Understanding and Defining Leadership Wisdom

If you think about the most effective leader you know, you can likely list many traits and characteristics that define them as effective. While wisdom might not be on your initial list, when you look at their overall effectiveness, chances are their leadership wisdom is what sets them apart from others.

Yet, how much of the leadership training you have received, or your organization provides, develops or even considers leadership wisdom as a goal?

In my experience, I’m guessing little or none.

I think there are reasons for that, and while it’s understandable, it isn’t necessarily wise. I think those reasons include:

• We think specific skills and knowledge are more tactically important or needed
• We associate wisdom as developing with age
• We’ve never really thought about it
• We aren’t sure we can “teach” it

Before we consider how we might develop leadership wisdom in ourselves or others (which I will address next week), we need to understand what this elusive (and valuable trait) even is.

What is Wisdom?

If you want dictionary definitions, I’ll let you look those up for yourself – they are useful, but I want to help you think more deeply about it. Throughout history, wisdom has generally been associated with the ability to see and understand a situation in a balanced and thoughtful manner. While information is linked to intelligence, discernment is connected to wisdom.

We separate many skills as either hard or soft, with the soft ones being more complex and difficult to understand. In a similar way, we can define intelligence as a hard skill and wisdom as a soft one – but most importantly, it is a skill.

In the paper Wisdom: Meaning, structure, types, arguments, and future concerns, they write:

… none of the more than twenty definitions of wisdom we found … is universally recognized.

Here is my definition, meant to be practically helpful for us as leaders:

Wisdom is the mental flexibility to see things from a variety of perspectives, keeping the big picture and goals in mind before determining what actions to take, if any. It considers the situation and its implications in both the short, but more importantly long term.

Leadership Wisdom

Whether you agree with my definition or not, let me ask you four questions about it:

• Will leaders be more effective in an uncertain and complex world if they have that ability?
• How would your organization benefit from having more of that ability in more of your leaders?
• Would you like to have more of that ability?
• Do you see it now as a skill that can be learned?

Knowledge isn’t enough – and in an information rich overloaded world, it isn’t the holy grail most think it is. The antidote for that overload, is the development of wisdom.

There are many skills and habits associated with building leadership wisdom, and my goal here is to get you thinking about that more clearly. Next week, I will share some ideas for how to build leadership wisdom for yourself and in your organization.

My upcoming book Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence, points us towards leadership discernment and wisdom. It gives you a complete understanding of what it means to be a Flexible Leader and provides leaders with mindset, skillset and habitset tools to become more effective, flexible, and wise.

Pre-order your copy today.