What do you do if your logical reasoning abilities are lacking in a leadership position?

If you feel you lack logical reasoning skills as a leader, consider seeking professional development opportunities to improve them. You may benefit from taking critical thinking, problem-solving, or decision-making courses. Additionally, having a diverse team can bring different perspectives and complementary skills to the table. Embrace collaboration and seek input from others to compensate for any personal shortcomings. Remember, leadership is about leveraging the strengths of the team.

I would take proactive steps to address this challenge. Firstly, I would acknowledge the importance of logical reasoning in decision-making and problem-solving processes. Then, I would seek to improve my logical reasoning skills through various means, such as attending training sessions, reading relevant literature, or seeking mentorship from individuals with strong analytical skills. In our organization open communication is encouraged, every team member is welcome to provide input and share their perspectives.

Having a leadership is pivotal. Sometimes assessing your strengths and weaknesses, can come with your own personal bias and inability to see past with they truly are. A leadership coach will offer you feedback, constructive criticism and ability to role play different methods. In order to improve what you are lacking you must practice ways to strengthen this skill. As i say often, “consistency hardwires practice”

You will not have all the answers all the time. Embrace the unknown with humility, for it is in seeking understanding that true wisdom is found. Collaborate with your team, utilize tools, and seek feedback to refine your approach efficiently.

Identifying your strengths and weaknesses is indeed a crucial first step. By taking online tests, seeking feedback, or reflecting on past experiences, you can gain insights into your areas of improvement. For instance, you might excel at identifying patterns but struggle with spotting fallacies. Similarly, you could feel confident in quantitative reasoning but less so in verbal reasoning. Once you know where you need to improve, you can focus your efforts on developing those areas and avoid making mistakes.

Leadership is not about making all of the decisions. Leadership is about knowing when it’s time to lean in, learn and gain from the perspectives and experiences of those around you.

One of the myths of leadership is that you have to be an expert at everything. While you do need sufficient knowledge in a broad base of skills and subject matters, great leaders surround themselves with people who know more than they do. This is why great teams are diverse with skill sets that compliment each other. As a leader your job is to help set the vision, build an excellent team, and guide them to the desired outcome.

Learning from others is important to acquire or enhance skills, but this must be done in times of peace while taking sufficient time for application and discussion before reaching the stage of making decisive decisions.

In this section Learn from Others: Seek out mentors or colleagues who excel in logical reasoning. Observe their decision-making processes. Engage in discussions with team members. Listen actively and learn from their perspectives. Read books, attend workshops, or take online courses related to critical thinking and problem-solving.

In a world of leaders , every person walks in with a unique ability and skill set! To know it all is great in theory but being smart and knowing whom to bank on at the need of the hour is a bigger win. When logic does not make sense being humble with a mindset to unlearn and relearn from peers and leaders around saves time and effort.

Practice makes perfect. So practice logical reasoning in all aspects of your professional life and personal life if you want to get good at. You should also consider volunteering opportunities for organizations that require strategy support, where you could apply logical reasoning in situations that you may not normally experience at work.

Logical reasoning and effective leadership go hand in hand. Like any important capability, they require practice. We define our executive coaching practice as a “Thinking Partnership.” Most of the leaders we work with are overloaded with work, forced to be in fire fighting mode and in back to back meetings. Logical reasoning can be very challenging under these conditions. Having a thinking partner who is not a colleague, and yet aware of your business and your business challenges can be instrumental in developing your logical reasoning.

Remember, when practicing regularly, you need to know exactly what to practice. In the context of leadership, you must be paradoxical. Capable of logical decisions, not affected on emotional bias, you have as the leader. It's tricky because you can't effectively lead if you are not emotionally invested. You will be inclined to decide immediately because of your emotions. You must recognize when this occurs. If you are going to practice logical reasoning, you must first exercise restraint in making a decision. This will allow you to have time to reflect on your initial decision. Use the time to analyze at a pace you can ensure is grounded in sound reasoning. Repeat and seek feedback to refine your reasoning.

Practice increases proficiency and effectiveness, and the more practice you have, the more efficient and important you are to your team since you can teach others. Learning without practice renders your capabilities invaluable, and you will never achieve better results.

One thing I have found helpful is the power of doing and practice, you'd be surprised how much muscle action adds to your leadership.

If faced with a deficiency in logical reasoning abilities within a leadership role, the seasoned leader should prioritize seeking feedback and support from trusted colleagues, mentors, and experts in the field. They should acknowledge their limitations and actively pursue guidance on improving their logical reasoning skills, self-realisation is the key towards any improvement journey. Additionally, they should invest time in self-improvement through reading, attending workshops, or taking courses focused on enhancing critical thinking and analytical skills. This proactive approach demonstrates humility, a willingness to learn, and a commitment to personal and professional growth.

Empathy and gratitude are the most important and often ignore skills at the leadership level. In the pursuit of achieving targets we often forget that we are dealing with humans. If you keep empathy and gratitude as your guiding light you will rarely fail as a leader

When you’re illogical, you don’t know it. Only others do, and only a critical coach that provides honest feedback will uncover those blind spots. All executives should have a coach.

Seeking and receiving candid feedback is not easy, especially for leaders. Often colleagues that report to you will be hesitant to be forthright in their feedback, so we conduct confidential 360s via our Rapid Insight process. We work with many seasoned leaders who are often hearing challenging feedback for the first time. It is essential in understanding your developmental opportunities and often we find logical reasoning is one of them and having this awareness is the first step to improving it.

If you have a mentor, this is a great time to leverage that relationship and get honest and actionable feedback. Make sure that you ask for explicitly help on improving your logical reasoning abilities, providing your mentor with the context of why you need to improve and what goal you want to reach.

Take logic tests to determine your specific weakness in this area. There isn't just one kind of logical or critical thinking. Gain data to make sure you focus practice and effort on the right subgenre if this element.

One of the reasons behind this can often be a natural propensity to be a 'gut feel' decision maker. A leader with the tendency to make risky and gut-based decisions should be a concern for an organisation to some degree. If this natural propensity can be identified, then such a leader should make sure they are balancing this natural behaviour with a deliberate intention to put checks and systems in place to ensure decision making is balanced by data and sense checked.

Logical Reasoning Comes from Logic . logic comes from logical thinking . Logical thinking comes from mindset . If you have fixed mindset you will lack logical reasoning . To fix this mindset, you need to have learners mindset , to have learners mindset you need to broaden your point of view . To broaden your point of view , you need to fix your being , to fix your being you need to let go of your fears . Fears drives everyone . Face that , don’t ignore or run away from it .

Regardless of our leadership experience, we are fooled by cognitive biases every day. Learning about cognitive biases (confirmation, availability, loss aversion, etc.) and the dark side of personality (for example, the Dark Triad leads to overconfidence and rejecting cognitive biases) will help leaders make the right decisions. Remember, not all logically driven decisions are right decisions—humans are significantly influenced by emotions and culture (social and corporate). The following resources will help you improve: 1. Judgment in Managerial Decision Making by Max Bazerman 2. Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman, et al. 3. Hogan Leadership Assessment

My experience has taught me that if you're struggling with logical reasoning in a leadership role, it's essential to take active steps to improve. Start by seeking educational resources or training that can help sharpen your critical thinking skills. Finding a mentor who excels in logical reasoning can offer valuable guidance. Don't hesitate to lean on your team's diverse skills for decision-making support. Take time to reflect on your decisions to continuously grow your abilities.

Nobody said that, to be a leader, you need to have all the correct answers. There are far more important characteristics and skills required. Whenever you feel that you are lacking in some needed competence, it is always best to find ways to improve on it so it ceases to become a weakness. You can also have a diverse team supporting you, and this team’s talents taken together will negate any shortcomings.

Show vulnerability, too many times leaders are expected to have all the answers, always be right, not show any signs of weakness. The truth is people engage with Human leaders, who are not shy to admit when they don’t have all the answers or when they are wrong. Being vulnerable is a strength, not a weakness.

A great productive technique to help improve logical reasoning and support a leader that may be struggling… Debate! I enjoy debate, I believe there is not enough of it for critical decision… to often, decisiveness, speed, confidence, is favored over good thoughtful debate with colleagues. Debate forces logical reasoning, critical thinking and brings out many aspects to consider, to help prioritize and develop strategies to achieve the best outcome. Debate also, helps the leaders involved in logical reasoning, to explain the decisions that are made, to those impacted by what the leader believe to be logical. A pitfall to watch for, is choosing sides and seeing debate as a win lose … instead of seeing it as collaboration to learn from…

If all else has failed, then there is always our intuition and gut-feel that may not be explainable logically! When in unchartered waters, I often rely on these in decision making and then find logic to justify them later!

Few other points: 1. Observation is key. Decipher how people behave around you. Don’t have to be the elephant in the room with your logic. If your contribution questions your leadership style, take a pause. 2. A leader is expected to win, but failures are inevitable no matter what level you are at. Be open to accept mistakes, understand the ‘Why(s)’ & restart. 3. Don’t take matters to your heart/head. Elevate your abilities via real time projects. Get hold of a mentor to see things differently. 4. History shows the greatest of leaders losing situations due to their lack of reasoning many times. Re-think, observe & implement again to bounce back. Just be open to learning & your humility shall take you to the finish line just in time.