Linda on Leadership: thoughts on leadership, coaching and development


Insightful & Inciteful Leadership

One of the tough things about leadership is that it requires a range of skills that aren’t always found together as natural complements. For example, I think of leaders as needing to be both insightful and inciteful [yes, I know it’s not a real word but the coincidence of the sounds is irresistible].

A leader needs to have a perceptive, intuitive comprehension of the nature of the situation facing the organization in order to develop a compelling vision and a strategy likely to result in success. And then, the leader must be able to incite – that is to encourage, to stir people on, to rouse them to action so that the strategy is delivered on and the vision becomes a reality through the efforts of an engaged workforce.

An insightful leader draws on the cognitive domain of the mind, while an inciteful one draws on the emotional domain of the heart. Neither on its own is sufficient.