“Workshop: Leading with Instinct” Recap

Who do you think of when you hear the word, “leader”? What characteristics come to mind? How do they match up with the qualities you want to embody vs. those you’ve been conditioned to believe make a good leader?

At the end of October, we sent out a survey asking our community about these very questions. Then we gathered and got ~deep~ about leadership. We did the hard work of introspection and reflection to understand our unique flavor of leadership because people aren’t automatically born leaders. People become leaders, through their experiences (both positive and negative), through their mentors, through their upbringing. Leadership isn’t a quality you just inherit — the culmination of your beliefs and aspirations that make you human, also make you a leader. And only by understanding that can you learn how to lead with instinct.

A deep thank you to Ambika Pai, Chief Strategy Officer at Mekanism (and badass leader, if you ask us!), for helping us define our truest versions of ourselves and how that manifests into our leadership, and to our survey partner, Instapanel, for gathering inputs and inspiration from 100+ strtgsts on this topic. Keep scrolling to learn more about leading with instinct 👇

Best bites

• “There are no boundaries anymore. Who we want to be has to be as a holistic person, it cannot just be who we want to be as a professional.” We’ve all seen the articles about the blurring of our personal and professional spheres since COVID. But how have we applied that shift internally in the way we think about the type of manager we want to be? Ambika argues that who we want to be as people needs to influence who we are and how we show up at work. Full stop.
• “Every decision cannot be made by evaluating layer after layer of expectation, construct, how you’ve seen it done before, your ego. As a leader, you have to trust whatever comes up within you to make those decisions. And that’s what it means to lead with instinct.” Leading with instinct makes leading easier, by making it more intuitive. When we trust our gut, based on our experiences and background, to make our decisions, we act from a place that is truly us, rather than from a place that is informed by everything external.
• “When anyone starts at Mekanism, I do an exercise called Love Love Hate Hate. Everyone takes me through things they love that they’re good at, things they love that they’re not good at, things they hate that they’re good at, and things they hate that they’re bad at. That allows me to have a level of awareness as I’m putting people on projects or putting people together, to know what they want to learn, what they’re insecure about, what they love and feel confident doing.” To stay true to herself and her leadership style, Ambika runs this exercise with her team to ensure she’s navigating people’s growth through what they need, not what she thinks they need. This is a tool her team at Wolf & Wilhelmine used, and she’s implemented it again as a direct result from a conversation she had with a former manager who imposed their needs on her and made her feel unseen.

Go deeper

Be on the lookout for Ambika’s upcoming book, to dive deeper into consciously defining leadership for yourself, and learning how to implement that style in your life.

Run with it

Take some time to reflect on the three stages of understanding and developing instinctual leadership:

• Conditioning: What have you been conditioned to believe about leadership? What about yourself?
• Consciousness: What are the inflection points that have made you who you are today? What are the lessons that came out of those?
• [Re]construction: Who are your expanders — people who expand the way you think, inspire what you want to achieve, and influence who you want to be? After that reflection, let your mind wander and write down whatever comes to you for 5 minutes. Then, determine your own personal version of instinctual leadership by defining personal practices and working processes that acknowledge who and how you can best serve and define a path for how you get to what you want.

These are deep exercises that require heavy introspection. So remember to be kind and patient with yourself as you define how to be the leader that is most true to you. We’re with you every step of your journey.

With love and solidarity,
Team strtgst