Leadership is a challenging job anywhere in the world. That is why it is a scarce resource. Leaders are wanted in every human endeavour-family, community, business, organisation, nation and the world.
Being a leader has been described as influencing others with or without positions. I have described leadership with many phrases in my many write-ups, such as character, behaviour, attitude, decision, result, influence, and most importantly, relationship. Within any leader, especially those leading teams and organisations, there are conflicting ideas, situations, decisions and outcomes to pursue. Leaders aren’t a joke; they must be fair, inspiring, firm, ambitious, and ambidextrous to be effective. Leaders are like a combustible engine with different elements working together to power any organisation’s wheel but remain one object to others.
“Leaders are like a combustible engine with different elements working together to power any organisation’s wheel but remain one object to others.”
Leaders always have to produce an outcome. The outcome is first a decision, then the result of investing in their decisions by creating an enabling environment for people to support them to achieve results. In arriving at the decision that shapes the direction of efforts, leaders make mistakes, strive to correct their errors, and determine the collective result of people’s efforts.
I have taught leaders in my circle of influence to use my LIE concept to evaluate their internal logic before expressing them as goals for their teams. What is a LIE?
Logic, intuition, and emotion are crucial in leadership and decision-making. They are intertwined and can lead to many wrong decisions if they need to be understood and balanced in the right proportion.
For every leader, thinking is the foundation of the activities that propel action and the outcome they ultimately achieve with their teams. Do emotions, logic or intuition influence your thinking? Using emotions to think and make decisions could lead to self-centred, myopic and unfair choices for your team. Emotion is good in acting, but it has a caveat. Too much emotion might over-sedate your vibration and create mental blocks, leading to low situational awareness. You could consistently knock on a door that has been moved with emotion rather than change your strategies to align with the reality of time. A leader who grew up with a high power, high position view of leadership might want to maintain the status quo with their emotions without realising the change brought about by the new composition of millennials and Gen Z in the workplace. Today’s workplace is better led by collaboration and partnership. Mlodinow states, “Emotions play a hidden role in our behaviour and can malfunction, revving too high, lingering too long, or flaring up in inappropriate situations.”
For thinking, logic is ahead of emotions as it helps to create clarity and objectivity and reduces the possibility of impulsive rationality in decision-making. Intuition is ahead of logic and emotion. Intuition is the ability to think aptly and understand something without conscious reasoning. It is making decisions by isolating emotion to a greater extent based on experience, clarity of purpose, and objectivity due to built-in capacity over the years.
I will illustrate the concepts of logic, intuition, and emotion with a story about my work as a workplace leader.
In 2016, I led a team of 45 people as a branch manager at one of the large banks in Nigeria. My team found itself in a problematic situation forty-five days before the end of the year. We were below average on all the performance metrics and need to change the story by December 31. Suppose we allow emotions to take over our thinking in such a precarious situation. In that case, our thought pattern will be tilted towards giving up and blaming the organisation for the unapproved requests or many other things. If we use emotions to think, we will accept fate and think of how to cope with the menace of abusive leadership that throws terror on us based on our current performance without a reflection of the past.
Instead, we started our thinking and decision-making with logic. I stopped by the office one Sunday evening to reflect on the team’s performance. I printed the performance scorecard, glued my eyes to each line item, and spoke to my mind. I was thinking of how the performance doesn’t reflect the quality of the people on my team and how our fortunes have changed negatively in just a few months. I realised I needed an eleventh-hour miracle in November to avert embarrassment with the team for another year.
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While thinking about our position, using logic, not emotions, I concluded that a one-billion-naira inflow that stays for the next forty days is required to rewrite my team’s performance story and protect my brand. I knew I could not do it alone, and my vibration level must be contagious in the form of emotional implementation by the team members.
How do I use logic to arrive at the performance turnaround figure, how do I use intuition to guide our collective actions, and how do we raise awareness of the possibility of turning performance around? Maximising the team’s vibrations and using emotions to act is essential for leaders who intend to make decisions that exude self-seeking gains and uplift the productivity, performance, and sustainability of their teams.
To be continued next week….
Babs Olugbemi FCCA, the Chief Vision Officer at Mentoras Leadership Limited and Founder of Positive Growth Africa. He can be reached on [email protected] or 07064176953 or on Twitter @Successbabs.
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