Intelligence

Intelligent leadership is a form of public leadership, itself a collective leadership style. In the public sector, collective leadership is considered to be an essential way of dealing with the complexity of public service delivery particularly in an age of austerity. Intelligent leadership holds promise as a mechanism to bridge the gap between vision and implementation and known and unknowns based upon the best available evidence. This would apply whether the aim is to improve the education of our future generations, the safety of our society or, at a more specific level, the experience of patients

Intelligent leadership has also been viewed as a means of dealing with what is described as a leadership deficit (Sydänmaanlakka, 2008) through a combination of four kinds of intelligence;

“Intelligence of the hand (the skill to do things), intelligence of the head (the ability to reason things out), intelligence of the heart (awareness of one’s own feelings) and intelligence of the soul (clarity over the values guiding all action)” (2008:4).

This is almost akin to the black box of leadership. How often, in your learning so far, have we emphasised the need to know what is currently unknown? Considering synergy helps us to understand complexity and how to deal with it in reducing the potential or the impact of chaos that inevitably follows and aligning this with cybernetics provides the opportunity to drill down into the components that make up the whole and help in both establishing and encouraging network, institutional and personal accountability.

RELECUTANCE TO SHARE INFORMATION

One of the most significant barriers to collective leadership is the reluctance of one member of a partnership to share information with another member.

Partnerships consist of individuals, agencies or organisations with a common interest. Common interests need to be transformed into a shared vision as this defines the purpose of the partnership. If this shared vision is not acheiveable then the partnership will reflect separate organisations working in parallel (at best) or in competition (at worst).Midway between the two will be diverse attempts at making efforts to achieve the outcomes desired.

When these difficulties emerge the energy and increased opportunities of different organisations to work together is lost. Barriers to this will include diverse agendas, misunderstandings in relation to the framing of the problem and a lack of boundary-spanning between partners' responsibilities and roles. A reluctance to share information and data with other partners, however, is often the most significant barrier, particularly in the early stages of the partnership. Why does this happen?

Leaders will often acknowledge that partnership working provides many benefits, not least that it provides a lens through which to view and understand challenges from different perspectives as a prelude to 'joined-up-thinking'. The reasons for reluctance (whether explicit or implicit) to share information will often be due to 'organisational jealousy', 'organisational obstinancy' or 'organisational inertia' often leading to a lack of commitment, poor articulation of purpose, and a lack of effective coordination. This can lead to a lack of trust and ultimately conflict and tension which becomes counter-productive. Individuals and agencies are not focused on developing conflict resolution skills, as one example, as conflict can be positive ... we just need to 'cook the conflict' at the right temperature (see Heifetz and adaptive leadership).