Leadership intuition meets the future of work

Importance of leadership intuition

Deloitte managing director Dave Dye along with contributing writers Chiara Corso, Claradith Landry, Jennifer Rompre, Kyle Sandell, and William Tanner dive into the importance of leadership intuition in the chapter “Leadership Intuition Meets the Future of Work” in the recently published book How Well Do Executives Trust Their Intuition? While the term “follow your gut” is typically met with a high level of skepticism, Dave and his team advocate for informed intuition during times of high-speed change, when the situation is ambiguous, and risks are largely unknown.

The chapter provides an overview of the changes to the business landscape, a framework for leadership decision making and its connections to the development of informed intuition, and how leaders can blend this intuition with more data-driven approaches for decision making.

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Shifting society, shifting leadership needs

With the workplace and marketplace constantly shifting with advanced and evolved technology, millennial talent, artificial intelligence (AI), and increased salience as industries continue to mature within this “Digital Age,” it is more important than ever for leaders to exercise agility, adaptability, and other characteristics of informed intuition. The chapter dives into each of these elements to discuss why they are important and how leaders can utilize them in their everyday decision making.

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A framework for developing informed intuition

Deloitte’s leadership framework is the result of thorough investigation over many years about how to develop the type of leader needed in this ever-changing environment. The framework, discussed at length in the chapter, identifies three key components of a leader—capability, potential, and experience—and how they play into a leader’s success throughout their organization.

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Informed intuition in practice

To round out the chapter, Dave Dye and his team discuss what informed intuition looks like in practice. Leaders must implement two things when they execute on intuition—conviction that their decision is the right one and ability to articulate how they came to their decision. The chapter explores both of these elements at length to show why they are important and how a leader implement them.

Overall, this chapter advocates for the blending of data-driven decision-making with a leader’s established intuition to arrive at big-picture answers to their business’s most challenging problems. Leaders should use the information at hand as well as their established intuition built through experience, and instinctively understand when and how to leverage each.

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