That Special Something All Great Leaders Possess

Photo Credits Dan X O’Neil

What is it that enables great leaders to grow their following, impact change and make a difference? It is more than education and connections –lots of people have those. It is something rarer.

It is instinctive intelligence.

Instinctive intelligence is being able to know things, see things and act upon them with an understanding that cannot be taught in a textbook. But, it is not acting based on a gut feeling. Leaders cannot reach their potential for success if they are acting only upon instinct, there will be too many mistakes made along the way.

Instead, great leaders use experience and combine it with data in order to create a high probability of success. Consider seasoned professional athletes. When they are on the field, they are able to read the game in a way that a rookie hasn’t fully developed. The seasoned athletes are able to use their experience in combination with their instinct to determine which way to run on the field, who to pass to or where the ball is likely to go. They need both their experience and their instinct to be successful. Relying on just one or the other would result in mistakes that may cost the game or the season.

Rookies can develop their instinctive intelligence by studying the success of seasoned leaders and through consuming data, typically in the form of game film, player stats and player behavior. During the early part of their career, they also need to overweight the influence of data and underweight their instincts because the experience has not been gained yet. Studying trends, successes and failures and the environment around them will build their intelligence. Their specific combination of influencers will make each leader’s instinctive intelligence unique to the individual.

How does this relate to your career? How can you utilize some of the same strategies professional athletes use to better your instinctive intelligence? Are there industry leaders you can follow, stats you can study and consumer behavior you can analyze? Adding this to your daily regimen will enable you to build your experience and knowledge faster so you will be able to rely heavily on your instinctive intelligence in the future.

Has your experienced lined up with this? Do you feel that instinctive intelligence can be learned?