Why Leaders Who Trust Their Intuition Make Better Decisions
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Jan Turner works at the intersection of leadership, resilience, and conscious transformation. As an executive coach, former C-suite leader, and 2x burnout survivor, she brings the human back to organizations and guides leaders home to themselves.
What if the most consequential leadership tool available to you right now was something you were trained to dismiss, likely used recently without realizing it, and is more important than ever to cultivate?
We have built our organizational leadership cultures around a love of the rational mind. We expect and demand data, analysis, logic, and proof to develop our recommendations and enable decision-making. These things are fundamental, of course, but somewhere along the way, we decided that the other kind of knowledge, that which emanates from intuition, was unreliable, soft, imprecise, or simply inappropriate to mention, especially in a business context.
The research tells a different story, one that becomes even more compelling when you take into account the experience of leaders who have learned, often the hard way, that intellect alone is not enough.
Intuition is a form of intelligence
The dismissal of intuition rests on a false premise that it is the opposite of thinking. In reality, neuroscience has established that intuition is a highly sophisticated cognitive process that draws on experience and subconscious information processing in ways the conscious mind cannot replicate in real time.
A study in Academy of Management Review defines intuitions as affectively charged judgments that arise through rapid, nonconscious, and holistic associations. [1] In simpler terms, your brain is processing more than you are consciously aware of, and intuition is how that processing surfaces.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis offers an explanation of how this works. Damasio found that the body creates what he called emotional bookmarks, or physiological responses linked to past experiences that guide future decisions long before conscious reasoning catches up. Things such as a gut twist or a subtle hesitation are data expressed through the body, rather than through the traditional types of data and information that we are used to assessing at work. [2]
The enteric nervous system, a network of more than 100 million neurons lining the gut, communicates directly with the brain via the vagus nerve. Scientists now routinely refer to it as the second brain. When leaders describe a feeling in their gut, they are describing a real communication system that is transmitting information their conscious mind has not yet organized into language.
What the data says about gut-informed leaders
Despite the culture of reverence for data and analytics that has taken hold in many organizations, senior leaders quietly rely on intuition far more than they admit publicly. According to a survey by The Economist Intelligence Unit in partnership with PwC, when it comes to making major decisions, an executive's own intuition and experience remain the single biggest input, outranking data and analysis, financial indicators, and the advice of colleagues. [3] That finding aligns broadly with the observation in a separate PwC study, where 59% of decision makers acknowledged that the analysis they require relies primarily on human judgment rather than machine algorithms. [4] A study cited in Analytics Magazine found that 73% of executives trust their own intuition when making decisions, including 68% of those who consider themselves data-driven. [5]
Experienced executives also tend to trust their intuition more than junior executives. Research by Dr. Jay Liebowitz and colleagues across four countries found that while less experienced employees prefer to rely on data and emotional intelligence, seasoned C-suite executives tend to use what researchers call inferential intuition, a form of knowing that integrates experience, pattern recognition and felt sense into judgment. [4] In other words, the more you have led, the more you have learned to listen to something other than just the data.
This matters even more now with the proliferation of AI. Machine-generated data is growing faster and becoming more abundant every day, so the pressure on leaders to defer to algorithms will only intensify. Yet, AI cannot assess cultural fit, read the room, sense what is not being said or weigh ethical complexity against an organization's deeper values. Those capacities belong to human leaders. In one study conducted at Cambridge Judge Business School, human-only teams continued to improve creatively while human-AI teams plateaued after performing 10 rounds of tasks. [6] This is a reminder that over-reliance on machine intelligence does not sharpen human judgment. The leaders who will navigate this era most effectively will be those who have done the work to know when to trust the data and when to trust themselves.
What we lose when we only trust the rational mind
I have spoken with many leaders who describe a version of the same experience. They knew something was off long before anyone else in the meeting did. Yet the rational case had been made, so they set aside what they sensed and moved forward with the agreed-upon next steps or decision. The stakes of doing so can vary widely. Sometimes the cost is negligible. At other times, it could be a quarter's profits or considerably more.
Hitendra Wadhwa summarized the power of intuition this way in his book Inner Mastery, Outer Impact:
“Intuition looks at a problem in totality, tapping not just our conscious mind but also our subconscious mind, making unexpected connections, helping us approach things from a new perspective, and drawing from all life experiences, automatically, instantly, and effortlessly.”
Most high performers have developed a significant reservoir of intuitive intelligence, built over years of navigating complexity and making consequential calls. The challenge they are facing is that they have been conditioned to discount or ignore it. Often mindful of their own reputation, or just not able to trust themselves, many will overlook what their gut or instincts are signaling. Compounding the loss of this valuable intelligence is the high rate at which experienced workers are retiring across a host of industries and sectors of the economy.
Furthermore, traditional corporate cultures and approaches to leadership development have tended to reinforce the same message – show your work, prove your case, and defend it with data. One problem with this is that leaders’ inner signals rarely make it into the presentation.
What is ours to cultivate
Intuition is a vital capacity that can be developed and deepened over time. The practices that strengthen it tend to be ones that high-performing leaders have deprioritized precisely because they have been so rewarded for analytical rigor, efficiency, and speed. Here are some practices that I use in my own life and in my work with the leaders and teams that I coach.
Build a practice of stillness: Intuition rarely surfaces in noise, rather, it arrives in the pauses. A consistent mindfulness or contemplative practice is not a wellness program “add-on” or a luxury for the few. It is a cognitive investment that creates the conditions for intuition to register more freely and fully. It also has many positive effects, including helping to manage stress and cultivate presence, which can improve, among other things, our relationships with ourselves and with others. There are a host of free apps and online resources that can be used to kickstart or sustain a simple ongoing practice.
Learn to distinguish signal from noise: Not all gut feelings are wisdom. Fear, bias, and old thought and behavioral patterns can masquerade as intuition. The key is to develop, over time, the self-awareness to sense where a feeling is coming from versus simply following every inner signal.
Develop your interoceptive awareness: Interoception is the body's capacity to sense its own internal state. The tension in the chest, a felt sense around an issue that should not be ignored, breathing that suddenly turns shallow, sudden clarity that arrives before the mind catches up, these are examples of relevant data. Somatic practices, breathwork and mindfulness all strengthen the capacity to access the body’s wisdom.
Reflect on your own track record: Review the moments when your inner knowing was right, and you dismissed it. Most leaders, when they look back objectively, can identify a pattern. Naming it builds the confidence and authority to act on it in the future.
Create space for it in your culture: Teams that have permission, or better yet, are outright invited to name what they sense, and not just what they can prove, tend to surface risks earlier and innovate more freely. Enabling the environment that supports this starts with leaders who model it.
We can learn to trust ourselves
I have spent decades as a leader in industries and organizations that prized analysis and rewarded certainty. As part of this, I have led decision science, data and analytics, market research, and finance functions. I have survived two burnouts that were, in part, the cost of overriding the signals my body and instincts were sending me long before the breakdown arrived. I have had spiritual experiences that have enabled deep groundedness and transmitted timeless insights. After decades of personally worshipping at the altar of intellect, I have learned that the rational mind is a magnificent instrument, but it represents a small fraction of our potential as human beings.
The leaders I most respect are those who have learned to hold both intellectual rigor and deep intuition. They apply a deeper intelligence by triangulating data and information through multiple sources, methods, or perspectives. Along with evaluating the facts, figures, and projections, they have done the work to know themselves well enough to articulate what they stand for, trust what they sense, ask the essential questions, remain open, and act decisively. I believe these are non-negotiable qualities for what is already needed from, and will continue to be demanded of, leaders in the years to come.
The high-performing teams and professionals I work with are often already carrying more than they realize. Integrative Coaching creates the space to name what is happening and rebuild from a stronger, sustainable foundation. If you are looking to deepen your leadership intelligence, explore more here.
Read more from Jan Turner
Jan Turner, Executive Coach and Strategic Advisor
Jan Turner is an executive coach, strategic advisor, and former C-suite leader with over 25 years of experience in global financial services. Having led teams across 11 different functions and survived burnout twice, she guides leaders and teams through significant transitions, helping them build trust, grow in confidence, and move beyond self-defeating habits. Jan’s approach combines whole-person development, mindfulness, business acumen, and practical leadership techniques that deepen presence, resilience, and overall impact. She helps organizations and teams to navigate complexity and drive results by fostering personal growth and transformative leadership. Her mission: bring the human back to organizations and leaders, home to themselves.
References:
[1] Academy of Management, 2007, Exploring Intuition and its Role in Managerial Decision Making
[2] Unplugged Psychology, 2026, The Neuroscience of Intuition: Understanding the Power of Gut Feelings
[3] The Economist Intelligence Unit for PwC, 2018, Gut & Gigabytes
[4] Chief Executive, 2018, New Research Says CEOs Should Follow Their Intuition
[5] Analytics, 2015, Intuition-based decision-making: The other side of analytics
[6] University of Cambridge, 2025, Human brain vs AI: what makes better decisions?
