Leaders with ambition but no judgement run out of money. Leaders with charisma but no judgement lead their followers in the wrong direction. And leaders with passion but no judgement hurt themselves down the wrong path.
Good judgement is more than a gut feeling. Many people view it as the secret sauce in leadership: a magical combination of deep expertise and analytic chops. But even as a young leader, you can improve your judgement. Start with understanding its six distinct elements.
- Learning: Hone your active listening skills, including picking up on what’s not said and interpreting body language. Beware of your own filters and defensiveness, which may discourage alternative arguments.
- Trust: Cultivate sources for trusted advice: people who will tell you what you need to know rather than what you want to hear. Someone who disagrees with you could provide the challenge you need.
- Experience: Assess how well you draw on your own experience to make decisions. Review your important judgement calls to identify what went well and what went badly. Resist the urge to rewrite history by asking how a neutral colleague recalls the situation.
- Detachment: Its critical that you understand and address your own biases. Clarify and accept different viewpoints. Do this by engaging people in role-playing and simulations and by putting processes place to keep yourself aware of your biases.
- Options: Leader are often expected to choose between at least two options. But smart leaders press for clarifications on poorly presented information and challenge their people if they think important facts are missing.
- Delivery: You can make all the right strategic choices but end up losing out if you don’t exercise judgement in how and by whom those choices will be executed.
From ‘Elements of good judgement’ by Sir Andre Likierman.
About Author
Sandhya Reddy is a PCC Accredited Executive Coach and Leadership coach based in Bangalore, India. She is the Founder and Principal Coach at Chapter Two Coaching, a coaching consultancy that specializes in leadership development. She is a Certified Hogan Assessor and Coach. She has over 750+ hours of experience with coaching senior professionals. She has enabled personal transformation for over 1500+ individuals through coaching interventions, workshops, webinars and mentoring.
Chapter Two helps leaders in middle levels and senior levels engage better with their teams, peers and senior stakeholders. We help teams develop a growth and performance mindset, align better with the organizational culture and values and function more cohesively. We are also passionate about women’s leadership development and have developed a practice around it. We enable leadership development through 1:1 coaching interventions and through a set of curated leadership and personal transformational workshops.