“Wisdom” is a word that we don’t here much in the workplace. I’ve been involved in the hiring and promotion of thousands of employees. Yet not once do I remember wisdom being mentioned as a job requirement. Why is that? Certainly wisdom is as important in the workplace as anywhere else.
Where can we even find wisdom? Nowadays we are bombarded by information, but that’s not wisdom. We turn some of that information into knowledge, but that’s not wisdom either. Wisdom is something different. Wisdom evolves from experience.
You have likely been amazed and angered by some of the dumb things you have done in your life. You’ve asked yourself many times “how couldn’t I have known better?” Well, you probably did know better. But navigating those times required more than knowledge. They were times that required wisdom and that was something you couldn’t have without experience. So making the mistakes you made were likely inevitable.
There are times when we allow the wisdom of others to guide us. But that probably doesn’t happen nearly as often as it should. We all get frustrated by people who won’t listen to us when we know the right thing to do. Perhaps there is something deep inside us that drives us to experience and grow wiser. It seems difficult for us to embrace the lessons learned by others. Maybe that’s why generation after generation make the same mistakes over and over again. But this is something that cannot be accepted in today’s competitive business environment.
In the workplace those on the frontlines have experience with customers and some of them gain valuable wisdom from those experiences. Yet too often, and to the detriment of many organizations, the wisdom within the organization is ignored and critical decisions are made only based on available information and knowledge.
Great leadership requires capturing and using the wisdom of others to make truly informed decisions. It is for this reason that business leaders must visit the frontlines to learn from those with real wisdom.