Supporting Leadership Wisdom

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There are plenty of definitions of wisdom – and not just from the dictionary. There are philosophical and psychological definitions – even biblical ones. My goal here isn’t to dive into those distinctions but to be pragmatic and practical about the important quality of wisdom – more specifically leadership wisdom.

Why?

Because whatever your definition, given the choice between any two leaders who are equal in every way except that one has more wisdom, I am certain you would pick the wiser one. In fact, in many cases, you might pick leadership wisdom over other leadership qualities if you were trying to optimize team or organizational results.??

So, What Is Wisdom?

It might be easier to start by defining what wisdom is not. Researchers agree that wisdom isn’t the result of aging. (In other words, older doesn’t necessarily imply wiser.) They also don’t believe that higher IQ scores equal increased wisdom. (Which for some – me included – feels like great news!)

And note, both of those points are easier to measure, and we often conflate one or both of those traits as signs of wisdom. As in other characteristics of effective leaders, the traits/skills/habits of the most effective ones aren’t always easy to measure.

I’ll keep our definition simple then, staying in the dictionary rather than diving deeply into wisdom research and literature. Here are two perspectives:

• The soundness of an action or decision with regard to the application of experience, knowledge, and good judgment. (from Google - Oxford Languages)
• the quality or state of being?wise; knowledge of what is true or right coupled with just judgment as to action; sagacity, discernment, or insight.

Reflecting on my earlier assertion – I’m guessing you would rather have leaders with this quality or ability than not!

Supporting Leadership Wisdom

In my experience, while we would all say we want leadership wisdom, we don’t think organizationally about how to create more of it, because we have oversimplified (and reduced our goal to more traditional skill building) or feel like some people will gain more wisdom and others won’t – that it is a personal journey that can’t be modified and advanced across a group of leaders.?

I propose we can strive to build collective leadership wisdom across the organization, through a combination of prioritization, expectations and the targeting of specific skills. That is the mindset shift – that leadership wisdom is both important and can be supported and cultivated.

The skills below are a synthesis of my experience (and perhaps wisdom) with a hat-tip to the paper from Meeks and Jeste that I found as I was writing this for you.

What are the skills to cultivate?

• Reflection skills. The ability to reflect helps improve self-awareness and provides information that allows us to connect new situations to past ones.
• Social decision-making. Understanding other’s emotions and motivations and using that information to make “wise decisions.
• Self-control and impulse control. The ability to put self in a different context in challenging situations.
• Perspective-taking.? The ability to look for and apply new perspectives (even though foreign to our experience) in decision-making.
• Connection-making. Using life experience, knowledge and skills to find new connections between situations to look for new/better solutions.
• Uncertainty-navigation. The willingness to acknowledge and ability to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity in productive ways.

Few leadership development programs acknowledge or prioritize many (or any) of these as important skills to expect of and develop in their leaders. I believe in a world that is more complex and uncertain, these skills are more important than ever. The organizations and individual leaders that focus on skills like these will create far better results than those who don’t.

Nearly all of these skills are discussed at length (with suggested tools and approaches to help grow them) in my upcoming book, Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead With Confidence .

A version of this article was first posted on our blog

What Do You Think?

Share your thoughts in the comments? - which of these skills would you most like to cultivate, and why?

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