With 31 seconds to go in their annual dogfight in Columbus, 6 foot 10 center Jared Berggen drilled a three pointer that brought the Wisconsin Badgers from behind to knock off the home standing #8 ranked Buckeyes of Ohio State. While having your 6 foot 10 center launch a three on the most important possession of the game would seem to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, making the right call at the end of the game over his long and distinguished career has become the trademark of Badgers Head Coach Bo Ryan and the coach intuitively knew this was a great shot. Realize that making the right call is nothing new to Bo Ryan. In his 15 years as Head Coach at University of Wisconsin-Platteville, he won four Division III National Championships. Clearly Bo Ryan has demonstrated an amazing ability to use his intuition to make the correct decisions that have been the cornerstone of his 646 coaching victories in college basketball.
Great leaders and great coaches seem to always make the right call and many experts will tell you the reason: great leaders are extremely intuitive. When we look at the definition of intuitive we get two different interpretations of the concept.
1. Act or faculty of knowing or sensing without the use of rational process.
2. Immediate cognition.
While some individuals look at intuition as a mystical gift, the reality is great leaders and coaches have an amazing ability to aggregate tons of information acquired over their lifetime and process that information almost instantaneously. Great athletes have that same talent and use it to create winning situations. Maybe the greatest example of intuition in the athletic arena is Derek Jeter’s backhanded flip in game 3 of the 2001 American League playoffs to nail Jeremy Giambi at the plate in the seventh inning to preserve Mike Mussina’s 1-0 lead. As A’s manager Art Howe gasped, “I don’t have a clue as to how or why he was even involved in the play.”
Just like Ryan setting up his 6 foot 10 center, Jeter used all his experiences and knowledge to quickly size up the situation and immediately synthesize the information to position himself to make the game saving play.
Great leaders have that intuitive ability because they pay attention to every circumstance and process that information. Leaders focus on every situation they experience both from their own personal experiences and from viewing others. They not only observe the actions of others but they retain that data and store it in their memory bank. The critical message to be included in your leadership style is, "Do not to be so self absorbed that you only pay attention to yourself. Instead, gather every bit of information from both good and bad leaders so you instantly know what gives your organization (team) the best chance for success." Winning athletes and coaches make critical plays at critical times because they have worked to be able to use all their aggregated knowledge. While it appears great leaders often instinctively know the right decision, they have acquired loads of resource information over the years to use to make those "instinctive" decisions. Don’t be confused and think that intuition is some god given talent, winners develop that intuition by paying attention to everything around them and then filtering that information through a leadership funnel. As Coach Ryan has done numerous times, he has watched games and asked himself, “If I were coaching in that situation, what would I do?”. Be like Bo and ask yourself, “What would I have done if I were the leader in that situation?” There is a good chance you will have a similar situation occur in your leadership life.
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