Intuitive Leadership

The Power of Intuitive Leadership

By Maurice Jenkens · 8 min read

Published September 24, 2024

Quick summary

78% of the CEOs surveyed say it is increasingly challenging to navigate risks and opportunities (1). Intuitive leadership empowers leaders to do better and faster decision-making. And using the power of intuition helps to future-proof the organisation by becoming better at navigating uncertainties and unknowns.

The Intuitive Leader™ aligns a culture of trust with profitability. A culture of trust creates sustainable growth and superior investment returns (2). Among others by the ability to trust one's own judgment to stay strategic while helping others to better trust their intuition.

What is Intuitive Leadership?

In essence, intuitive leadership is an anchored self-trust in one's own inner knowing and the ability to translate that into meaningful action, inspiring others to follow.

Intuitive leadership is the ability to use both analytical and intuitive thinking and to align rational and intuitive intelligence. It allows leaders to combine data and gut feel when making decisions or when reading the room to navigate relationships.

Every single syllable in this text is written by myself and without AI.

1. Intuition is key in decision-making

As a leader you have to make decisions yourself, but also facilitate for other leaders, like middle management, to dare to make decisions. Or daring to fail in the process.

AI beats us in processing data. But we beat AI on relations, and we SHOULD make the decisions. So: let AI do the analysis, while we focus on relations and decision-making.

In the words of a former CEO in the financial sector, currently a senior investor and long since financially independent:

Intuition has value in its own right, but it also facilitates better decision-making. Maybe it is not always bang-on, but it points us in the right direction. It then takes an open and honest discussion to verify and validate.

During my interview with him, he told me that feeling uncomfortable about a decision was for him a clue his gut was raising a warning sign. He would then go ahead and ask his senior management questions until that feeling of discomfort had subsided.

2. Intuition helps you stay strategic

About 50% of all leaders in the Global West are constantly battling fatigue or the feeling of being overwhelmed (3). It happens easily that you get distracted or bogged down in a swamp of to-dos, and we all know how important it is to stay strategic.

One of my course participants told me literally that this is exactly what intuition helps you with:

Intuition helps me stay strategic. It makes it easier for me to zoom out when needed and then to stay focused on what's really important.

3. Intuitive leadership and psychological safety unlock valuable tacit knowledge

Psychological safety is a key ingredient in the mix of trust-based, intuitive leadership. Honesty, openness and a non-judgemental culture increase innovative ideas, allowing the valuable tacit knowledge that people or a group silently hold to be aired and discussed.

And spreading this culture starts at the top, with the CEO of a bigger company telling me:

We didn't pay all these huge salaries to hire the best managers for them to not use their own good judgment. We have to trust their decisions.

By creating this culture of trust, she created a safe zone that opened up and invited her management team to share their own tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge management is harvesting knowledge that has silently been built up through entire careers and is invaluable to any organisation (4).

4. Intuition increases self-confidence in leadership

A senior Chief Revenue Officer once told me he had done well so far in his career and relied heavily on his strong analytical skills, because that gave him a sense of security. It simply felt safe to talk about data points and processes.

Needless to say, analytical skills have value in their own right, but he felt he had hit a ceiling in his role as a leader. Dealing with people is an art that numbers can't teach us. At some point a mentor told him:

You are excellent with analysis, but you have to trust your gut more if you are to progress in your leadership.

Afterwards he felt more confident asking himself: “What is my gut telling me?” He told me working with his intuition made him bolder to speak his mind — or what he “was thinking in his gut”. It created an increased sense of self-trust. Put in his own words:

What? Can I trust my gut? An entire new world opened up for me.

And he is far from the only one. Just about every person I have worked with, either in small circles or through my program for leaders called Decoding Intuition™, witnessed increased self-trust in that subtle sense of inner knowing and the ability to show up more genuine as a leader.

5. How do you know it is your intuition?

This is probably the most asked question on this topic. How do you know it is not fantasy, “just” fears, or wishful thinking?

As one experienced senior manager once shared with me:

I believe in intuition, yet how do I know what I am feeling is true? Or how can I trust myself? How can I trust this really is my intuition and not something else?

How do you know that you know?

The answer lies in how your intuition resonates within you. Quite literally, your intuition has a specific and unique Inner Resonance Signature. I have one, you have one, and we all have one — but as it seems, slightly different from each other.

It is our job to identify, analyse and get friendly with that inner resonance signature. The scientific name for this work is interoceptive work: using our (scientifically proven) interoceptive sense, the ability to be aware of internal sensations in the body (5). This is also known as introspecting (to “look inside”) and the ability to detect inner signals — like, for example, the very real gut feel.

Once we have established a clear connection with our inner resonance signature, we grow more confident in the ability to distinguish between “just a feeling” or “just a thought” and an intuitive feeling or an intuitive thought.

6. Decoding Intuition™ — science based

Over the years I have been interviewing dozens and dozens of leaders, entrepreneurs and leading academics on the topic of intuitive leadership, as well as studying the literature on intuition (6). And I have been applying intuitive skills myself at work since 2001.

On the back of that combined knowledge, I have built a program for leaders called Decoding Intuition™.

The program has 3 main pillars:

• Science based and in line with modern research and academic works
• Proven method and evidence based
• Everything (to the detail) is based on my own experiences

To phrase one CEO on her experience of the program:

This levels-up my career. I can now identify my gut feeling and it helps me make better decisions.

And in the words of another participant — a middle-management leader:

Intuition has given me a feeling of psychological safety in myself. It helps me in creating psychological safety in my team.

And in the words of another participant — an entrepreneur:

This program is very much about self-trust and about the transfer of trust. I feel much more confident as a leader and I am more likely to speak up with confidence and inject that into the team.

I am sure you have your own experiences with this. We are building a community of Intuitive Leaders™, you are welcome to let me know yours.

/Maurice

Sources

1. 2024 Disruption Index study from AlixPartners
2. Trust Across America and superior investments
3. Future Forum Pulse Numbers from 2022
4. Global Think-Tank of Organizational Tacit Knowledge Management
5. American Psychological Association (April 2023)
6. Kahneman, Klein, Gigerenzer, Pearson and Sadler-Smith among others