If you want to know about the brain in relation to leadership, or development of leaders, then the best two books to start with are David Rock's "Your Brain at Work" and Dr Dan Siegel's book "Mindsight". They are both fantastic at filtering, applying and making sense of the vast amounts of neuroscientific research being generated every day.
However, they have always seemed to me to be approaching that research from completely different viewpoints. David Rock's writing has been mostly about how we can use knowledge of the brain to improve our thinking. Dan Siegel's work has been about how we can use knowledge of the brain to change unhelpful patterns of behaviour. Now I find they are mutual fans! Let me give two examples from a David Rock presentation I attended yesterday.
The first is Rock's explanation of why awareness of neuroscientific research helps leaders. The hard data in research creates a willingness to look at how our brains work, it also creates a language for talking about it. This allows better self-regulation, which supports better adaptation of our behaviour to the situation (flexibility). Importantly, Rock explicitly saw the link between better self-regulation and better adaptation as being better integration of brain function. This is Dan Siegel's entire focus - his work is all about various forms of mindfulness and physical practices which integrate the brain.
The second is Rock and Siegel's collaboraion to produce a list of 7 things you should do every day to maintain mental health - the "heatlhy mind platter". Google it for more details, but in outline you need: Sleep time, Physical [Activity] time, Focus time, Down time (relaxing, preferably not with TV), Play time, Connecting time, and Time In (his word for internal reflection or mindfulness type meditation - the opposite of Time Out). And both of them are clear that the last is one of the most essential.
