Quiet Leadership

David Rock
 Great teachers….
• Create vision and strategy
• Establish clear expectations
• Help their students to solve problems
themselves
• Support them in making their own decisions
• Give consistent positive feedback on
performance
• Change is pain. Organizational change is unexpectedly
difficult because it provokes sensations of physiological
discomfort.
• Behaviorism doesn’t work. Change efforts based on
incentive and threat (the carrot and the stick) rarely succeed
in the long run.
• Humanism is overrated. In practice, the conventional
empathic approach of connection and persuasion doesn’t
sufficiently engage people.
• Focus is power. The act of paying attention creates
chemical and physical changes in the brain.
• Expectation shapes reality. People’s preconceptions have a
significant impact on what they perceive.
• Attention density shapes identity. Repeated, purposeful,
and focused attention can lead to long-lasting personal
evolution.
• 1. To take any kind of committed action,
people need to think things thru for
themselves:
• 2. People experience a degree of inertia
around thinking for themselves due to
the energy required;
• 3. The act of having an aha moment gives
off the kind of energy needed for people
to become motivated and willing to take
action
• We have a limited amount of working
memory
• Once people have done a job for some time,
they are unconscious much of their workday
• It’s almost impossible to change any
hardwiring that’s been imbedded in the brain
• Big difference between a thought (a map
held in our working memory) and a habit (a
map that’s hardwired in the deeper part of
our brain)
• Neurons need positive feedback in some form to
create long-term connections
• Instead of looking for behaviours to fix in
others, become fascinated with identifying and
growing people’s strengths
• Directions a conversation can go
– Philosophical
– Detailed
– Problem focused
– Solution focused
• It only takes 10 to 20% of the time to use a self-
directed approach than it does to make
suggestions
• Remove the word ‘why’ from our
conversations, and we’ll become more
solution-focused
• Assume that people have the answers, and
we’re just here to help them to think
• When other people are able to make their
own mental picture of what we’re saying,
their brain sends a signal to the head to nod a
little
• Advice rarely works
 Questions you could ask to deepen
people’s learning
• What was your big insight this week?
• What did you find out about yourself?
• What other insight did that open up?
• What did you discover about your thinking
or habits?
• What new habit did you notice starting to
emerge?
• According to neuroscientist John Ratey, any
kind of physical activity helps the brain
process ideas
• Have a lie-down. A recent study showed
people came up with better ideas while
horizontal
• Goleman (in Emotional Intelligence) found
that social isolation was roughly twice as
detrimental to our health as smoking