One can make a pretty compelling case that good judgment is the single greatest competency of a successful leader. In my years as the head of leadership development at several Fortune 500 companies, I can’t tell you how many times the CEO would base his final assessment of an emerging leader on this single competency. There might be a lot to like about the executive, but if the CEO didn’t feel in his gut that they had good judgment, they weren’t climbing any higher in the organization.
Now there’s a entire book devoted to this under-rated leadership trait. In their recent book titled Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls (2007), Warren Bennis and Noel Tichy call judgment the “essence of leadership” and identify three judgment domains that great leader must master – people, strategy, and crisis. The authors propose that good judgment can be developed (if you have the right foundational qualities like integrity, courage, and listening skills) and that making great calls is a process, not an event. Bennis and Tichy present a framework for making judgment calls that includes four phases - preparation, judgment, execution, and evaluation. This is a great book to add to you library if you’re a collector of seminal works on leadership.
Let’s hope our leaders exercise good judgment this weekend. While we need a plan that can be executed, and we probably need it quickly, it will all be for naught if it’s not based on sound judgment.
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