Legacy Leadership: Heart or Brain?

What’s more important if you want to be a Legacy Leader; your heart or your brain? This is not an easy question. Should you be governed by your feelings or your intellect? In the past, conventional wisdom said use logic and strategy; leave your emotions out of leadership. But, the work of Daniel Goleman and many others has helped us realize that trying to leave emotions out of it is darned near impossible. So, does this mean that our emotions should rule the leadership roost? Don’t jump to that conclusion too fast.

Perhaps the best way to understand the head and heart discussion is to put it into a context. Let’s think about this conundrum from a biological perspective. In a living organism, like a human being, the brain cannot function without the heart. And, although the heart can continue to beat without the brain for a little while, it would be hard to refer to the state of that being as being alive. The bottom line is simply, life requires both the brain and the heart.

We now know that our ability to make wise decisions does not just consider logic and reasoning. We now understand that our emotions can inform our logic and reasoning. Ignoring emotions discounts the impact our emotions have on our ability to drive towards important goals. If we rely purely on our brains, we can miss the reasons why people may or may not become fully engaged in the work needed to achieve important outcomes. When logic and reasoning are allowed to be influenced by our emotions, we have a greater probability that the energy needed to sustain efforts will be there.

Leaders get in trouble when they think they can separate the heart from the brain. It doesn’t work in a living organism and it doesn’t work in organizations either. Legacy Leaders quickly realize that an integration of head and heart is the most effective way to pursue important goals. Achieving critical outcomes requires well developed and logical strategies, supporting targeted tactics and heart felt motivations to power the efforts needed for success. Using our brain and our heart allows us to do so much more than either one would allow if we engage them separately.

To make real progress in any organization, Legacy Leaders use both their brains and their hearts. Creating a Legacy Culture means having a vision that inspires followers to work to achieve short term, intermediate, and long term goals. The short term goals can often be accomplished with strategies and tactics but the effort and work towards more intermediate and long range goals is more difficult to sustain without getting emotionally connected to those goals. This means believing in, loving, enjoying, and being connected to those goals. Logic and reasoning may be needed to make sure we do what needs to be done but without our emotions we’ll never be able to persevere for the duration.