leadership skills: when intuition isn’t really intuition

Intuition is either an essential leadership skill, or, depending on your perspective (or degree of disembodiment or dissociation), new age hogwash. 

Access to this capacity, our body-wisdom, varies significantly between people. Our trauma histories, neurotype and the social conditioning we have all absorbed shapes what we perceive as intuitive knowing. They influence whether we can trust that feeling, and whether what we are sensing is actually intuition at all.

Research shows intuition is essential for leaders processing complex information and navigating ambiguity (Sleesman, 2024). The ability to sense dynamics, read unspoken tensions, and trust gut responses matters. 

It matters because leadership is relational. 

Leadership requires reading rooms, noticing what is not being said, noticing patterns and responding to shifts that have not yet been articulated. For leaders who have never developed this somatic intelligence, or for whom trauma and chronic stress have disrupted its effectiveness, the work of building or restoring this connection extends beyond personal healing into how we lead, relate, and make decisions. When we operate without access to genuine intuition, or mistake bias for intuitive knowing, the consequences play out personally, for the teams we lead, and for the organisations we shape.

We hear often about the necessity of reconnecting with our intuition during a healing process. Trauma and chronic stress can scatter this capacity, so the focus on restoration makes sense. 

But what if it's a bit more complex than that?

It is possible that our histories, neurotype, and experiences mean that what we think of as intuition can be confused with implicit bias. We may not yet have reached the level of self-understanding required to see the difference…

Have you ever had a reflexive ick and thought, “I just do not like people like that”.

When someone walks into a room and you feel an instant dislike, it is worth examining. They might be loud or confident. They might be (subjectively + in line with cultural norms) attractive or unattractive. They might be overweight, disabled, dressed in a way you deem too attention-seeking, or perhaps they have not made the effort to conform to expectations of professionalism or conformity.

That immediate response is not neutral.

It often suggests the person has violated an internal expectation you did not know you held. 

The brain registered an unfamiliar pattern and flagged it as a potential risk before conscious thought began. Logic then justifies the feeling. Calling it intuition sounds more acceptable than admitting to bias or recognising that we have complicated feelings about something like body size, disability or confidence.

We might even feel like we’re making progress - recognising a gut instinct. These snap judgments are often pattern-matching errors. What feels like intuition is often the brain responding to difference. When we don’t make time to examine these reactions, we can easily mistake nervous system activation for insight. We can then be acting on incomplete information while believing we are listening to our gut, or make the mistake of thinking our opinions are neutral and based in objectivity.

It is not that intuition is not real. It is real. However, without doing the work, we might not be able to discern it from regular bias and entrenched beliefs.

Where you might start

Big confession: I used to feel the ick when seeing women step forward to speak about abuse or assault. I would outwardly be sympathetic because I was afraid of not appearing like a good feminist probably, but inside, I felt they were attention seeking or gauche.

My reaction was obviously not about them at all. 

It was about me, my experiences and my own internalised misogyny. When I was in their shoes I had not spoken up, so I found it difficult that they could. Instead of dealing with my own shame, I externalised it.

It is not easy to see things in yourself that you do not want to see. 

But this is healing. It is peeling back the layers like an onion and understanding your reactions with empathy. If we can move beyond these reactions and see people as they are, rather than as we project our own history onto them, life feels lighter. The world becomes better.

You might like to explore this line of inquiry in a few ways:

• The work of Byron Katie. This is a process of questioning the thoughts that cause reactive feelings. She shares a tonne of resources for free and they’re great. 

• The Harvard implicit bias tests. These help identify your own subconscious associations on traits like race, sex, religion, weight and more. 

• Self-led personal inquiry into what irritates you. Identify the people or situations that make you feel the most revved up. You could look deeper into why this is a sore spot through meditation, journaling, or by talking to a mental health professional. It is likely not about the other person or people at all.

Why are you sharing this? What does it have to do with leadership?

Being trauma-informed, or calling ourselves that without the professional learning, supervision or working on our own wounds, is becoming bloody trendy right now.

The righteous rebellion against an oversanitised world full of AI-simplified, clickbaity resources on self growth, leadership and politicisation means that leadership and relational frameworks that emphasise emotional intelligence, trauma-informed thinking and authentic leadership will become more central to how organisations learn to support and work with customers, employees and stakeholders alike in more evidence-informed ways.

The catch being, a surface level understanding of intuition and listening to our gut can potentially reinforce the very entrenched, culturally dominant behaviours, and normalised ways of working that have failed so many in the past and present.

Self work, nervous system literacy and trauma-informed leadership are not just the domain of social workers, psychologists, educators and yoga therapists. They are the foundation of authentic leadership. They are the foundation of trust and safety, two things we desperately need to purposefully cultivate in a changing world. 

Referenced:

Sleesman, D. J., Hollenbeck, J. R., Davison, R. B., & Scott, B. A. (2024). Leader intuition: Good or bad for multiteam system performance? The roles of information load and introversion. Group & Organization Management, 49(4). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10596011221121461