Develop your Leadership Intuition
Posted on July 14, 2021 by Johncey George, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.
When can your leadership intuition be trusted? When you know that it is securely based on in-depth knowledge you acquired and your past experience.
During my corporate stint, when I was involved in interviewing people, I used to get a fair idea on whether to hire a person or not, usually within the first 5 minutes of talking to them.
I occasionally used to test this hunch, by spending more time with a few candidates randomly and my hunch was proved right in almost all the cases.
There were a few times when I went against my intuition and hired someone, but after working with the person for a few months, my initial intuition was proved right again.
We have seen and read how Dhoni has been a very intuitive leader in the cricket field.
The question is, how does one develop this leadership intuition? Is it just a random feeling? No.
A leader develops such intuitions for decision making through the in-depth knowledge they acquire and through their extensive experience.
A leader has to develop expertise and knowledge in several areas. Some of this knowledge may not be completely processed by the leader at the time. It would be collected and acquired from several sources, but could be utilized later for efficient decision making.
When can your leadership intuition be trusted? When you know that it is securely based on in-depth knowledge you acquired and your past experience.
Here are a few tips to develop your Leadership intuition:
1. If you are someone who loves writing a journal, you may want to note down your leadership journey experiences as they happen, so that you can refer to them in the future. This will be your reflective journal.
2. If you have taken some major decisions, you may want to note them down and the thought processes you went through to take those decisions.
3. If you were impressed with or influenced by the way a team leader handled a situation, you may want to register this along with the circumstance it happened. (It is important to correlate with the circumstance)
4. Observe how your team and customers react to certain situations. You can use these reactions to later influence your decision making with respect to these individuals.
5. Enrich your knowledge through reading, case studies and stories of leadership and networking.
6. If you get unexpected and sudden bursts of inspirations or ideas, note them down in your phone’s notepad so that you don’t lose them.
To summarize, intuitive thinking is based on your previous experience and acquired in-depth knowledge. So nurture it by practicing using the tips above.
