Leading By Instinct Could Be A Gamble Too Far

For years, the debate has raged over whether leaders are born or made. To some extent, the argument has been made less relevant by the spread of leadership and management training to a wider cross-section of the workforce. Nevertheless, there appears to be support for the born-not-made proposition in the growing acceptance by some employers that certain people are not really suited for management and should instead be enabled to develop their careers as specialists in their chosen fields, whether they be finance, engineering or whatever. This would mean that they would not have to force themselves into roles for which they were temperamentally unsuited in order to gain “promotion.”

Less well developed is the idea that even people who have been prepared for leadership roles through extensive training and development can find themselves, when the going gets tough, falling back on their instincts or the behaviors they learned while growing up. Some light is shed on this topic by a recently-published book by Nik Kinley, a London-based consultant and coach, and Dr Shlomo Ben-Hur, an organizational psychologist and a professor of leadership and organizational behavior at the IMD business school in Switzerland.

Kinley and Ben-Hur argue that the sheer pressure of the job these days means that leaders are having to rely on their instincts more than ever before. Surveys they have carried out suggest that almost all leaders say that at some point on most days they “find themselves running on automatic, with little or no time to think things through. And on average, leaders say that about 72% of their time is spent like this.” In their view, this approach goes some way to explaining many of the mistakes experienced by businesses. This is because operating in this way is effectively gambling. As they write at the beginning of their book, a leader may think that their instincts have served them well for 20 years or however long they have been in such a position, but “the longer you rely on your instincts without really understanding them, the bigger the risk you take.”

There are two key reasons for this. The first is down to simple probability. Every time somebody relies on their instincts they are taking a small gamble and the longer they keep gambling the more likely they are to lose. Second, and more important, the more senior somebody becomes the bigger the risk. “Make a wrong decision as a first-line leader, and it may not even be noticed. Make one as CEO, and everyone will see.” Indeed, as Kinley and Ben-Hur point out, the more senior somebody becomes the busier they tend to be and the busier they are the more likely they are to use their instincts and the more they do this the more likely they are to make mistakes.

If this sounds like an inevitable downward spiral, the good news is that it is possible to do something about it. As their book’s title, Re-writing Your Leadership Code, suggests, Kinley and Ben-Hur believe that the underlying instincts, inclinations and tendencies within us are the products of our experiences and become written into the structure of our brains like a code. The book goes into a fair amount of scientific detail of how this code is formed, but the important thing for leaders and those aspiring to the role is to understand that this code exists and can be altered.

In an age where employees crave empathy and authenticity, the self-examination that this requires could be crucial. To assist leaders through the process the authors offer six key lessons. These range from realising that they probably under-estimate the effect of their codes on them and how they react to certain situations and understanding what it is in them that triggers certain behaviour in other people and what in them triggers a reaction from them.

Of course, understanding their code or going to great lengths to re-write it are not in themselves going to turn somebody into a great leader but they could well be part of the package that helps a modern leader navigate the increasingly complex world in which they find themselves.