Most of us widely use this phrase. As leaders and managers, going with your “gut feel” or something that “feels right” is usually somewhere in the mix when you’re making a decision – it’s your intuition.
Some do it very consciously and openly. I met someone recently who confided in me that when he’d been the head of a large company in a previous role, his interviewing technique to find if an individual would be a good ‘fit’ for the business was to take them to the local pub for a few hours and see how they handled themselves! I should caveat this to say that the example he used was from about 20 years ago (and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is something that still goes on), but my point is that this person was very clear that he went by his gut feel and, to his mind, his decisions had always been right.
I wasn’t totally surprised then to hear then that he wasn’t entirely convinced about how using psychometric assessment when you’re recruiting people or developing people will help to give objectivity, impartiality and transparency on which to base decision making - which is where our initial conversation had started...
This whole notion of gut feel or intuition is one that I’m particularly intrigued about and it’s a subject that I’ve heard Professor Eugene Sadler-Smith from the University of Surrey, who has carried out a lot of research in this area, talk about on a couple of occasions. It’s based on Dual Processing theory (sometimes referred to as the two minds model for which Daniel Kahneman is notably renowned for).
So, what is intuition (or gut feel) and what isn’t it?
What it is...
- It’s involuntary
- It’s affectively charged (which means it involves feeling good or bad)
- It’s rapid
- And it’s non-conscious
And what it isn’t...
Intuition isn’t insight and it isn’t always right!
The reason being that insight is being able to explain to others the solution, whereas you’re unlikely to be able to do that with a “gut feeling”.
It’s how intuition is used in business that was of particular interest to me. In a work environment, middle managers are more analytical, whilst senior managers are more intuitive... that’s probably because middle managers are normally required to be more task-focused, while senior managers should be focusing on vision setting and relation building, so it follows that senior managers have more of a balance?
Interestingly, there is little difference between males and females in intuition – so much for the notion of “female intuition” which, according to this thinking, doesn’t really exist! (Although of the four types of intuition: creative; expert; moral; and social – females are supposedly better at the social...).
Dr Sadler believes the intuitive mind can be developed and it’s about building ‘intuitive muscle power’. The point that stayed with me was about practicing these skills to build expertise – in other words learn to trust your hunches and gut feelings but be aware that what may be right for one person may be completely wrong for you. So, the more often you do it, the more it will develop, but don’t just rely on a hunch or a gut feel. The longer you’ve been in the world of work, this becomes harder to do because most of us equate experience with being ‘right’ and, whether consciously or unconsciously, will let our gut feel take precedent.
So, if you’re a manager responsible for recruiting and developing people, just going on your gut feel isn’t always going to get you a positive outcome. Be a ‘smart’ intuitor and use analysis (such as psychometric assessment going back to my scenario at the start) to feed into your decision – if your intuition and the analysis say “yes”, then there’s a much higher likelihood of a good outcome to your decision; if your intuition says “yes”, but the analysis says “no”, then go back to your analysis... but don’t just disregard it. The more you do it, the more you’ll develop your ‘intuitive expertise’...