Develop Your Spidey Sense

Leadership is often about the hard facts—the processes and data and standards that define what we do. I obviously want you to be good at all of this. Yet great leadership is also about the more internal, emotional aspects of leadership and I want to urge you to be gifted in this as well.

I call this developing your “leadership sense.” Some of my friends joke that this is Stephen’s version of “Spidey Sense,” Peter Parker’s ability to sense danger before it happens in the movie Spiderman. Maybe it’s true, but your leadership sense is one of your greatest tools and it is essential that you lean into it and fine tune it.

If you are called to leadership, then you have at least budding leadership senses. These are a group of internal sensitivities and detectors that help you do what you are made to do and at a level beyond the rational, beyond the scientific.

An example. You head up a meeting with your team. It goes fairly well. Yet there’s that same old tension with David. You’ve felt it before. It is unstated but it is always there. You feel it every time you are in a meeting with him, every time you walk with him through the firm’s building. You feel he’s pulling against you, not really on board, perhaps even undermining in some almost undetectable ways. Your leadership sense has you on alert. You ask some of your senior leaders about it. They think David is odd but don’t feel the opposition you sense. Then, in time, you find out that he is overtly undermining, perhaps even hatching plans to unseat you or betray the company to competitors or just leaking discontent wherever he goes in the firm.

Now, a leadership sense isn’t an excuse to be paranoid or lean only to your own sometimes flawed emotions. A leadership sense is like radar—it detects what isn’t visible or obvious. You need it. You have to get in touch with it and strengthen it. You’ll make mistakes. You’ll be uncertain. Yet a leadership sense is as important as a leadership education, leadership experience, and leadership record of success.

I emphasize this dynamic of leadership so firmly here because it has saved me time and again. I’ve often felt first, and this then sent me in pursuit of facts that kept a disaster from happening. I would never have acted on my sense alone, but the sense moved me to verify reality in a way that helped me lead wisely.

I’m not asking that you put emotions first in all matters. I am asking, though, that you take moments in your day to consult your inner sense of things. How did the meeting go? Why does 30 minutes with Sean exhaust you? Why do you keep having a sense of dread about Warehouse 21 just before you go to sleep each night? Why do you get a heaviness in your gut when you think of your upcoming audit?

Don’t run from such feelings. And don’t trust them and act without verifying. But do use them as sensors on your leadership dashboard. I was on a plane once when the pilot announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a sensor light up here in the cockpit. It says the landing gear might be stuck. So, I’m going to come back where you’re sitting and stick my head through a panel in the aisle floor to check for myself.” And he did, much to the nervousness of everyone looking on. Yet it turned out the indicator light was wrong.

A sensor went off. The pilot verified. It might have been right. It might have been wrong. But the pilot flew the plane based on facts, not sensors. I’m sure that sensors combined with the facts have saved a lot of lives in the history of aeronautics. It should be the same in your leadership.