avoid losing their best writers to the competition, or that they want to be seen as some kind of all-knowing borg; I think it is the latter.

What hard science can be found within the often foggy field of ‘management science’? This article highlights the work of several biologists that are applying hard science to delve into things that you might care about:

• If you want happier employees, you might want to start off by hiring happier people.
• People with low levels of the hormone cortisol will be less interested in deferred compensation.
• Oxytocin, a neurotransmitter, plays a role in building trust.
• There are genetic predispositions to the fields we choose, particularly within the creative arts and physical sciences [ironically 'soft' and 'hard' -ed.]
• The greater the mismatch between testosterone and status, the less effectively a group’s members co-operate.
• Around 40% of the variation between people’s incomes is attributable to genetics.
• The role that testosterone can play in the sales process.

Before you ask us for a blood sample kit to put this new knowledge to use, consider that this is pretty new stuff, and there are already laws that ban the use of genetic information in job recruitment. Researchers cited also admit that they are dealing in averages and trends, which is hard to apply to individuals.

I recommend this very well-researched and interesting article, which provides hope for those who want to see a more rigorous ‘hard science’ approach to topics important to managers. Thanks to Phil for passing this along.

Revenge of the Introvert by Laurie Helgoe

We often make the mistake of associating shyness with introversion. Shy extroverts exist, as do ‘outgoing’ introverts, and this article helps us better understand this dynamic. Probably my favourite part was a ‘sub-article’, that very accurately portrayed the internal monolog that occurs when you ask an introvert the apparently rhetorical question ‘How are you?’. As an ‘outgoing introvert’ I found this portrayal both accurate and funny:

Good? That’s not quite right. I really have had a pretty crummy day, but there isn’t a quick way to explain that… I hate that we so often just say ‘good’ because that’s the convention. The other person doesn’t really want to know… While the introvert is evaluating the question on at least two levels (how she is feeling and what she thinks about the question, perhaps also what this says about our society), the speaker is already moving on to sharing something about his day. [Been there! -ed.]

In our very extroversion-oriented western society, introverted behaviour is often marginalized because those behaviours get misconstrued as ’antisocial’, passive, or not ‘team-oriented’. Scans of the electrical behaviour and blood flow in the brain show increased activity in the introvert’s frontal cortex and Broca’s area. These areas are used to perform remembering, planning, decision making, problem solving, and speech production. These areas were more active in introverts than in extroverts, both during challenging cognitive tasks and at rest. Researchers observing this trend propose that introverts limit input from the environment in order to maintain an optimal level of arousal. Extraverts, on the other hand, seek out external stimulation to get their brain juices flowing. So while western society frowns on the introverts tendency to withdraw, the introvert does not do this to limit their contribution, but to increase its effectiveness; keep this in mind the next time you hold a brainstorming session.

A selection of our recent posts:

• Taming the Stubborn Elephant
• 10 Reasons to Quit Your Job
• LWD 2010WK38 – How Pathetically Prophetic!