Cultivating Wisdom for Leadership

8 minute read

At FiveAndCo. we meet very talented leaders all the time, and one of the things that makes a leader really stand out for us, particularly at times of crisis, is wisdom.

When it comes to leadership, we don’t see wisdom as a standalone skill that you pick up over time, such as effective time management or public speaking. Rather it’s a collection of ‘attributes in action’ that rise above the everyday requirements of a particular job or role.

You often see wisdom play out most publicly in decision making, but it can make a big difference in lots of different contexts – talking with your team, managing stakeholder relations, and so on. Here’s our take on wisdom in leadership.

Wise leaders make multi-sided decisions.

Fear and anxiety can make us grab whatever information we have and lead us to decide or act too quickly. Our nature can push us to make a one-sided decision – decisions that are “good for us” rather than “good for us all”. So, wisdom often starts with self-awareness - particularly of our own biases and cognitive habits.

The best decisions are informed, not only by our personal experiences or judgement, but also by the perspectives and judgements of others. Whilst this may feel like it takes too much time, a wise leader knows that a few moments of reflection and discussion about the possibilities before a decision, costs a lot less than the time required for lengthy “after action reviews”, or repairing damaged relationships with people who knew better but were not heard in the decision making process. Remembering to take a step back from the situation to look at a larger picture (and how others may see that picture) seems like a lot of effort at first, but the habit is a good one and will form quicker than you may expect.

Often this wisdom is only apparent in hindsight. Part of the price of being a wise leader is that other may not ‘see it’ or appreciate it until they look back. This can feel uncomfortable at first, but learning to have courage in your own wisdom is an essential skill.

Wise leaders know how to build trust through personal integrity.

Wise leaders pursue honesty and truth in everything they do. They are willing to share information in the pursuit of the whole truth rather than horde it to secure their preferred version of the truth. This means being open to new ideas that did not originate with them.

But how do you know when you don’t know something? A good place to start is to commit to creating psychological safety for your teams in service of innovation, agility, respect, and diversity of thought. Fostering open conversations will give your team opportunity to say things that are potentially disruptive, challenging and sometimes hard to hear. With time and practice, these conversations are enormously helpful for building a trusting, agile team.

Flowing out of this, wise leaders are committed to doing the right things in the right ways for the right reasons. The right reasons have to come out of a comfort with balancing short-term needs with long-term goals, self-interest with the wider interest, and holding idealistic values and hard realities in tension. For example, the answer is sometimes “No” to a perfectly good idea or maybe a decision by the Board brings re-organisation and change. Both are everyday realities for business that may have short term impact on us and our teams but are in the interest of longer term goals that maybe we can’t see yet.

Wise leaders have learned to live comfortably with change and uncertainty.

In essence, a wise leader accepts impermanence as perfectly normal. To speak of change as something “that happens from time to time” is to miss an important reality – change is an everyday experience for all of us (not just business), and so we must learn how to recognise and differentiate the ‘ordinary’ change from the ‘extraordinary’ change.

In that sense, living comfortably with change and uncertainty is knowing when to dial up our attention to the change – and so bring new processes or approaches to managing it, and when to hold events more lightly. It’s about being present, resisting distractions, and keeping a laser like focus on what matters most.

Our conclusions

In today’s businesses we’ve given up trying to cultivate wisdom, preferring to go after quick, tangible wins. Wise leaders aren’t just born better than the rest of us, they’ve taken the time to develop habits of stepping back to see a bigger picture, learning the limits of their knowledge by being ready to accept new ideas and they understand that change is a part of life and have learnt to live comfortably with that. There’s not a fast working method to become a wise leader overnight and perhaps that’s why we’re so uncomfortable with the idea of it. We need to remember that everyone has the potential to cultivate wisdom, but only a few dedicate time to it.

More from the Knowledge Hub: