The Art of Leadership

Chapter 5. Spidey-Sense

You bump into James in the eighth-floor cafeteria. You haven’t seen him in weeks, which is fine because while you’ve worked together for years, your paths are currently not intersecting.

“Hey, James.”

“Hey! Long time, I was just thinking about you.”

“Really, why?”

“Randy just called you out in the launch meeting. He said the project was a month behind. Everything okay?”

In your head, before James reaches the end of the statement, you already feel your response. It’s not the emotional reaction to Randy calling you out, and it’s not the road map implications of a month’s delay. It’s a feeling that you’ve been in this precise situation before. Randomly being thrown under the bus by a different VP. Publicly. None of his business, really. What is he up to? You don’t know what’s up yet, but it’s a familiar feeling.

I’m talking about Spidey-sense.

Understanding Spidey-Sense

Spidey-sense is real-time wisdom. You build wisdom through experiences, small and large. These experiences leave you with impressions, opinions, and lessons learned. When they’re shared with other humans, you’ll find differences of opinion on their value. However, these different perspectives expand your understanding and teach you lessons. You observe it all—the different approaches, attitudes, emotions, and words. You continue to learn, and carefully index and file away those lessons.

As this corpus of knowledge grows, your brain discovers delicious patterns. When situation X occurs, I often ...