The Six Leadership Capabilities

Wise leadership consists of applying and integrating smartness wisely for mutual, instead of just personal, benefit. Introspection, reflection, and care for the common good are essential practices that provide balance to smart leaders and help them bring authenticity and ethical clarity to their actions and lasting success to their endeavors. In other words, wisdom amplifies and elevates leaders’ smartness, enabling them to operate at a higher plane.

In essence, wise leadership involves knowing the limits of smartness. It contextualizes your smartness and helps you act with role clarity, humility, and intuition to be effective in your organization. It does not necessitate turning away from spiritual wisdom, but rather using it actively and tempering it with smartness and enlightened self-interest so that it is both practical and pragmatic.

Our research and experience have shown us that most smart leaders rely on the same leadership capabilities throughout their careers.¹¹ Based on our research and wisdom texts from cultures around the world, we have identified six areas of capability that all leaders exhibit:

• Perspective: What influences and shapes a leader’s worldview
• Action orientation: How a leader is driven to act—or not act
• Role clarity: How a leader chooses a role and how closely she identifies with it
• Decision logic: What framework a leader uses to decide
• Fortitude: How a leader determines when to hold and when to fold
• Motivation: What inspires and drives a leader’s actions and decisions

Different leaders exercise these capabilities differently, depending on the kind of smartness they usually exhibit. For simplicity and in keeping with the image of smartness as being a set of filters that capture only a subset of the visible spectrum, we will speak of functional smart leadership as falling within the blue area at one end of the spectrum and business smart leadership as being within the red area at the other end of the spectrum. Wise leadership encompasses—and embodies—the full spectrum:

• Perspective. In terms of perspective, functional smart leaders who tend to operate in the blue zone are execution oriented, whereas business smart leaders who usually act and lead from the red zone are strategic, big picture thinkers.
• Action orientation. In the blue zone, leaders are risk averse and tend to act with great caution, as opposed to leaders in the red zone, who are proactive and opportunistic in their action orientation.
• Role clarity. Blue zone leaders operate within functional boundaries and tend to follow instructions, often letting others lead when risks are high. A red zone leader, by comparison, seeks to lead from the front as much as possible in order to control the outcome.
• Decision logic. Blue zone leaders make decisions aimed at short-term results and improving the bottom line, whereas a red zone leader is more likely to make vision-driven long-term decisions that affect revenue growth.
• Fortitude. Blue zone leaders can flip between being too stubborn and giving up too easily. A red zone leader perseveres as long as the outcome is aligned with his self-interest.
• Motivation. Leaders in the blue zone are motivated by basic safety and security needs and seek tangible benefits like job stability. A red zone leader more likely finds motivation in intangible success factors like title, recognition, and legacy.

Once smart leaders begin to evolve into wise leaders, they begin to exercise the same six capabilities very differently. To begin, their perspective shifts: rather than being execution oriented or thinking purely in strategic terms, they start focusing on a higher purpose as they gain a holistic perspective. As a result, they become fully engaged in what they do as a process but remain emotionally detached from the outcome so that they can maintain a balanced perspective and operate with equanimity. They demonstrate authenticity in their actions and ensure these actions are appropriate to different contexts. They gain greater role clarity—that is, they know when to take ownership of a situation and lead from the front and when to let others lead and give them credit for doing so. In addition, their decision logic becomes more refined: with greater discernment, they start making intuitive decisions that are ethically sound and yet eminently pragmatic. Moreover, they learn to demonstrate flexible fortitude—true courage under fire—discerning when to hold on to their decisions and when to fold. Finally, their motivation shifts as they act increasingly out of enlightened self-interest instead of being driven only by selfish interests.

In our research, we have found only a few leaders who are wise most of the time across all six capabilities. They are the exception. More often, we have encountered leaders who demonstrate some of the wise leadership capabilities but only infrequently. Growing as a wise leader takes practice, self-discipline, and a willingness to act consistently with your own purpose, values, and the context.