Leadership can be deeply rewarding—but also deeply demanding. As a leader, you need to deliver immediate results, while also building for the long term. You have to lift yourself up to see the whole field of play, while also helping your teams move forward at ground level. Meanwhile, technology is changing faster than ever, and the division of labor between human and machine keeps shifting. What does it take to lead intelligently through all of that? 

Powered by the science-based approach that made her first book, How to Have a Good Day, an instant and enduring success, Caroline Webb’s Leadership Intelligence enables leaders to excel at this unique time in history. Rooted in fresh insights from psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics, and brought to life by real stories of accomplished leaders, the book provides an integrated system full of original frameworks and tools that readers can put to work right away.

Clear enough to consult before a crucial meeting, but engaging enough to read in depth, Leadership Intelligence is an indispensable toolkit that successful managers will return to year after year as their roles and responsibilities grow.

Webb recently took some time ahead of the book's launch next week to answer some questions about the new book.  

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Porchlight Book Company: You note that many of the greatest challenges leaders face aren’t technical problems, but biological and psychological in nature. At its best, you seem you suggest, leadership is more about understanding people than addressing problems—though understanding people certainly informs how we solve problems and may even prevent some kinds of problems from arising in the first place. If I’m on the right track, can you expound upon that briefly, and how you honed your coaching approach with insights from cognitive and behavioral science?

Caroline Webb: At its heart, leadership is about enabling a group of people to achieve more together than they could on their own. You’re definitely addressing problems, and chasing opportunities—but you’re doing it with and through your colleagues. So even when you’re doing very technical work, good leaders are always thinking about how to bring the best out of others.

Over the years, I’ve seen how understanding the human mind makes that easier. For example, once leaders understand that people’s brains are more likely to notice and process things that match what they’re already thinking about, they get less flummoxed by situations where they or their team have missed something “obvious”, and more adept at getting everyone to step back and see all the angles.

Science also gives us guidance on what really motivates people at a neurological level, and what has been shown to reduce stress and sharpen thinking in tough situations. All of that makes it easier to diagnose what’s really going on when your team isn’t firing on all cylinders, and easier to work out how to get people back on track. I sometimes say that a bit of science can help leadership feel less like chaos, more like a craft.

PBC: Can you discuss the importance of intentionality in developing leadership capabilities and expertise, and how someone aspiring to leadership, or simply more seniority, can work on it?

CW: We used to hear that “leaders are born not made,” and yet that’s not what research tells us. We all have the capacity to keep learning and developing, whether early or late in our careers. You see this play out throughout Leadership Intelligence. Each chapter has a “role model,” someone I know who’s good at whatever the chapter is about—making decisions, handling disagreement, coming up with solutions, driving change, getting colleagues to step up, etcetera.

In just about every case, those leaders have been on a journey: they realized there was an important skill they lacked, did specific things to improve, turned those actions into habits, and got good at it. I think that’s a fundamentally optimistic message, and it chimes with everything I’ve seen in my career. We can all become better leaders with practice—especially with some guidance, which is what this book aims to provide.

PBC: The book is delivered in three parts, each focusing on a different leadership quality: wisdom, inspiration, and resilience. As important as these qualities are in a leader, that doesn’t seem to be your ultimate focus. Rather, you aim to show leaders how to encourage those qualities in others. I found that unique, and I wonder how you settled on making it so other—rather than internally—focused.

CW: I think of it this way: as a leader, instead of trying to be the smartest person in the room, you’ve got to make the whole room smarter.

To do that, you absolutely need to pay attention to the quality of your own thinking (wisdom), your sense of direction and energy (inspiration), and your demeanor in tough times (resilience). But that’s just the start—it’s crucial to build those qualities in your team, too. You want them to be wise and savvy, inspired to do their best, resilient through the inevitable ups and downs.

And in most of the situations I cover in the book, it’s a two-way street. Done well, a feedback conversation has two sides to it, as does a delegation conversation. You can set a clever goal, but you’re not going far if your team doesn’t get it or doesn’t want it. The best leaders I know help everyone on their team be the best version of themselves.

PBC: Because the book is so intensely focused on the human qualities required to lead, and that leaders must encourage in others, you note in the Introduction that most of the work one must do [for a leader to make the most of those human qualities] is “pretty difficult to subcontract to technology.” But you do see a role for AI in leadership and even suggest there are ways to use it as a tool for practicing some of what readers will encounter in the book. At the risk of inciting the wrath of the understandable anti-AI backlash out there, can you give us a few examples and also discuss why it is important as a leader to seek counsel from multiple sources?

CW: I homed in on these qualities (wisdom, inspiration, resilience) many years ago when I started to look at the data on automation trends, to understand where humans would continue to have an edge over “the robots” (as we then called it). I felt back then what I know with more certainty now: as AI becomes more capable, we’re going to need to keep raising our game as humans. That means leaning into our distinctive human strengths—our ability to make good choices when there’s no right answer, to read a room and build a relationship, to lift people’s spirits and keep them moving forward.

But if we choose, we can use AI to make us even better at those things. For example, we can ask AI to kick the tires on our work, helping us see which perspectives we might be missing or where there are holes in our approach. We can use it to role-play important conversations, to help us see another person’s point of view and identify common ground, or ways to be more supportive. We can use AI to lighten the load on research or admin, to free up more time for work that requires our judgment and care.

AI can also make us dumber, if we stop thinking for ourselves. Using it well requires more metacognition than we’ve often needed in the past: we need to rise above the task and consider what kind of thinking is really needed to do it well—and then make deliberate choices about the best way to do that thinking. As leaders, we are accountable for the quality of our team’s work, so we need to make those choices intelligently, every day, to keep the benefits outweighing the costs. And just as you wouldn’t rely on a single human adviser for every important decision in your life and work, AI should be one source of perspective, not the source of truth.

PBC: I am a little concerned that my questions up until this point might make the book seem more theoretical or philosophical in nature rather than practical, which couldn’t be further from the truth. It is basically a playbook for becoming a better leader. It might seem a little “inside baseball,” but I’m hoping we can wrap up with you telling our readers how you structured the book, why, and how you hope people will use it in their real lives and work.

CW: Ha! Well, I did write the book to work on two levels. If you’re a “big ideas” kind of reader, there’s plenty for you, because there are some big principles that glue the whole book together. But the great majority of the book is in the 21 practical chapters. Each tackles a situation I’ve seen come up repeatedly in my work coaching leaders of all types, whatever their seniority or title.

Then, I wanted to make this book unusually easy to pick up and dive into when you have just a couple of minutes before a meeting or a deadline. So each chapter has the same structure: “The Challenge,” which includes what science says about how to handle it; “The Role Model” who anchors the chapter; and “The Advice” which lays out clear step-by-step guidance. I hope that means the reader will always know exactly where they are, and how to navigate to what they need.

I also drew on the evidence about what makes information easier for the brain to remember. So, every chapter is structured around a sticky little framework (say, the ACORN decision-making model, or the 3Fs of intelligent team discussion). There are clear headings, bullet points, and a summary box that’s always in exactly the same place. You don’t have to swim through a lot of prose if you just want a quick steer. In short: I wanted to write a book that even the busiest leader could use, and keep using over the years. I keep my own increasingly well-thumbed copy on my desk, too.

About the Author

Caroline Webb is a leadership coach, economist, and author of How to Have a Good Day. She is a Senior Advisor on leadership to McKinsey & Company, where she was previously a Partner. Her work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Economist, Financial Times,  Fortune, and Time, among others.