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A Leader's Intuition: Toy Box Leadership By Ron Hunter

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A Leader’s Intuition

I was doing a reading for my creative thinking class a while back and I came across an interesting idea that the author put forth. According to him, Michael Michalko, when we are stuck, unable to find a solution for a problem, our unconscious already has the solution, it is just a matter of pulling it up from the depths of our minds. This is where intuition comes from. Intuition is our subconscious telling us what we already know is or will be true. This subconscious to me is built off of experience, information, and our animal nature.

As usual, this got me thinking about leadership. Many times in my leadership experience, after given enough time to become familiar with my followers and the environments I find my instincts become very sharp and very accurate. I have been able to determine the outcome and the likeliness of a project working out or someone not …show more content…

The premise of the book is that you can pull a large number of leadership lessons from the toys we grew up playing with. Things like Play-Doh and Mr. Potato Head. One of my favorite lessons is one that is pulled from LEGO bricks. In summary, the lesson is that leadership is about building connections to build something better. Like LEGOs, relationships are the building blocks that our organizations are built with.

That makes perfect sense, but another sub-lesson from the chapter is that LEGOs do not just attach to one another willy-nilly. The person building with them (the leader) hast to deliberately and with effort push the blocks together, thereby creating the connection.

When you think about it, this is super inconvenient for leaders who are regularly sucked dry of our time and energy by the world, work, school, etcetera. This means that we need to find a balance of taking time and energy to build relationships with and between others and also meeting our expectations set for us… Not an easy

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