The SCARF model helps understand what it means to be an effective leader? Leaders motivate their teams, they set the organizational culture, and they make important decisions. However, they also play a vital, and often underestimated, role in managing challenging interpersonal situations. This might involve resolving conflict between two employees, managing an intern’s expectations, or even helping an upset client to understand your perspective.

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While these workplace issues may seem illogical and unavoidable, there is an underlying reason behind each behavior. More importantly, by learning the science, you can resolve these issues before they cause your company major problems. The SCARF Model helps you make sense of what to focus on.

What is the SCARF Model?
Developed by neuroscientist David Rock, the SCARF Model explains that the social domains of (1) Status, (2) Certainty, (3) Autonomy, (4) Relatedness, and (5) Fairness activate powerful threat and reward responses that have a dramatic effect on our behavior.

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Our brain responds disproportionately to these social domains because they conferred a genuine survival advantage in our evolutionary past. Far back in time, the hunter-gatherer humans who approached fresh berries lived to pass on their genes. Those who decided to take on a tiger did not. Similarly, the tribe member who is held in high esteem by his peers was less likely to be murdered in his sleep.

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The idea is to use this model to design interactions to minimize threats and maximize rewards in each of these five domains. In a second step, the objective is to activate reward response to motivate people more effectively using internal rewards. When the brain and body register a social threat in these dimensions, they light up the networks of the brain that register the threat of physical pain, a finding that has substantial implications for leadership practices. The SCARF model improves people’s capacity to understand and ultimately modify their own and other people’s behavior in social situations like the workplace, allowing them to be more adaptive. This model is especially relevant for CCDF leaders and managers or anyone looking to influence others. The more we understand about the workings of our brain and body responses, the more we understand what is happening to us moment-to-moment, whether that is why we can’t think straight after a long day or what’s going on with a relationship in our life. We’ve got a new language for what’s happening. This adds to feelings of certainty and control. Thus, we can make different choices that we might not otherwise explore. To better understand which of the five SCARF domains are key drivers for you, there is a free online self assessment that will give you insight into the importance each domain currently has in your life. Please see the Resources section of this guide for the self assessment.

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Take the below assessment and Understand your Motivation. For each questions use the appropriate scale and enter an number between 0 and 10

• 0 - Less Likely to 10 - Most Likely

• 0 - Strongly Disagree to 10 Strongly Agree

• 0 - Least Often to 10 Most Often