AFRICAN SPEAKER BUREAU | THE NEUROENGINEER
What If Your People Aren't the Problem?
Veli Ndaba, The NeuroEngineer, helps leaders examine what the workplace is asking people to do, and which conditions let their capabilities turn into performance. Founder, NeuroEngineering Leadership.
Two leaders set Veli Ndaba a hard standard. One returned his reports in red until they were right, sometimes eight times, and explained why he expected better. Another gathered managers beside a broken machine, threatened to fire anyone who left and drove away. The first built capability. The second secured compliance for a night. Veli knew both experiences before he developed NeuroEngineering Leadership. Trained in mechanical engineering, he worked at Transnet and in manufacturing and corporate management. He began asking why the same capable person could contribute freely under one leader and go quiet under another. The question eventually became his work: people may not be the problem; the workplace may be engineering the problem. Today Veli is The NeuroEngineer, founder of NeuroEngineering Leadership and Lumineve Consultancy, and author of five books including The Neuroscience of Effective Leadership. He has addressed corporate audiences including Cell C and Eskom's Kendal and Kusile power stations. His talks are the introduction to a method that looks at the conditions around performance and, where a client chooses, follows through with workshops and a longer measurement journey.
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The standard was never the problem. The conditions were. At Transnet, Veli Ndaba's chief engineer returned his reports in red until they could go to senior management without another check. He explained what he was building and stayed close to the work. Years later Veli found him and thanked him with a signed copy of his first book. At a manufacturing plant, a critical machine broke down during a major order. The operations director told the managers they would be dismissed if they left before the machine was running, then drove away. The order was eventually completed with outside assistance. Threat got them through the night; it did not develop them. Veli's point is not that leaders should relax standards or excuse individual responsibility. People retain agency and accountability. Leaders are also responsible for what their environment rewards, tolerates and discourages. The conditions change what people are prepared and able to contribute. A mechanical engineer who later worked in management, Veli turned to applied neuroscience and organisational behaviour to understand those conditions. He now calls the discipline NeuroEngineering Leadership. A keynote gives leaders a way to see the problem differently. His five-stage NeuroEngineer Organisational Performance System goes further: diagnosis, mapping, intervention, reinforcement and measurement, with the scope agreed for each client. In a room of managers Veli does not ask them to leave their operational judgement at the door. He asks them to examine the systems and behaviours that produce the results they see, beginning with the next conversation they have with their people.
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