Intellectual stimulation, exercising your brain, is as important as physical exercise to maintaining your health.  Elongating your life span requires attention toward all body parts – muscles, vital organs and thinking processes.

Supporting thought

On and off my posts focus on leadership behaviours.  A critical tool in understanding and motivating others is to create an environment that allows for positive exercise of intellectual prowess.

Properly orchestrated this can enrich the performance of the team, group or organization, through a series of a productive set of behaviours, that addresses not just physical well being but possibly more importantly, mental health.

Like your muscles, without regular active use your thinking processes can become atrophied.   Leaders must not just motivate action and outcomes but enable others to do so in a mentally stimulating way.

Setting the Environment

One approach is to encourage respectful dialogue.  Exchanging information in a reasoned manner while encouraging dissent and opposing views can be a very powerful motivator.

More importantly, this behaviour results in higher levels of engagement which in turn raise motivation and ultimately outcomes are better.

These outcomes hopefully map to the groups goals and objectives.  Encouraging the team to mentally challenge themselves includes the use of scenarios specifically targeted to make everyone think.

In these cases, the goal or objective may be in and of itself, about the thinking process, no more no less.