Leadership isn’t natural — but making intelligent decisions can be learned View our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed Leadership isn’t natural — but making intelligent decisions can be learned A wise leader must learn to widen their perspective and lighten their mental load. Get curious, find purpose, and become more resilient at work Mind and BehaviorLeadershipStress ManagementAnalytical ThinkingOrganizational Psychology Adapted from Leadership Intelligence: Science-Backed Strategies for Mastering 21 Everyday Management Challenges by Caroline Webb. Published by Crown Currency.
Every day as a leader brings an endless flow of judgment calls, big and small. Even as you read this, you might be weighing where to focus your team’s efforts this quarter, who to hire for a role, or how to handle a slightly cheeky budget request from a colleague. You might be trying to decide whether to skip a meeting this afternoon, or how to tamp down a weird little disagreement so that it doesn’t turn into a bigger one.
These choices are rarely like math problems with clean answers; you have to figure out the right approach when there isn’t really a single “right approach.” So a distinctive strength of a good leader is the ability to make choices wisely, day after day, in ways that maximize your team’s chances of success. Where does that wisdom come from? Years of experience can certainly help guide you, if you’re lucky enough to have it.
But whenever you’re faced with something new, familiarity may not be enough to make you wise. That’s why — whatever stage you’re at in your career — it’s worth distinguishing between experiential wisdom and what I call _deliberate wisdom_. Experiential wisdom comes from having seen situations before.
Deliberate wisdom is the set of intentional mental habits that help leaders think clearly in any situation — even when encountering it for the first time. And the key to developing deliberate wisdom is to learn to work intelligently with the way your brain processes information. That’s because our brains have tight constraints on how much they can handle at once.
If we ignore these limits, our brain can underperform without us realizing: We miss important signals, think less clearly, and do things that cause a facepalm the next day. But if we understand and work within those limits, we help our brain function at its best — and we make smarter, better judgments as a result. The way to unlock that capacity for wisdom is to learn to _widen_ our perspective where it matters, and _lighten_ the cognitive load everywhere else.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
