Intuitive leadership for better decision making

In today’s data driven world, you’d be forgiven for thinking that leadership is all about how good your business insights are.

Whilst that’s a critical part of leadership, intuitive leadership has an important role too. As something that’s traditionally been a lesser valued skill, it’s an underrated part of your leadership armour, that can help drive your business forward.

Here are five reasons why intuitive leadership is an important skill.

Intuition helps keep things aligned

As a business leader, you’ll have a vision and a mission that lead you to where you are now. Think about the decisions that you made along the way and identify times where you’ve used intuition to guide your journey. Have there been difficult business decisions where you’ve had to choose a path based on what feels right to you? Has all the evidence pointed towards an ideal decision and yet you’ve felt that it was just off? Trusting your gut and exercising intuition will help keep your aligned with your leadership vision.

Get closer to your ideal customer

Do you have a picture in your mind of your ideal customer? Or a gut feeling about what your customers want? No matter how much data or research is available to us, truly connecting to customers and understanding what they want involves a deeper level of thinking and intuition. This ‘knowing’ will have developed from experience and practice – so tap into it and don’t let your inner critic get in the way.

Make faster more holistic decisions

Time to decision making in business is a critical part of success. But what if you don’t have all the facts or data at your fingertips? That’s where intuition comes in. This is often most obvious in a crisis when we don’t have all the facts to hand but need to make fast, informed decisions. Using intuition alongside any other pertinent information means you’ll be making more holistic time critical leadership decisions.

Better relationships with employees

As a leader, using your intuition can also enhance employee relationships and employee culture. That’s because leaders who trust their gut tend to be more in tune with what’s beyond the data and more empathetic. Whether it’s knowing when an employee needs extra support or noticing when morale is low, your intuition is a valuable detection tool. Employees are also more likely to respect a leader and their workplace when they feel they’re being looked after.

More open to new ideas

Intuitive leadership can also make us more innovative and open to new ideas. In traditional business decision making lead by logic and data, we often don’t consider anything beyond the information in front of us – limiting our vision for a business. One example is problem solving where despite having possible solutions, none of them feel right. Our gut may be telling us that the solution is in something new and innovative – or that wider input is needed. Tapping into this and trusting it to guide you opens doors to new possibilities and growth.

Intuition is a valuable tool that we can utilise to keep ourselves and the business that we lead aligned. Together with other information such as data and business insights, listening to our gut when making decisions and understanding our customers can help us become more effective leaders. Intuition can also guide the way we support employees and improve employee culture. By trusting our gut and practicing intuition-guided decisions, we can make more holistic decisions with better outcomes for everyone.