Leading from Your Gut

John Townsend

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780310350125
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

Leading from Your Gut will help emerging and experienced leaders alike to hone their intuition and become the leader they were meant to be.

As a leader, your decisions are critical. They have a significant effect on you and everyone around you. But the effective leader needs to have more than just logic, facts, and financials to help make the best choices. Leaders also must access their own intuition, that gut feeling inside.

In Leading from Your Gut, you'll learn how leaders excel not just through external competencies and skills but by drawing on their internal world and personal experience.You'll explore how to harness the power of your values, thoughts, emotions, and relationships to better meet the complex demands of leadership.

As you apply Townsend's principles, you will see great results in your leadership. But more importantly, you'll experience the kind of personal transformation that will enable you to lead as a whole person.

This book is the revised edition of Leadership Beyond Reason.

Chapter 1

HARNESSING YOUR INTUITION

The board of a large manufacturing company had asked me to work with their leadership team on improving performance. When I met with the team, I interviewed them one-on-one and also rounded out the picture by asking them for feedback on each other.

I quickly found out that the CEO, Alex, was a major concern to both the team and the board. Four years previously, he had been promoted internally from his position as CFO, a role in which he had excelled. He was brilliant in complex analytics and financial formulas. However, since taking the helm of the company, Alex had made a few costly missteps—mistakes that went well beyond the normal learning curve of a new leader.

The most obvious misstep was committing significant resources to a new product line, which ended up not working out and damaging the company’s financial state. Being a data-driven person, Alex had analyzed the metrics of the line and had created positive projections for its success. On a strictly numerical level, it should have all worked out. However, his key clients and his team didn’t think the product line was a fit for the company—it was too extreme a departure from their core business. And, as Alex himself later told me, he’d had the same “gut” thought, though it was not backed up by his projections. However, the data trumped the gut and he pulled the trigger, leading to a problem the company then had to dig its way out of.

When I asked Alex how he viewed his decision-making process, he said, “I think it’s pretty simple. I made a 100 percent data-driven decision. And I remember feeling anxious that we were too far away from our core. But I didn’t trust that anxiety. I thought it was weakening my logical thought processes. So I didn’t pay enough attention to what I and others were thinking and feeling about it, and it ended up being a bad call.”

This was the point at which I began to work with Alex and his team. Obviously, the analytic emphasis of the company wasn’t the broken part—that was strong and sound. It was the “inner voice” part I wanted to dig into. Why did Alex not listen to his gut, and to the input of those around him? If we could get to the bottom of that question, I felt confident we could turn things around—for both the company and for Alex. Alex could become a great senior-level leader if he could learn to draw on internal data as well as external data.

And that, quite simply, is the premise of this book. Great leaders succeed by harnessing the power of both the external world and the internal world. You, as a leader, are probably more trained, prepared, and experienced in the external world than you are in the internal one. Most likely, you are able to amass large amounts of valuable information from reports, research, journals, and input from colleagues. And you need that information; it is critical to your success as a leader. At the same time, you also need access to data within you that is just as valuable and helpful to how you lead, relate to others, and make decisions.

This book is designed to help you understand and access what is inside you—your intuition or your gut—so you can use that internal data to help you succeed.

Reason, in the sense of using rationality, logic, and objective sources of information, is clearly a necessary core component of leadership. No person of influence can function at high levels without it. However, there are also important leadership aspects that transcend pure reasoning. They are subjective, internal, and experiential. These intuitive aspects of leadership are not infallible, but they are highly significant and valuable. Leaders who want to keep growing, to be equipped and empowered for the next level, must know how to utilize all the resources and tools available to them. This is what separates the great leaders from the good ones.

What Intuition IS—And What It Isn’t

There are several ways to describe and recognize intuition. Sometimes it is referred to as your subjective, internal, or inner world. However, at the end of the day, it is simply your immaterial life. Within you are values, thoughts, emotions, and passions. They cannot be seen or touched because they are not physical. But they are real, they exist, they are an essential part of you—and they will serve you well if you honor and develop them.

Some theorists define intuition as the ability to understand something without using conscious reasoning. My own definition is broader. I see intuition as the capacity to make decisions based on integrating objective and subjective truth. That is, when we access both internal and external information, we have a much more accurate understanding of reality, and a greater ability to make the right decisions. Thus, intuitive leaders—those who lead from the gut—pay attention not just to numbers and research, but also to their own heart, as well as other internal realities we’ll cover in this book.

I believe Jesus was referring to a similar dynamic when he said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37, emphasis added). When we integrate all of ourselves in seeking him, our lives work better. In the same way, when we integrate all the avenues of truth we can access into our leadership, we can make much better decisions.

There are a few other terms that can be confused with this understanding of intuition, and it may help to clarify these:

• Instinct: Instinct is an innate, inborn behavior pattern that does not have its basis in learning. For example, birds build nests without seeing how their parents did it. And I have seen leaders act to protect their people without a thought for themselves, as a parent acts on instinct to save her child. A good illustration of this is a business owner friend who, hearing that an employee’s child was very sick, ran out of a board meeting and went straight to the hospital to help.

• Impulse: An impulse is an abrupt emotion that is strong enough to drive a behavior without thinking about it. For example, rather than thinking through the source of the frustration, a leader may impulsively lash out.

• Spiritualization: Spiritualization is the tendency to use one’s faith to avoid making tough decisions. It can be driven by a fear of making mistakes, a fear of conflict, or even by laziness. For example, a CEO might say, “I’m waiting on the Lord for a leading about whether or not to acquire that company,” when the truth is that the CEO is avoiding time-consuming due diligence work or potential conflict with other leaders.

Intuition, as I use it with my clients, differs from instinct, impulse, and spiritualization. It is hard work that requires a lot of thinking, feeling, and talking things through, and then allowing all those aspects of decision-making to shake hands with one another. But time and time again, I have found that the best leaders make the best choices by engaging in this approach.

In this book, we’ll explore five key aspects that shape your intuitive world—values, thoughts, emotions, relationships, and transformation—and how you can use them not only to make better decisions but to significantly impact your leadership for the long haul. When used the right way, your gut intuition—all these internal aspects of who you are—will become a vital and essential part of your leadership repertoire.

How Intuitive Is Your Leadership?

If I asked you to assess the level of intuition in your leadership on a scale of one to ten (1 low, 10 high), what number would you choose? Go ahead and write it down. Then use the assessment that follows to help you gain additional insights about where you are in this dimension of your leadership.

Next to each of the statements below, write the number 1 if your response is yes, and 0 if your response is no.

____ Overall, the leadership training I have received has placed as much emphasis on the value of my inner world and personal experience as it has on my external competencies and skills.

____ I have made “gut” leadership decisions that did not seem to be logical at the time, but ultimately proved to be the best decision.

____ I have ignored my gut in making decisions and later realized it was a mistake.

____ Based on my experience of emotions in leadership, I would say that paying attention to my feelings routinely helps me to reach my goals.

____ I esteem intuition (internal information) as much as objective information when considering decisions.

____ If asked, I could describe how I intentionally make use of intuition (my inner world) in leadership and also list several recent examples.

____ Even when I am under pressure to produce results, I rely on both externals and internals—hard facts and intuition—to implement strategies and navigate professional relationships.

____ I trust the power of my emotions as much as I trust the power of my intellect to help me make good leadership decisions.

____ I routinely reflect on my core values, which means I rarely make on-the-fly decisions that conflict with my values.

____ I spend as much of my time and energy on personal growth and transformation as I do in developing other areas of life that are important to me and impact my leadership effectiveness (for example, professional training/education, physical health and exercise, etc.).

____ Total

Briefly review your responses and add up your total. How does the total compare to the number you wrote down before the assessment? Is it higher, lower, about the same?

If your responses to these statements landed your total in the lower numbers, don’t be discouraged. That is actually normal for most leaders. And there are some good reasons for this. You have a responsibility to create good outcomes and to help people achieve them. The outcomes are generally measurable, such as profits, customer service ratings, attendance figures, or some other growth metric. Because leaders are evaluated in objective and measurable ways, you may tend to look only at the facts to help you achieve your goals.

The process is similar to the outcome, in that sense. You trust what you see and read, things that can be proven and measured. For example, a profit-and-loss statement is reliable. It has the facts. The information is there, in black and white, and it does not change. It is hard data. However, hard data rarely tells the whole story, and if you choose to ignore the soft data—your intuition—you do so at your peril. As we will see, leaders who don’t pay attention to their inner world miss a great deal of additional data, ranging from the gut data Alex ignored about the new product line, to the ability to relate to and understand those you work with and lead. Disregarding this essential information can not only negatively affect the quality of your judgments and decisions today bu...