Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

I was interested in John Gratton's post at Core Character today about teens who learn to mask their fear and found myself wondering about the rest of us...

Do you remember the fox in Aesop’s Fable…”The Fox and the Mask?” He rifled through an actor’s house…held up a mask made in an imitation of a head… and said: “What a beautiful head. Yet it has no value …as it entirely lacks brains…”  Do people wear masks where you work…?

Robert Wegman, the late … highly successful owner of Wegman’s Food Stores, knew people well at work…. I often spotted him strolling through his Rochester stores where he “hung out with workers and customers.”  I mean people told him stories about their lives and about talents they hoped to share….  More than once Robert Wegman changed what he did as CEO because of what they said…

Does that happen where you work? Or does your firm cultivate the opposite of Wegman’s style… workers who hide behind masks?  Brain experts tell us that people wear masks or who hide who they are… tend to lack interpersonal intelligence…. Here at the MITA International Brain Based Center we find we get to know others more by stepping up to people with a bit of support when they need it…. Just last night we met a senior citizen at the end of the day … who was locked out of the post office because the personnel locked the door two minutes early. We stopped…helped him to explain the situation to the post office staff who opened the door to allow him in… and we made a new friend.

Can you see any benefits to your brain and your business through hanging out to learn from…support or get to know others a bit more…?