First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently

by Gallup Press

By the time the child reaches her early teens, she has half as many synaptic connections as she did when she was 3. Her brain has carved out a unique network of connections. She has some beautiful, frictionless, traffic-free four-lane highways where the connections are smooth and strong. And she has some barren wastelands where no signal at all makes it across. If she ends up with a four-lane highway for empathy, she will feel every emotion of those around her as though it were her own. By contrast, if she has a wasteland for empathy, she will be emotionally blind, forever saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person — not out of malice, but simply out of an inability to pick up the frequency of the emotional signals being sent. Likewise, if she has a four-lane highway for confrontation, she will be that lucky person whose brain just hands her one perfect word after another during the heat of a debate. If she has a wasteland for confrontation, she will find that her brain always shuts her mouth down at the most critical moments of a debate.