Leadership topic - Intelligence

Everybody is writing about the artificial kind this year. This is the other one.

Intelligence is the leadingWithMusic label for the human, positive kind: what you do with the loudest voice in your own head. The frame is Positive Intelligence, Shirzad Chamine’s work, and its central figure is the Judge, the universal saboteur that everybody has. The Judge grades the meeting before you have left the room. It replays the tape at 2 in the morning. It finds the 1 thing that went wrong in a day full of things that went fine, and it sounds exactly like you, which is why you believe it. It works with accomplices, and most of us have a favorite: the Hyper-Achiever who moves the bar while you are still reaching for it, the Hyper-Rational who has to think everything through before it will feel anything, the Restless who is already onto the next thing while the good thing happens in the next room.

The uncomfortable half is that nobody imposed this on you. The leaders worth writing for are rarely being crushed from above. They are exhausted by a bar they set themselves, and they are quietly proud of the bar. You can spend a career getting better at the thing the Judge rewards and never once notice what it cost, because the voice only ever reports the misses. Ask a tired senior leader what went wrong last week and you will get 10 minutes of detail. Ask what went fine and you will get a pause.

The practice underneath this label is deliberately small. End every day with 6 things that went ok, not great, just ok, for every 1 thing that went wrong. Ok is the point, because the Judge can argue with great all day and has a much harder time with ok. Do it nightly and, in my experience with the leaders I work with, it steers the brain away from the negative on its own, without an announcement. The arc of the label is name it, claim it, build from it. No machine will do that part for you. Naming the voice in your own head, on purpose, in your own handwriting, is the most human intelligence there is.