A graduate of Harvard College and Tulane School of Medicine, Edward M. (“Ned”) Hallowell is a child and adult psychiatrist and the founder of The Hallowell Center for Cognitive and Emotional Health. He was a member of the faculty of the Harvard Medical School from 1983 to 2004. He is considered to be one of the foremost experts on the topic of ADHD. He is the co-author, with Dr. John Ratey, of Driven to Distraction, and Answers to Distraction, which have sold more than a million copies. In 2005, Drs. Hallowell and Ratey released their much-awaited third book on ADHD, Delivered from Distraction. It provides updated information on the treatment of ADHD and more on adult ADHD. In his most recent book, Shine: Using Brain Science to Get the Best from Your People book (2011), Hallowell draws on brain science, performance research, and his own experience helping people maximize their potential to present a proven process for getting the best from your people.

Here is a brief excerpt from my interview of him during which he shares his thoughts about to achieve peak performance by completing what he calls the Cycle of Excellence: Select, Connect, Play, Grapple and Grow, and Shine.

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You brain does its best when it is doing a task it can do well.  That’s basic brain science.  Yet many people persist in the wrong job, trying year after year to get good at what they’re bad at or at what they dislike.  Like marrying the wrong person, working in the wrong job is a prescription for a life of toil-and-groan. Put simply, select refers to matching a person with whatever and whoever is right for that person. It could be a job or an assignment, it could be a wife or a doubles partner in tennis. When selections are right, they make people shine because they’re happy, they feel fulfilled, and they are eager to do well.

On numerous occasions, Jack Welch observed that “getting the right people in the right jobs is a lot more important than developing strategy.” That’s what Jim Collins has in mind, in Good to Great, when he urges business leaders to get the wrong people off the bus and get the right people on the bus. Young people beginning a career need to realize that there are lots of “buses” in life. More often than not, selecting which one to be on determines success or failure, joy or despair.

Connection is the golden key to all that’s good in life.  Disconnection leads to most of what’s bad in life.  “Dr. Shine” [an elderly man who shines shoes at Boston’s Logan Airport] intuitively knew this, and he dedicated his life to connecting with people, helping them to open up and get past fear.  Fear shuts people down.  When you feel safe, your brain is free to soar.  When you feel in danger, your brain goes into survival mode, not peak performance mode.  Too many people feel unsafe at work, under toxic pressures, and stretched too thin. They are literally about to snap. Within an atmosphere of trust and what I call connection, a supervisor can create conditions under which people’s brains can set aside fear and fly high.

By “play” I do not mean the traditional sense of play, what kids do at recess, goofing off.  By play I refer to the highest activity of the human mind, any activity in which the imagination lights up and gets involved.  This is what we humans can do so well and machines can’t at all.  Doing exactly what they’re told, following human or electronic commands, is what machines do best.  They can be valuable to our efforts but that as the standard of excellence for humans at work.  We ought to do everything possible to get them fully and imaginatively engaged with whatever it is they are doing, just as I am engaged fully and imaginatively as I write these words.  In a state of play, of imaginative engagement, people do their best, their most innovative work.

Here, again, the importance of select and connect are obvious. Supervisors must make the right choices and some of these choices will help people to connect with their work, yes, but also with each other and, most importantly, with what they really want to do, with what they enjoy doing most and (I’ll bet) with what they do best. Teresa Amabile expressed the best career advice during a commencement speech at Stanford about 15 years ago: “Love what you do and do what you love.”

Think about it. Some of the most closely connected people are those who play games together. The greatest teams (Walt Disney’s animators, John Wooden’s U.C.L.A. basketball teams, the Manhattan Project, Red Auerbach’s Celtics teams, Lockheed’s “Skunk Works”) possessed exceptional “chemistry” because they loved doing what they did together and could not do alone. They would later exclaim, “We had a ball!” I agree with Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, that play drives creativity. It creates a sense of joy and, in process, helps to generate some of our most creative ideas.