Leaders, as all people, make their decisions in an instant based on their gut instincts.
Our intuition is nothing less than pattern recognition in our highly efficient emotional brain--making quick and effortless judgments and taking action. We form positive or negative impressions in a mere "blink" or "thin slice" of time as described in Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller, blink (Little Brown, 2005), which promotes decision concepts around what Gladwell refers to as the adaptive unconscious: "Decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately."
Many managers mistakenly assume that leadership style is always a function of personality rather than strategic choice. Their leadership style is based upon their innate signature talents and this represents their default leadership behavior. However, leaders can choose a different leadership style that best addresses the demands of a particular situation.
Being unaware that we can change our leadership style to match the situation at hand, we unconsciously engage our default behavior. Only when we become aware of something, are we able to make choices as to the action we wish to take. The ultimate leadership responsibility is modeling the behaviors you expect from others. To a large degree, leaders operate in a fishbowl. Employees are constantly watching the leader--and learning from him or her.
Inspirational leaders have finely tuned situation sensors.
They can sniff out and interpret “soft data”—environmental signals that aren’t spelled out or overtly expressed. Leaders with great sensors can easily gauge unexpressed feelings and accurately judge when relationships aren’t working. They can read silences and pick up on nonverbal cues.
However, we can be blindsighted by costly intuitive errors when our quick pattern recognition leads us astray. Our unconscious, implicit and emotional attitudes---which typically manifest wariness toward those unfamiliar to us or those who resemble people with whom we have negative past associations---may not agree with our analytical brain. Intuition is powerful, often wise, but sometimes perilous, and especially so when we overfeel and underthink.
Sensing can create great problems. It’s very easy to misinterpret or misjudge based on personal assumptions and biases. In making fine judgments about how far they can go, leaders risk losing their followers.
For this reason, sensing capability must always be framed by reality testing. The most gifted leaders always validate their perceptions with a trusted adviser or member of the inner team.