Financial Post: Changing Employee Behavior – What Managers Need To Know

May 30, 2010 – Financial Post – Ray B.Williams – Canada

When executives and managers are faced with the challenge of trying to change or modify employee behavior and performance, management strategies often encompass new approaches to coaching and motivation. Yet, many of those strategies and approaches may not be grounded in the latest knowledge about human behavior.

Advances in neuroscience now can provide guidance for the development of a new view of mental health/illness that can be translated into practical applications for personal, executive and life coaches as well as managers wishing to engage in coaching activities with their employees.

In a ground breaking article entitled “A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry,” Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel proposed several principles based on neuroscience research. Of these principles, perhaps the most important is that “all mental processes, even the most complex psychological processes, derive from the operation of the brain,” Kandel also suggested that genes do not explain differences in mental illness and that experience and environment have significant influences. Researchers Nydia Cappes, Raquel Andres-Hynan and Larry Davidson of the Yale School of Medicine have proposed 7 principles of brain based psychotherapy that all coaches should become familiar with. Read More.