Brain vs. Brawn

"It is my simple mission: to help everyone in our company understand the power of a relationship.   In almost every account we have ever lost, if we look back it is due to somewhere along the way we lost touch with the relationship."

These words were written by a coaching client of mine, Barbara, She has recently been promoted to regional VP at a fortune 100 company and her words resonate with the truth of experience. Barbara is a warrior who loves to move into the trenches with her people and get up close and personal when helping them solve problems. Barbara builds relationships not because she is  nice, kind, and compassionate. She actually is all of those things. She builds and nurtures relationships because she uses her brain. Barbara is a pragmatic warrior who has been through countless battles with competitors, clients and upper management. Her philosophy of relationship building is based on what works. Her strategy will beat out more aggressive, brutish approaches over the long haul every time. But why does her strategy work?

Resent brain research suggests that the human brain is not so much a “thinking brain” but a relationship making brain. Dr. Gerald Huther, who leads the Dept. of Neurobiology at the Psychiatric Clinic of Gottingen, Germany, says “Until quite recently, it was held to be self-evident that human beings have a big brain to make it possible for them to think. However, the research results of the last years have made it clear that the structure and function of the human brain is especially optimized for building relationships. Our brain is thus much more a social organ than it is a thinking organ.”

Our brain has evolved over millions of years and our closest ancestors, the great apes, have much to teach us. Apes will fight and even kill members of other tribes who try to invade their territory. However, when scientists observe these animals in the wild they report that for the majority of time these animals spend much more time cooperating then fighting. Great apes have learned that building relationships increases the chance of success for all members of the community. By cooperating and specializing on essential tasks like food gathering, rearing the young and watching for dangerous invaders, they all benefit.

Barbara is using her brain when she pays attention to building these interpersonal networks and she reminds her team that relationships take constant attention. She knows that especially in times of stress, building and strengthening relationships will win out over blame and got’cha behavior every time.

Comments

[Burt Voorhees]

There is a good deal of anthropological work around the idea that the growth of the brain in human evolution involved being able to manage social relationships in relatively large groups (the attractive element). There is also a (not completely mainstream) group of cognitive scientists who work on the idea that the brain is not a computing organ but a pattern recognizing organ (relationships again).