The Steadfast Leader: Control Anxiety, Make Confident Decisions, and Focus Your Team Using the New Science of Leadership

CHAPTER 5

Creating Superior Teams

So far, we’ve looked at how the Polyvagal Theory relates to the organizational setting, how it affects leadership, its impacts on organizational staffing and talent acquisition, and its effects on financial decision-making. We’ve made a solid case for finding the sweet spot between relying on rational and nonrational thinking, and how simply being aware of our biases and physical state can result in positive changes. In this chapter, we’ll turn our attention to how organizational leaders can use the three autonomic states to improve staff productivity. We’ll start with a scenario where senior executive Oliver Green creates conflict during a department meeting, and later we’ll see how he can solve the team conflict ...