We are relational beings and have an inherited need to be part of small groups where we are known, know others and feel safe. Yet our lived experience is increasingly boundaryless, hyperlinked and uncontained, leading to the stress and exhaustion that accounts for many missed workdays. Being part of a community or social group is vital for our health and well-being – after all, having five friends is a much more accurate predictor of future health than weight, diet, smoking or alcohol consumption.

These are biological needs influenced by the structure of our brains (hence, 'The Social Brain'). Our social relationships create responses at a physiological and psychological level that rumble unseen and unmeasured beneath all our interactions. In our book we have explored how a better understanding of our social brain can help organisations - and the teams within them – to adopt practices and ways of working to help them thrive.

We have uncovered six foundational components for organisational thriving that take account of our hardwired motivations and responses. Our book explores each component in detail, as well as the leadership practices that create these environments for thriving. It is a leader’s job to understand when and how to work with the grain of our hardwired motivations and responses - and conversely, to know when to disrupt them.

Our natural tendencies, for example, towards freeriding, homophily and moral partiality in our close relationships are just some of the behaviours that may need intervention and calling out. Equally, much more attention needs to be paid to our unique human gifts by upweighting and focusing on freeing employees’ imagination, creating opportunities for employees to communicate at a conceptual level, supporting them to engage meaningfully with the future and making space for people to learn from others.

Think flexibly about teams and build the leaders of those teams – do not do all the work yourself. Have tight principles, but where you can, keep the rules loose. Leaders need to be able to match team size to task, and as scale alters, so must leadership practice. For example, a team of 15 needs facilitative leadership, a team of five needs no leader at all, and a team of 50 needs structure and subgroups.

It is easy to fall into the trap of focusing too much on individuals when we promote staff or develop people, but leaders also need to think about the way those teams work together: their connection, their ability to learn, and the way they bring values to life. We are social animals: great leadership lies in the relationship a leader has with their followers, just as great teams, through their interactions with each other, become more than the sum of their parts. In the book, we have explored why this is so and, conversely, why it is that some teams of highly skilled individuals fail to thrive.