Guts

I have always been an advocate for listening to gut instinct. ‘Trust your gut’ is leadership advice I have both absorbed and given. However, the other day, I heard a mildly terrifying quote that cast this advice in a new light. “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” And who made this hubristic claim? Of course, it was our favourite orange presidential nominee and convicted felon, Donald Trump. 

Gut instinct is a weird, hard to explain thing. I’d describe it as a strong sense that I should either take or not take a certain decision, but without a watertight argument to back it up. It could help you take a call about a person to cast in a play, or a candidate to appoint for a job. It could be the deciding factor on giving the green light (or not) to a particular project. My greatest gut instinct moment was when, early on in my first leadership job, myself and some colleagues were meeting candidates for a job vacancy - there was one candidate who everyone was particularly keen on, but I had a strong sense that, although they were a good fit for the job, they didn’t really want it. Sure enough, after inviting them back for a second interview, they withdrew their application the day before we were scheduled to meet - after which point, my new colleagues were convinced that I was psychic. 

The thing I like about gut instinct, as a concept, is that it acknowledges that leadership involves making necessarily subjective judgements about which path to take. Some choices you make as a leader are straightforward - you either know or are provided with the relevant information and it’s clear what call you should make. The vast majority, however, are not clear cut, and one of the biggest lessons I’ve had to learn is that the quest for the ‘right’ decision is fruitless. There is no right or wrong, no correct path to find. There are just choices to go one way or another - choices that, ultimately, you have to make. When confronted with a complex decision, when there are many differing facts that might support each of the options that you could pick, taking a deep breath and tuning in to what your gut is saying can really help you turn down the noise and start to solidify what you actually think is the right thing to do. 

But then, we have the Trump quote. This shines a light on the huge risk around gut instinct - that you trust it more than you trust facts or the thoughts and opinions of your colleagues and it leads you to make decisions that actually don’t serve you at all - or worse, they serve you, but they don’t serve others. Maybe the gut instinct that you feel about a candidate in an interview process isn’t based on some mythical intuition about how they’d fit within the job - maybe it’s just plain old bias, for someone that looks or sounds a bit like you, or has a backstory that’s similar to yours. Making your strong inclination to take this course of action rather than that one is because that one feels scary and new and uncomfortable - all of which are good to acknowledge but doesn’t necessarily rule it out as a path to take. And, in Trump’s case at least, the phrase ‘I trusted my gut’ could be a cover for the more truthful phrase ‘I did whatever the hell I wanted’. 

Photo by Raul Petri on Unsplash

If we examine a bit more deeply what exactly gut instinct is, I’d suggest that it is the relatively instinctive response that you have to a situation based on the accumulation of the many experiences that you have had in your life. Some of this will be wildly irrelevant - you can’t decide to appoint a particular person because their voice sounds like your childhood best friend’s and therefore you are immediately comforted by their presence. But in other cases, all of those experiences put together can help you pick up things that perhaps a straightforward intellectual analysis couldn’t. Going back to my example of the candidate who pulled out of the interview process - probably, by that point in my career, I’d sat in enough interview rooms with enough candidates to know a bit about how people who really want a job present, and that was not what I saw in front of me in this instance. 

I think the most useful way to use your gut instincts in a way that’s helpful is to not be afraid of bringing them into the light. If, for example, you and your organisation are trying to decide whether to jump on board with a particular project that’s being pitched to you by a potential partner and your gut is telling you it’s not right, then find a colleague who you trust and who also knows the context for the decision that you have to make and really unpack with them what it is that’s giving you the heebie-jeebies. Try and put your finger on exactly what it is that concerns you - perhaps the project feels very similar to something that you’ve done before that didn’t have a very good outcome; or the people pitching the project were ten minutes late for the meeting, which shows a lack of consideration for your organisation and yours and your colleagues’ time. Neither of these things would necessarily preclude you deciding that the project should go ahead - but by talking about where your instinct is coming from, you can work out which are valid concerns and which aren’t. There might also be easy ways forward to allay or confirm some of your concerns - for example, by finding someone who worked with the potential partner on a different project and gathering some intel on what that experience was like. By talking this all through with a colleague, you can also see where their read of the situation differs from yours, which in turns allows you to analyse whether some of your gut instincts are justified or not. 

The phrase ‘gut instinct’ doesn’t always summon up positive connotations for me. It has an aura of something primal, tapping into some deep, caveman-like knowledge that helped us survive for many years. Whilst we all owe the cavemen a great deal (our very existence, in fact), the instinct to know which lion to chase or which women to impregnate to ensure the survival of their genes won’t necessarily help us make complicated HR decisions where part of the goal is to eliminate our natural biases. I like to think of my natural pulls or aversions to certain courses of action as lying more within the heart. The heart is home to our values, our purpose, our emotions, our longings - all things that, used correctly, can be an excellent (maybe even essential) part of decision making. Most good choices in life come from combining the feeling heart with the thinking brain - when we pull together the best of our (and our colleagues’) knowledge with an emotional understanding of both ourselves and of the values we want to uphold, we stand a chance at making the kind of decisions that we will look back on with pride.