Written by Tove Kinooka - Director of Global Perspectives
Nowadays, looking at the news seems to be getting ever-more scary and depressing. Conflict, climate change induced extreme weather events, polarized politics and society - no matter where you live or how comfortable your life is right now, at least some of it is bound to connect to your life in some way or another.
Now picture an ordinary day at work. Depending on your role, you might be speaking to different people about different projects, juggling meetings, admin, and employee evaluations, balancing customer expectations with supplier capabilities… That’s already a heavy cognitive load, but add to that the fact that as humans we also have relationships to maintain and responsibilities to meet outside work as parents, friends, partners, and community members, then things start to get really complex.
However good we are at separating work from our personal lives, we are not machines - we all have emotions, and the things we are seeing or experiencing in one area of our lives will be influencing our emotions and mental state in the other, whether we are conscious of it or not.
Being conscious of this impact relationship at an individual level, and understanding how to manage our own energy and emotions, is critical to being a self-aware leader. (Or colleague, friend, or family member, when you think about it). When it comes to leadership, however, we’ve found that the most respected and best-performing leaders we’ve worked with are consciously applying this understanding at a broader level.
Why is this such a critical skill for leaders to develop?
A couple of years ago, in our regular 6-monthly offsite with a global leadership team we have been working with for a number of years, we realized that there was a context gap. Although they have regular online team meetings, the 12 team members are usually working in different countries and don’t see or fully understand each other’s day-to-day reality. This lack of “contextual intelligence” was creating considerable frustration and friction, and negatively impacting their ability to align on priorities as a team.
But it’s not just them. Over the past few months, we’ve worked with an interesting range of leaders:
a newly-formed team of leaders at the launch of a med-tech IT delivery centre in Portugal
a multicultural group of functional and business leaders at an e-commerce company
a global regulatory affairs leadership team at a pharmaceutical company
a global IT leadership team in the midst of a major organisational change
a cohort of next-gen sustainability intrapreneurs at a “big 4” professional services company
Very different people, working at different levels in very different companies and industries, but the need for contextual intelligence has been a recurring theme in all of this work.
So what do we mean by “contextual intelligence”?
We define contextual intelligence as looking beyond one’s immediate role, tasks and environment to notice and consider the relevance of seemingly unrelated events and issues, and their potential impact on people and the business. Let’s look at an example of how this works in practice.
Anu is a senior leader we worked with in the marketing department of a global US-headquartered media company. She’s originally from India, and is now based in Singapore where she leads a culturally diverse team that is scattered across several locations in the Asia-Pacific region. Aside from her business goals and team performance, what kind of things does Anu need to be paying attention to?
Climate issues: recent typhoons have caused disruption for her colleagues in Hong Kong and Japan
Cultural events: Divali, the Lunar New Year, Ramadan, Christmas… In the most culturally-diverse part of the world, it’s important to know when these events are, their significance to her team members, and how it may impact their schedules and focus
Geopolitics: new conflicts in the Middle East and even changing regulations for travel and visas may be causing stress and worry to team members with family or connections in affected areas
Technological disruptions: AI is rapidly changing the world of marketing, and the organisation is currently in the process of working out what this means for their day-to-work, hiring strategy, and longer-term plans. Meanwhile, some team members are excited to experiment with new tools, while others are worrying about whether they will have a job in a year’s time…
Leadership change: the long-time regional head is due to retire next year, and discussions are underway to appoint his successor. More uncertainty - will the new leader have the same approach and priorities? If not, how will that impact the team and their plans?
There are many more things we could add, but you get the idea - this contextual intelligence both incorporates and goes beyond business acumen, emotional intelligence, cultural sensitivity and people skills. It requires curiosity (and the mental bandwidth) to look beyond the day-to-day, systems thinking to connect the dots between issues, events, and their impact, and the ability to hold all of this “noise” in mind and identify what is relevant to your business and people.
Developing contextual intelligence
So how can we develop our contextual intelligence? We’ve started opening our more in-depth interventions with a “context map” - a large space on a physical or digital whiteboard where everyone can add what’s currently on their radar. This can include anything from personal circumstances (such as a child preparing to start university) to the big-picture topics such as climate change or AI. As we progress through the various topics and discussions, participants continue to add new things as they emerge, and also refer to the map during discussions so as not to forget the context they are working in.
Creating this shared contextual understanding together develops empathy for and understanding of each other, and develops the contextual intelligence of both the team and the individuals within it. We can then build on this practice in subsequent sessions by updating the map as a group, and individuals can apply the same approach in their daily work to uncover potential blind spots and make better-informed decisions.
In a world where time is a precious and often very limited resource, making the time to look up and pay attention to the world around us is critical. In one group coaching session with Anu and her peers from other functions, she responded sharply to one leader who suggested that the “Time To Think” she blocked out on her schedule each week to consider the issues listed above was a luxury he didn’t have time for. In her words “If you’re not making time to do this, you cannot be an effective leader. Something you’re not paying attention to will eventually trip you up.”
We couldn’t agree more.
