INsight/ The Neuroscience Way

Ubud, 26 March 2025 — Culture change will happen when you grow leaders around you in the right way.

Story

It happened last week. A webinar we attended offered the latest insights from neuroscience for leadership development. Over the past decade, the research at the NeuroLeadership Institute (NLI) has informed how we designed our work with leaders for culture change, so we were keen to compare our leadership development experiences with their latest research. 

What we learned during the webinar is that our TransformationFirst design is strongly aligned with NLI’s latest research findings for Cracking the Code on Culture Change, which is what leadership development is about. Discovering this, we felt a strong sense of reaffirmation for our vision and process to make culture change happen in individual leaders, teams, and entire organizations. 

Drawing on NLI’s research experience to advance culture change in a variety of organizations around the world, the team shared three key principles that they have consistently enacted with their corporate, government, and civil society clients. These are to focus on priorities, habits, and the systems needed for culture change. Let’s dive into these one by one.

Challenge

In our process to coach leaders through transitions, getting clear with them on their vision for change is both critical and foundational. That’s where NLI’s focus on priorities comes in. We help our clients discover, communicate, and enact their purpose in their work every week. This focus on priorities applies to individual leaders and to teams of leaders and the organization as a whole.

NLI’s second principle for culture change is about building habits. When we coach (teams of) leaders, our relentless focus is on helping them practice effective leadership behaviors that deserve attention and repetition. We all know what it feels like to do reps in the gym, and the same applies to building effective leadership behaviors: they need practice every day of the week to become habits and second nature.

The third principle shared by NLI is about creating the systems and environment in which leadership development work is done well. This applies to norms, guidelines, and recognition for showing up and making progress. In our community of practice, performance is supported by visual cues and nudges and by a system of rewards and recognition. The environment and systems are designed to make daily leadership practice easier and more fulfilling.  

Question

Talking about culture change in organizations, my question for you is this: who are the colleagues (and clients and partners) you want to grow into leaders to make culture change happen in your workplace? Please let us know what you want to see happen. Working with us, you will benefit from a neuroscience-informed process that helps you grow more leaders and create culture change together. That’s what your team, your business, and the world need. Congrats on making a start!

Note that our TransformationFirst process stands out from what you see elsewhere. First, we focus on helping you practice leadership behaviors rather than accumulating more knowledge about leadership (which is widely available rather than scarce). Second, we offer you leadership challenges that activate your head, heart, and gut in experiential learning, rather than providing one-off training events or programs (which are shown by research to be ineffective for changing the culture at work and are therefore a waste of time and money). 

Third, we help you build collaborative practices that are faster, more effective, and more fun than learning solo (individual leadership development is difficult for most people to sustain without a collaborative process for structured learning, practice, and feedback). Let us know your preferences. We look forward to hearing from you. Please reach out in a free strategy call if you are ready to invest in growing leaders around you to change the culture in your workplace.