Future-Proof Your Leadership Skills with Cognitive Readiness

The best way for a leader or manager to improve their skills for the 21st century culture is cognitive readiness.

How do you ensure your leadership skills keep up to date and improve as your career, business, industry, and world changes? How do you make the best possible decisions when dealing with rapidly changing demands and inherently risky and emotionally charged situations?

Be cognitively ready.

Process incredible amounts of information from technical to emotional to social in real-time, and focus, trust your judgment and act quickly with confidence.

Cognitive Readiness is the mental preparation for project leaders, people managers, and team builders who want to conquer frequent, unexpected events and multiple, unpredictable people in order to achieve the outcomes and objectives of the organization.

Get ready—because this is one of those rare gems on leadership. Here’s the breakdown:

Category 1: Attentional Focus

Attention focus is the focus of an individual’s attention at a particular moment. This focus may be internal (cognitive, emotional, pain cues) or external (environmental, cultural, societal cues).

Subcategories to attention focus are mindfulness, situational awareness, and metacognition. Improved attention focus allows for better decision making, real-time adjustments, and increased risk assessment.

This can be improved through training, experience, and coaching.

Category 2: Cognitive Intelligence

Cognitive intelligence is an individual’s abilities to learn, remember, reason, solve problems, and make sound judgments.

Essentially this is obtaining general knowledge and most people are decent at this category since they have been doing it most of their lives.

Some areas to focus on within this category are the transfer of training in order to speed up the application of what has been learned, automaticity particularly around the skills in the other categories, and mental flexibility to stay nimble in your unpredictable world.

Category 3: Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence (EQ) comprises of four abilities: to perceive and appraise emotions accurately; to access and evoke emotions when they facilitate cognition; to comprehend emotional language and make use of emotional information; and to regulate one’s own and others’ emotions to promote growth and well-being.

Decades of research now points to emotional intelligence as the critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack. Emotional intelligence accounts for nearly 90 percent of what moves people up the ladder when IQ and technical skills are roughly similar. [8]

The most effective way to enhance your EQ is to engage in regular habits that strengthen the communication between the rational mind and the emotional mind.

Category 4: Social Intelligence

Social intelligence is the ability to understand people and effectively relate to them.

This category resembles most people’s traditional definition of leadership. Here we talk about teamwork, connections, interpersonal skills, and soft skills.

Strong social intelligence reveals itself in putting team interests above personal interests.

In Summary:

The Cognitive Readiness framework provides a model for enhanced human interaction, teamwork and decision-making.

Though some traditional leadership capabilities remain critical to success, there are also recently understood requirements for leaders at all levels. These demand a fluid combination of new mindsets and behaviors, cognitive knowledge, and emotional skills that are critical to lead teams in the new culture of business and society.

Cognitive readiness is relevant and significant for leaders who must adapt quickly to rapidly emerging, unforeseen challenges. Both individuals and teams can train on this framework to prepare to accomplish their goals.

Going Forward:

Which category will you start with first?

Which categories do you feel you have the most experience and a good grasp? Which do you believe you need a little more understanding and research? That research is a good first step.

Still don’t know where to start? Go in order Attentional Focus - Cognitive Intelligence - Emotional Intelligence - Social Intelligence or ACES. In this order, you will benefit from each category’s subtopics that will lead into and help build the subsequent categories.

Stay tuned to our next four publications as we will dive deeper into each category, rounding out a strong comprehension on Cognitive Readiness.

Definitions from: https://dictionary.apa.org/