What do you do as a coach or a manager when there’s a mismatch between talent and attitude? An HR director called me in to coach Lucy, an experienced senior manager in a city IT and software company.  He said she was excellent at her job, but her attitude was terrible. While she was good at what she did, the pressing problem was that she was rude to people. She had a poor attitude towards company initiatives and so she was continually overlooked for promotion. If it didn’t improve, regardless of how much they valued her skills, it would be time for her to move on. ​

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​A great paradox of leadership is that we seem to have clever people in stupid organisations.
 
Perhaps that’s because we usually view wisdom as a property of the individual. But if we face big collective problems, how about seeking and creating wisdom in a collective approach?
 
An element of wisdom is the ability to see beyond the obvious. Good leaders notice patterns. They discern signals amongst noise and get a sense of what’s going on. They bring the gift of making even complex circumstance more tractable.
 
Leaders working effectively together in an organisation (or society) can use this skill to determine from the myriad of activities and sets of information available what to pay attention to and what to overlook.
 
This guides the practice of colleagues – helping to clarify aims and decide where to apply effort.  In your next meeting, how can you increase clarity with your colleagues and generate collective wisdom?