This week, I finished taking two courses that overlapped over the past six weeks: Neuroscience for Business through MIT and Brain-Based Facilitation through the NeuroLeadership Institute. I highly recommend the NeuroLeadership Institute course. I’m still processing the MIT course, and I think my next step is to read the instructor’s book because I finished feeling like there were still some connections I wanted to make.

Maybe that is appropriate. If there is one thing I have taken away from spending six weeks thinking about the brain, it is that the brain is far more complicated than the tidy explanations we sometimes use to describe it. Dopamine is not simply a “pleasure chemical.” Oxytocin is not simply a “trust hormone.” The amygdala does not just hijack the rational part of our brain and take control. Those explanations can be useful shortcuts, but the actual neuroscience is much more complex and interconnected.

At the same time, learning more about the brain reinforced something I have been thinking about for a long time: if organizations expect people to do good work, then organizations need to create conditions that help people do good work. If we understand more about what supports attention, learning, decision-making, connection, and cognition, then we should also be asking whether the way we design work supports those things.

We spend a lot of time teaching employees the hard skills of their jobs. We teach software, procedures, policies, equipment, databases, workflows, and all of the everyday tasks people need to accomplish. Those things matter. But if we expect employees to learn and perform those skills, shouldn’t we also help them develop the skills that support their ability to do that work?

Attention management, emotional regulation, reflection, communication, relationship-building, mindfulness, optimism, and the ability to recognize our own automatic reactions are often labeled “soft skills.” Sometimes they are treated as extras rather than essential professional development. Yet these skills influence how we pay attention, learn, interact with other people, respond to stress, approach problems, and make decisions. If we want employees to handle the cognitively demanding parts of their jobs, it makes sense to help them develop the skills that support that cognitive work.

That does not mean sending everyone to a mindfulness workshop and declaring the workplace fixed. In fact, that distinction may be one of my biggest takeaways from these courses.

People Need Space to Think

Our brains have limits. Attention is limited, and so is working memory. We cannot continually add information, tasks, meetings, notifications, and interruptions and assume that none of it affects our ability to think.

People need pauses.

That might mean an actual break, but it can also mean creating space during a meeting or training session to stop, reflect, process, or make connections. As someone who facilitates learning, this is something I want to become much more intentional about. We often interpret silence as something that needs to be filled, particularly when we are teaching or facilitating. But silence does not necessarily mean nothing is happening. Sometimes the thinking is the activity.

Novelty also matters for attention. Changing an activity, introducing something unexpected, incorporating play, or simply approaching familiar information in a different way can help capture attention and increase engagement. But there is an important balance. Novelty does not mean adding more and more stimulation. Our brains still have limits on what they can process. Sometimes good brain-based design means making something interesting, and sometimes it means making something simpler.

Connection Is Part of the Work

Another idea I kept coming back to was social connection. Positive social interaction and bonding involve complex neurobiological systems that include oxytocin. That does not mean oxytocin is simply a “trust hormone,” because the actual science is much more nuanced. But it does reinforce something important: our relationships with other people are connected to what is happening in our brains.

That makes me think about all of those workplace moments that can easily be dismissed as unproductive. When do employees get to talk to one another without an agenda? When do they laugh together, share stories, play, or learn something about the person who works in another department? When do people who mostly interact through email or Teams have opportunities to actually connect?

Does your organization intentionally create moments for that to happen?

Those interactions may not produce an immediate deliverable, but that does not mean nothing productive is happening. They can help create relationships, and relationships matter when we are trying to communicate, collaborate, solve problems, and navigate difficult situations together.

Trust cannot simply be declared as an organizational value. It develops through relationships and repeated experiences with other people.

Psychological Safety Changes What People Are Willing to Do

Connection and trust also lead directly into psychological safety, a topic that has been central to my own work for years. If I am afraid that asking a question will make me look incompetent, I may stay quiet. If I think admitting a mistake will result in punishment or embarrassment, I may hide it. If experience has taught me that challenging an idea or suggesting something unusual comes with interpersonal consequences, eventually I may stop doing those things.

Now consider what that means for an organization that says it values learning, creativity, innovation, or good decision-making.

People need to be able to ask questions, say they don’t understand, challenge assumptions, suggest an idea that might not work, and acknowledge when something has gone wrong. Psychological safety does not mean everyone is comfortable or agrees all the time. It means people can take the interpersonal risks that learning, collaboration, and experimentation require.

Organizations that want people to learn and adapt have to create environments where it is safe to be a learner.

The “Soft” Skills Aren’t So Soft

Mindfulness is a good example of something that can sound a little woo-woo when we bring it into the workplace. But when we move past some of the language surrounding it, we are talking about attention. We are talking about noticing what is happening internally and externally, recognizing an automatic reaction, and creating enough space to decide what happens next.

Those are useful workplace skills.

Positive thinking can be misunderstood in much the same way. I don’t mean pretending everything is wonderful, ignoring legitimate problems, or telling someone to change their attitude when a system is hurting them. A more useful way to think about it is learning to notice possibilities alongside problems, challenge automatic assumptions, and leave room for another explanation. Our expectations, experiences, emotions, and mental models influence what we notice and how we interpret what is happening around us.

Learning to recognize those influences can help us become better thinkers and decision-makers.

If we are willing to train someone on a new piece of software because they need it to do their job, why wouldn’t we also give them opportunities to learn skills that help them manage attention, communicate, regulate reactions, build relationships, and approach problems more effectively?

These are not replacements for technical skills. They help people use those technical skills in a workplace filled with other human beings.

And Then There Is Burnout

This is where I think we have to be especially careful about how we apply what we know about the brain.

Sleep matters. Nutrition matters. Movement matters. Stress matters. Social connection matters. Mindfulness can be useful. Optimism can be useful. Developing strategies for protecting our internal capacity matters. I believe people should have opportunities to learn these things, and I believe organizations can play an important role in providing those opportunities.

But organizations cannot take that research and conclude that burnout is therefore an individual problem.

We have a tendency to respond to burnout by giving people more things to do: meditate, practice gratitude, exercise, set boundaries, think positively, become more resilient. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things. The problem comes when we offer them as the solution to conditions the organization itself is creating.

An employee cannot meditate their way out of chronic understaffing. A gratitude practice cannot repair a psychologically unsafe workplace. Resilience training cannot make an unreasonable workload reasonable. Teaching someone how to manage their response to stress does not mean we should stop asking why the workplace is producing so much stress in the first place.

I also don’t think the answer is to reject individual well-being practices simply because burnout can be systemic. We can hold both ideas at the same time.

We can teach mindfulness AND examine workload. We can teach resilience AND create psychological safety. We can encourage positive thinking AND address policies that make work unnecessarily difficult. We can teach communication skills AND create opportunities for people to build relationships. We can help people strengthen their internal capacity AND change systems that continually drain it.

If anything, what I learned over these six weeks makes me think organizations should be doing both.

What Would a Brain-Supportive Workplace Look Like?

That is probably the question I am left with after these courses.

If we know that people benefit from opportunities for recovery, manageable cognitive load, social connection, psychological safety, agency, learning, and reflection, what would it look like to intentionally consider those things when we design work?

That does not mean work will never be stressful. There will still be deadlines, difficult customers, competing priorities, limited resources, change, and days when too much needs to happen at once. A brain-supportive workplace is not a workplace where everyone is comfortable and happy all the time.

But perhaps organizations could spend less time asking, “How do we make employees more resilient to this workplace?” and spend more time asking, “What can we change about this workplace so people don’t have to use all of their resilience just to get through it?”

At the same time, we can give people the tools to better understand their own brains, manage their attention, recognize their reactions, build relationships, communicate effectively, and protect their internal capacity.

That is the connection I think I was looking for throughout these six weeks.

Brain-based leadership cannot just be about teaching employees how to manage their brains so they can handle whatever the workplace throws at them. It also has to mean looking at the workplace itself and asking whether we have created conditions that support the human beings we are asking to do the work.