We need wise leaders more than ever. Intelligence only will not do to solve our problems and move us forward.
We are getting smarter, but not wiser, and that’s a problem.
In the 20th century, the IQ of the general population in developed countries went up by 20 points. Twenty points in IQ is a lot. (Whether IQ is the right measure is a discussion for another day).
And yet, people aren’t necessarily wiser. That’s a problem.
Wars, hunger, poverty or famines haven’t disappeared. Our politicians and corporate leaders are not always role models of exemplary behaviour. They often are just the opposite. Some of our leaders are corrupt and selfish, and show little care for others’ welfare.
We may have many intelligent leaders who have studied MBAs in the best universities, but that doesn’t make them wise.
And what we need is wiser leaders, now more than ever.
Wisdom is not the same as intelligence or good judgement Intelligence isn’t a synonym of wisdom. Neither is good judgement.
You need some intelligence and good judgement to be qualified as wise, but these qualities aren’t sufficient. You can be intelligent and unwise; you cannot be wise and non-intelligent. The same happens with good judgement.
Wisdom goes beyond both intelligence and good judgement.
Wisdom has been an elusive concept throughout history, with many definitions and theories about it in different fields, such as philosophy and psychology.
Wisdom in history Human beings have been interested in wisdom since antiquity. From the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads in India to the Book of Wisdom of Solomon and the teachings of Confucius in China, wisdom has been an ever-present concern in most cultures and traditions.
The Norse god Odin decided that losing an eye was a good price to pay in exchange for gaining more wisdom . That’s how much he valued it.
The Oracle of Delphi announced that Socrates was the wisest person in Greece. As Socrates said, “The ancient Oracle said that I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing.” Socrates wasn’t the most intelligent, clever, brave or dashing, but the wisest, and he thought he was so because he knew nothing.
Socrates, the wise person who knew nothing. Aristotle wrote, in his Nichomachean Ethics , that wisdom was a meta-virtue controlling all the other virtues, such as courage or justice. Wisdom was the virtue that enabled all the other virtues. Wisdom helped a courageous person decide when to make use of that courage, for example.
Human beings have been thinking about wisdom for millennia, but only recently has it started being studied as a scientific subject in psychology and neuroscience.
Wisdom as a scientific construct – work in progress… As Jeste and Lee (2019) tell us, some concepts that are now accepted as valid psychological and neurobiological constructs, like consciousness, emotion, cognition, stress, or resilience, were relatively recently considered non-scientific and non-biological. Wisdom is probably part of the same group of concepts but in an earlier stage: it is still controversial and some psychologists think it is a fold or pop concept, but with more research, it has the potential to become a construct validated and accepted by psychologists and neuroscientists alike.
Many psychologists and neuroscientists are studying it as a psychological construct and have proposed different definitions of it. They haven’t reached a scientific consensus yet, and they don’t seem to agree on all the dimensions forming wisdom, but there are some overlaps between their definitions and conceptualisations.
Lee and Jeste (2019) identified nine common themes in the scientific literature on wisdom: social decision-making and pragmatic knowledge of life, pro-social attitudes and behaviours, emotional homeostasis, reflection and self-understanding, acknowledgement of and coping effectively with uncertainty, value relativism and tolerance, spirituality, openness to new experience, and a sense of humour.
Thus, wisdom is often associated with making the right decisions in a social setting, helping others and being interested in the greater good, having appropriate emotional regulation, reflecting and learning from experience, knowing oneself and others well, accepting others’ values and viewpoints, managing uncertainty, being spiritual and having the right sense of humour.
There is a lot here, but these are just some of the common themes repeated across models. This does not mean that a person must have all these nine characteristics to be considered wise, but it helps.
Anyway, nobody said it was easy to be wise.
The Wise Leader I wrote about the wise leader a while back. Back then, I argued that a wise leader was self-aware, made the right decisions, and was a purposeful leader . I am still aligned with these ideas, but I now believe wise leaders need a few more capabilities to be called really wise.
Wise leadership or leadership wisdom (What’s the right term? Does it really matter?) is about all those things, but also about much more. If I were to define a wise leader, I would say that he or she would be a people, business, or organisational leader who displays the wisdom dimensions identified by wisdom researchers.
That is, a wise leader would be a leader who shows most or all of the nine common themes shown above. Wise leaders have pragmatic knowledge about life, are pro-social and want to help others, manage their emotions well, reflect and know themselves, thrive in uncertainty, value differences in others’ mindsets and attitudes, and are open to new experiences. They may or may not be spiritual, and they may have or may not have an excellent sense of humour. I would rate these last two dimensions below all the rest.
We need wise leaders more than ever As we said above, this is a long list of difficult-to-achieve capabilities, but they can be developed. Nobody said it was easy to be wise; it is even less easy to be a wise leader.
But we need wise leaders more than ever.
We need them because we have plenty of problems and challenges, and intelligence alone will not help us solve them. Intelligence without morality is dangerous.
Clever leaders without the right moral compass are dangerous. They will take us on the wrong path.
We need leaders who want the right thing for society, not only for themselves. We need leaders who know themselves and their limitations well and have enough emotional intelligence to manage themselves and their relationships with others well. We need leaders who can make the right decision more often than not when there are no clear answers, leaders who can live comfortably in the grey confusing area of uncertainty and do not need things to be black or white.
We need wise leaders, and we need them now.
In the end, I will have to agree with Aristotle on what he said more than two thousand years ago. Wisdom is a meta-virtue that affects all other virtues. We need wise leaders because wisdom will help them be better leaders in all areas and better leaders for themselves, their organisations, and society at large.
Developing wise leadership I have known my share of wise leaders in my career, but sadly, they weren’t the majority. I have also known my good share of foolish leaders, and happily, they weren’t the majority either. The big majority of leaders I met were somewhere in the middle, neither here nor there, neither wise nor fool.
The good news is that most people have the capacity to become wiser, so we can develop this big mass of mediocre or just-good-enough leaders into wise leaders.
Many people believe that people become wise with age, but that isn’t exactly so. There are plenty of old foolish people, and we all know young people who are wise beyond their age. Age helps in the development of wisdom, but only if the person reflects on their experiences and learns from them.
The more we learn, the wiser we become. Obvious.
But you don’t need to wait until old age to be wiser. You can start right now. Wisdom is something that can be developed and learned.
How?
That’s a topic that deserves its own post, so we’ll leave it for another day.
