Your phone vibrates, you check for new emails. A GIF pops up on slack, you laugh. Your map app chimes, you turn. A birthday text from a college roommate appears, you reminisce. Your calendar alert dings, you freak – you’re 20 minutes late for an in-person lunch with investors. If you own a cell phone, you experience this algorithmic triggering an average of 3 hours and 35 minutes daily or roughly 47-86 times a day. And because of the way dopamine works on the brain, the more notifications you receive in a shorter timeframe, the more compelled you are to respond (Instagram’s algorithms are designed to do this).
These triggered responses go beyond cell phones. All of our senses produce stimuli powerful enough to trigger behavior. In cases of PTSD or leadership, triggers and conditioned responses are usually detrimental to sociability and success. Does this sound familiar? “I hate throwing my teammates under the bus (conditioned response) but they made me look bad (trigger) and no one gets rewarded for collaboration (conditioned stimulus)!”
But what if triggers could be an offensive strategy? What if they triggered you and your organization’s growth? A growing body of research suggests working on creating good triggers for positive outcomes. Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education mission states, “Our capacity to feel compassion has ensured the survival and thriving of our species over millennia.” In other words, it’s the upside of our behavior, not the downside that has ensured forward progress. The Center’s research complements the business case for triggering altruistic behavior as a means of generating employee engagement, and the intersection of altruism/employee engagement/increased performance. The bottom line: Triggering altruistic leadership does more than create warm fuzzies.
The brain’s reward system is responsible for creating a, “Yes, do that again!” experience. Neuroimaging and social neuroscience research shows how altruism is motivated by a specific pattern of activity in the Mentalizing, Reward, and Emotional Salience regions of the brain. In particular, the stratum and VTA (clusters of neurons in these regions) motivate actions, reinforce decisions, and aid in learning. This image shows the connection between these reward pathways and clusters. Furthermore, research on compassion-related display behavior shows how certain experiences can trigger compassionate responses. So, we’re learning that prosocial behavior…
- Keeps individuals and groups (even enterprises) growing
- Impacts business performance and profitability
- Happens in identifiable and specific regions of the brain
- Can be triggered through certain experiences.
As a leader, you can prime your reward pathways and ultimately build a library of conditioned prosocial responses. The release of dopamine will help you do it.
Dopamine is the chemical messenger (neurotransmitter) active in triggering your, “Yes, do that again!” pathway. If you want to trigger your leadership (and dopamine) for good, try the following.
- Increase Your Results Cycle-Time. I have a friend who had this encouraging little quip in his signature block: “Finishing is fulfilling.” I worked with another leader, a CTO responsible for multimillion-dollar IT initiatives, who required quick cycle times for his leaders’ results as opposed to the multi-year initiatives common with many IT functions. He required tangible, bite sized results delivered in less than 6 months. These task-related cues are shown to condition responses in the stimulus-response cycle. BestSelf Co. has great products to help you capture, track, and make changes to ensure you speed your results cycle time. Check out their Win the Day and SELF journal.
- Change How and What You Eat. Eating bad foods (yes, you know the ones) reinforcse eating more bad foods and leads to selfish, unhealthy rewards. Nutrition plays a vital role in the brain’s impact on our choices and behaviors. Familiarize yourself with foods that are loaded with natural probiotics like yogurt and sauerkraut and eat them. Increase your intake of iron, vitamin B6, and folic acid. Similarly, eat smaller meals more frequently to keep positive dopamine levels higher. If you need more, here are 33 Ways to boost Dopamine and increase your productivity, half of which are nutrition related.
- Join a Bigger Story. It is easy to become overly self-focused. Much research has shown the down side of social media and its ability to increase self-focus that results in depression and anxiety. Gratitude and practicing thankfulness have a powerful impact on your brain, resulting behaviors, and organizational outcomes. Regardless of religious preference, spirituality often encourages thoughts and attention toward concepts and stories that are bigger than one’s self. Spiritual retreats, Stanford’s Monk study, and the University of Utah’s religious experience study all indicate the upside of spiritual experiences and the brain’s reward system.
- Be Social. Social media isn’t all bad, but the reward cycle isn’t directly in your control which means a lack of likes and negative comments can trigger you to lead in less than effective ways. You know the relationships that bring joy and life; ensure you spend time there. Did you ever hear the following cliché? “Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future.” The people we spend discretionary time with have an impact on the behaviors we exhibit. This is true for introverts as well. Isolation and avoidance behaviors do not create more dopamine.
- Doodle. Listen to Music. Have you ever noticed a colleague doodling on their notepad during a meeting? Have you ever done it? It may be more than them simply checking out. Research indicates that freeform drawing actually opens up your reward pathway and triggers the same part of the brain active in your most altruistic moments. Music you like can have a similar effect on your ability to lead in altruistic ways and reward you for doing it.
It may seem like your reward pathways and conditioned responses control you, but research shows that we are in control of them. It’s your choice. Choosing to trigger your reward pathways and build new conditioned responses, will not only help your brain rewire itself, it will also ensure those new altruistic pathways are strengthened. And that is an algorithm we all can benefit from.