Note before we begin:

I want to make sure each of these posts are written to make stoking discussion and forwarding very easy and helpful to you. In that spirit, I’m going to name the ideal audiences for who you could forward this to at the beginning of each post. Please let me know if you find this “feature” helpful.

Of course, you can keep these posts to yourself, but part of the point of CORE Concepts and its value to you is specifically to help teams have important discussions, not just to provide a personal learning experience.

This post is ideally shared with:

• Co-founders, to get on the same page about leadership style, ensure you aren’t undoing each other’s efforts, and create a platform and vocabulary for necessary (and probably overdue) alignment

• Your C-Suite / Executive Peers, to discuss these points as a group, find alignment on leadership style, and create a platform for feedback within your team

• Your manager or your team, if they are awesome. This post can be a great way to acknowledge what they are getting right using specific language. This isn’t to kiss anyone’s butt. It’s to validate and say a sincere thank you for managing using the best approaches.

ok, here we go…

This is going to be a longer post, because there is zero sense in only knowing part of this puzzle. It will not be useful unless you have all the pieces to put together, so I apologize for breaking my 5-10 minute rule, but I hope you find this super eye-opening.

Are you awesome at leading and managing?

Take a minute to reflect on how you are as a manager or leader, right now. If you aren’t one, no problem. Keep reading because this will help you become one 100x faster (if that’s what you want).

Do you consider yourself a good manager? Do people like working for you? Does your team get a lot of stuff done? Have you been on the fast track for promotions, or have you been kicking ass if you’re a founder?

Really think that through and form an opinion of yourself.

Got it?

Great, now throw all of that thinking right off of a cliff.

Not because you’re wrong, but because this post will be most valuable to you if you read with a mindset of neutrality, not a mindset of whether or not you need to change.

You’re already a great leader or manager? Awesome! Throw it off a cliff.

Do you feel like you really struggle, that you don’t know what you’re doing, and that the team wants things out of you that you don’t know how to give them? Great! Throw that off a cliff, too.

Remember how this newsletter is designed to feel like culinary school? This is a great moment to be reminded of how culinary school feels.

If you walk in the door and you’re already a great chef, they don’t just hand you your diploma, give you all A’s, and tell you that you’re already good to go. And if you walk in feeling disoriented and lost, they don’t tell you to give up.

Instead, you start with the same fundamentals as everyone else, relearning things you already know and learning things that are more efficient, precise, and outright better than what you already knew.

Some of the most frustrating people in culinary school are the ones who think they are great because they are difficult to teach, help, coach, and grow. The same can be true in other fields, like the military, sports, law, medicine, and more. There are plenty of people whose learning and coachability is stunted because of ego. And this has everything to do with being a great leader, because you simply will not be one if you think you don’t need to be growing right now, at this very moment.

And the same can be true of people who feel lost and refuse to believe in themselves. These people are on the other end of the spectrum, too convinced they’ll never be great to embrace learning the tools that could make them just that.

So why did we waste a few paragraphs this week on this point?

Two Reasons.

First, because you are going to come across a LOT of people like this when you manage, so even if none of this describes you, it absolutely describes people you will manage, and you will only be a great manager if you know how to identify and evolve (or remove) these people.

Second, because as you embark on learning the science of human performance, it is absolutely critical that you approach it with logic and an open mind. We are going to cover a TON of things that are going to clash with your current opinions, theories, and even your life experience. While you of course don’t have to agree with anything just because it’s written here, it’s key to approach these topics with logic instead of being emotional or self-referential (using your own experience as the north star, instead of using the real north star).

You would want this open mindedness out of anyone you would aim to help, so you should want this of yourself, first! A great leader cannot hope to evolve other people if s/he is resistant to be evolved, themselves.

If you are logical and open minded, it will cultivate a much deeper form of confidence than the one you might have in your ability (or lack of ability) today. Remember in the post Why to understand the mind, we covered the new and better form of confidence we want to have. Confidence in your own track record of success or your own knowledge is not a good form of confidence, as surprising as that might seem. That form of confidence has no idea whatsoever of your true potential, because it’s so stuck being confident in your current state. Misplaced confidence has little to no interest in learning or growing until you are forced to learn or grow. And that day will come.

So with that said, I hope the brain feels warmed up, logical, and open. Let’s dive in.

The science of greatness

You can read a hundred different business books and still not fully grasp the root level of what makes greatness in leadership or management. That’s what we’re going to explore today. This post will help you see that greatness in leading and managing is very simply about mastering cause and effect, and almost every book you’ve ever read is about a cause that (hopefully) helps you create the effect you want.

Maybe the effect you want from your team is trust, accountability, engagement, better communication, resilience, results-orientation, or innovation. Books cover it all.

But I think most of these books aren’t nearly as helpful as they could be, and here’s why.

Managing and leading people, at the end of the day, is 100% about the human brain. A great manager or leader maximizes the potential of other people’s brains, and this is the root cause of why these teams perform at such a higher level: it’s because their brains are working WAY better.

What possible other explanation could there be?

There isn’t one.

Every single business book you’ve ever read is just an explanation of one or a few ways of more fully activating human brains through cause and effect. Start with Why, The Advantage, Rework, Good to Great, Emotional Intelligence, and on and on. Book after book explains a few tips and theories about how to activate brains, without ever explaining (or in most cases, even knowing) what is actually happening inside the brain.

At best, each book does a very, very partial job at educating people how to activate brains, and each book speaks an entirely different language, like a puzzle with a thousand pieces that the authors never considered people might want to actually put together. How does The Oz Principle work with EQ? How does the Advantage work with The Innovator’s Dilemma? Good luck connecting those dots, because you can’t.

Instead of looking at the surface level of the amalgam of “do this to get that,” we’re going to look deeper at the root of how the brain decides to take action, and to take intelligent action.

What is Human Performance?

Your job as a manager or leader is to activate human performance, and that happens deep within the human brain.

If you are a bad manager or leader, what you’re actually doing deeper down is deactivating human brains, putting them into a state where they do worse thinking, make worse decisions, form worse relationships, and get worse results. You are doing this by causing the brains around you to release counterproductive doses of cortisol, adrenaline, and the wrong type of dopamine. You are causing the brains around you to use the dumbest, most instinctive, most present-centric, and most self-centered parts of the brain to think, make decisions, and take action.

This is what 82% of managers do. They are actively deactivating human brains, human potential, and human performance.

If you’re an incredible manager or leader, you are doing the exact opposite. Deeper down you are maximizing human performance. You are doing this by causing the brains around you to release serotonin, the right use of dopamine, and oxytocin. You are causing the brains around you to use the smartest, most perceptive, logical, creative, future-centric, and impact-centric parts of the brain.

That’s it.

Like, no joke, that is 100% all that is happening. Bad leaders result in bad chemicals and dumb brains. Great leaders result in good chemicals and brilliant brains.

Everything else you want, including accountability, results orientation, cooperation, coachability, resilience, and more all come from those chemicals and parts of the brain. If you want pizza, you go to a Pizzeria, not a Chinese restaurant. The same goes for the brain: if you want logic, you go to the left prefrontal cortex, not the amygdala (which will just give you a fight or flight response).

Every gap in every leader’s ability is about whether we are activating brains well or poorly. Period.

A lot of managers and leaders think that it’s their job to say what all needs to be done and the team should just do it.

That’s what we’re paying people for, right? To do their jobs.

Technically, yes. And if human beings were terminators that could be programmed to “do their jobs,” maybe that approach would hold water. But as long as we employ actual human beings, that is not at all the job of manager or leader.

If we lead in this particular way, humans won’t necessarily deactivate, but they will 100% go in a hundred different directions, based mostly on their personalities, their focus on managing optics, their perception of what gets penalized and rewarded, and sometimes just plain unexplainable nonsense. Leading in this way assumes people will take committed, aligned, quality action, and that is maybe the dumbest assumption of all time.

Instead, we need to learn the three tools that can help any leader maximize human performance. Here’s what they are.

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I’m still experimenting with how to appropriately paywall this newsletter, and have gotten a few bits of good feedback. Here are a few ideas:

• Readers should get more for free before the paywall: No, you shouldn’t. You should pay for receiving real value. You should expect nothing of value for free. That makes no sense whatsoever. Life lesson to learn in there.

• Remind readers that you can use your company card to pay for this. It’s professional development: Yes, do that!

• Any other feedback you want to share? Email me!

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How to maximize human performance

To maximize human performance, we need to focus on 3 critical actions we must perform, without exception. I’ll throw in a 4th if you want to go next-level:

Subscribe to CORE Concepts Paid Subscribers to read the rest.