Lewis Hamilton recently said about his move to Mercedes (from McLaren): “Pretty much everyone told me to stay, but I went with my gut and my #intuition and it was the best thing for me”
In every race, Lewis Hamilton needs to use his intuition (and separately his instinct) to be able to make decisions extremely quickly, and he can’t afford to second guess himself. Those of us in leadership positions in the corporate world do not have to make the same split-second decisions that F1 drivers need to. But in times of stress and uncertainty, our teams look to us to make decisions and provide guidance quickly. We don’t have the time and luxury to seek all the information available, or conversely, there is often too much information, and we just don’t have the capacity to sift through all of it.
We need to call upon an extremely powerful tool that we can harness to complement our decision making - our intuition. When we create the conditions to be able to channel and listen to our intuition, we can make smarter and faster choices for our companies.
For me, intuition comes as a “gut feeling”. I have spent a lot of my career in crisis management or restructuring, and often my stomach would feel all twisted up when I felt something was wrong.
I am currently reading Jessica Pryce-Jones’ latest book called “Intuition at Work”, and she talks about the importance of listening to your intuition in a corporate setting. If you want to create an even higher functioning team, I’d highly recommend this book, and the exercises within it.
I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Jessica for this book, where she talked to me about my experiences at Greensill as it was hurtling towards administration. Because everything was happening at a crazy pace, I needed extra help, and for the first time I actually stopped and paid attention to my body. I used that feeling to dig deeper, to get the relevant information, talk to the right people, and come to the conclusion or recommendation that I felt least uncomfortable with. That generally released some of that built up tension in my stomach.
This was the first time in my career that I listened to my intuition. Prior to that, I ignored my “gut feel”, and went purely where logic and the data in front of me led. If they led to different places, with hindsight I can see that the intuitive choice would have been the better one. Now I know to immediately stop and think when I get these visceral reactions.
This is so important in Early Problem Recognition. Early Problem Recognition is recognising that something is potentially going wrong and warrants further investigation, allowing you to take action before the problem becomes outsized or unmanageable.
In pretty much every restructuring or crisis that I’ve worked through in my career, whether at Greensill or in my 8 years of restructuring at Citi, there is always someone who tried to raise a concern when the problem was small, but their voice wasn’t heard or it was pushed aside.
Isn’t it better to consider something when it’s small, and see whether it’s worth further investigation?
So how do we create these conditions where people are comfortable using their intuition to raise awareness of a potential problem, in a corporate environment?
In the Early Problem Recognition workshop I run for senior leaders, I place enormous value on developing a culture where people feel comfortable raising concerns, and where there is an emphasis on psychological safety and inclusivity. We run through real life examples, and I ask you to think about what you as an ExCo or board member currently do, and whether it fosters this environment, or whether it celebrates success above all else. We talk specifically about what you can do as a senior leader to encourage people to trust their intuition and use it to raise awareness.
It would be great to spend a half day with your leadership team on this, talking through some really interesting case studies that I have lived / worked through. But in the meantime, here are some simple tips that you can execute next time you’re in a board meeting, or at any meeting where important decisions need to be made.
Lead by example - say things like, “This doesn’t feel right to me”, or “I’m not feeling good about this”.
Create space where you can - if a decision doesn’t need to be made urgently, and you sense discomfort or are uncomfortable yourself, press pause. Ask people to come back within a fixed time period once they have had time to think / investigate. These need to be short time frames, you don’t want to slow down decision making.
Be aware of the people around you - if someone doesn’t look comfortable, but isn’t saying anything, seek out their views. The quieter voices often have been listening, digesting, and may have something very important to say. But they don’t feel like they have the platform to raise issues. Give them the platform.
Obviously, if you want to learn more about how you can use intuition more broadly at work, Jessica’s book is brilliant. In addition to explaining with insights and examples, it also has several tools to help you harness your own intuition.
As we come back from the summer holidays, the next few months are the perfect time to get your teams ready for 2025. I’d love to work with you and your teams to really dive deep into Early Problem Recognition, using examples most of you have heard about, and where I can provide an inside view.
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