The Leadership Skill We Should Talk About More
Priyanka Ayodele is a leadership and organisational development specialist and the founder of The Leadership Method. As a Chartered Manager and Associate of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) member, she supports organisations through leadership development, coaching, and culture-focused work with managers and teams.
If you asked someone what makes a good manager, I imagine you would get some fairly similar answers. They need to be a good communicator, they should be emotionally intelligent, and they should know how to coach people and manage performance. This is all true. However, the more I work with teams and leaders, the more I wonder if those things only work because of judgement. This is something I feel sits behind all of the qualities mentioned.
Managers make judgements all day, every day. We decide whether someone is ready for more responsibility or whether a conversation needs to be supportive or challenging.
We decide whether someone is struggling, disengaged, or just having a bad day, and even choosing to do nothing is a judgement. The interesting thing is that we rarely stop to think about how those judgements are made.
It’s easy to assume good judgement comes with experience, but I am convinced that’s not always true. I have met managers with years of experience who still jump to conclusions, and I have met new managers who have an incredible ability to understand what is really going on before deciding what to do next.
So what makes the difference? Some people would argue it is emotional intelligence or coaching, and I think that is partly true. Emotional intelligence helps us recognise emotions, and coaching gives us the opportunity to have a conversation that supports people to grow and develop. However, neither of those things tells us what we are actually dealing with.
Imagine two people have both missed a deadline. From the outside, the behaviour is exactly the same, but the reasons for it are completely different. Maybe one is overwhelmed and is struggling to ask for help, and the other just does not have the skills they need yet. If we treat both situations the same just because the behaviour looks the same, we have already made a judgement before we have understood the context.
That’s why I think judgement comes first. It is not because it is replacing emotional intelligence or coaching, but because it helps us decide when and how to use them. For me, good judgement isn’t instinct, and it isn’t about experience alone. It is something we develop, and one of the best ways to develop good judgement is to stay curious before we reach conclusions.
I think it is something we all naturally do. We try to make sense of what we see. We tell ourselves stories about people because our brains like certainty. Sometimes those stories are right, and other times they are completely wrong. The problem is that once we have decided on the story, it starts to influence every decision we make afterward.
Psychologists refer to this as the fundamental attribution error. It is our tendency to explain somebody else’s behaviour by who we think they are, rather than considering what might be happening around them. In other words, we tend to assume behaviour reflects character before we have stopped to think about the context.
I don’t think managers do this because they don’t care or because they are trying to be unfair (most of the time). I think it is how our brains work a lot of the time. This, for me, is exactly where curiosity becomes so important. It is one of the things that helps us develop better judgement because it slows us down enough to ask ourselves what else could be happening and what else we haven’t considered.
In my experience, managers with the strongest judgement are not the ones who always have the answer. They are the ones who are comfortable admitting they do not have the full picture yet. They let themselves stay curious a little longer, and they ask another question before reaching a conclusion. They are the ones who recognise that the same behaviour can have completely different meanings depending on the individual.
For me, this is what good judgement is about. It’s not about making decisions more slowly or avoiding accountability. It is about making the fairest decision you can with the information you have, while staying open to the possibility that there may be more to understand. Maybe we have spent so much time talking to managers about how to respond to people that we have forgotten to talk to them about how to understand them first.
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Priyanka Ayodele, Leadership & Business Specialist
Priyanka Ayodele is a Chartered Manager and associate CIPD member and the founder of The Leadership Method. Her work focuses on leadership, team culture, and organisational development. Earlier in her career, she studied psychology and worked in mental health, which shaped her interest in how people experience leadership at work. Having experienced both poor management and the kind of leadership that helps people grow, she saw firsthand how much impact managers can have on someone's confidence and development. The managers who recognised her potential played a big part in shaping the leader she is today. That experience now influences the work she does at The Leadership Method.
