In what businesses and organizations have you seen examples of wise leadership?
To be sure, there’s no shortage of talks, posts, or tweets on our need for wise, capable leaders who pursue the common good; who balance big-picture thinking with next-step management. But predicting outcomes becomes much more complex as systems and people interact in unexpected ways. In a time when “flattening the curve” requires universal participation, when, how, and who to re-open requires tough decisions.
We need our business and organization leaders to do the right things, in the right way, against the right time frame. The real stand outs that I have noticed can navigate intrinsically complex circumstances, make smart decisions, and inspire others to do the same.
You see, two challenges commonly surface in complex circumstances: unintended consequences and difficulties in making sense of a situation. Unfortunately, many leaders tend to overestimate the amount of information they can process: humans have cognitive limits. More than ever, leaders need input from others to grasp complexities and determine how they affect other parts of the system.
A leader must be able to keep the big picture in clear view, while attending to all of the small executions that will lead to the right outcomes. They need wisdom.
Wise Leadership Defined
Socrates believed that wisdom is a virtue, acquired by hard work: experience, error, intuition, detachment and critical thinking; and that the truly wise recognize their own limits of knowledge.
Wisdom is also a paradox: based partly on knowledge, shaped by uncertainty; action and inaction; emotion and detachment. Wise leadership reconciles seeming contradictions as part of the process of wisdom, for wisdom is a process.
“Wisdom is not just about maximizing one’s own or someone else’s self-interest, but about balancing various self-interests with the interests of others and of other aspects of the context in which one lives, such as one’s city or country or environment or even God.”
~ Robert J. Sternberg, Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
What do you think? How do you define wise leadership? In what businesses and organizations have you seen examples of this? I’d love to hear from you. I can be reached here, on LinkedIn, or give me a call: 561-582-6060.
