The Four Intelligences of Leaders and Organizations

When Organizations face adversity, are underperforming, or experiencing misalignment at the top, the problem usually points to either strategy or people. We see strategy problems as people problems and people problems as strategy problems. Typically, intelligent leaders are really good at defining the WHAT, where it sometimes falls apart is defining the ‘HOW.” And the how is the way people work together harmoniously to achieve a common agreed-upon outcome.

When addressing your strategic issues, it’s important to build the capacity in your leaders and teams to actually realize your visions and plans, and also have the skills it takes to work together. Any credible business solution will also bring your team together in a more organized and aligned way.

At Intune, we see the human side of leadership as the key to creating balance across all four business Intelligences:

• Functional Intelligence
• Analytical Intelligence
• Relational Intelligence
• and Emotional Intelligence

Most adults are really good at the first two—our content expertise and analyzing information pertinent to our success or survival— and yet need support cultivating healthy relationships and understanding, being comfortable with, and regulating our emotional selves. By developing the Human Side of Leadership, we build our capacity to optimize our success despite the complexity, fast-paced growth, change, and the unknown. We need conscious leaders.

For Leaders, the 4 Intelligences can be defined as:

Emotional Intelligence
This is something everyone knows. it’s your awareness, consciousness, emotions, and inner experience.  It’s the understanding of your own inner world, how you respond to others, situations, and circumstances. It’s how resourced and resilient you are internally to navigate and manage the external world.
Somatic Intelligence – this is the intelligence we carry in our bodies.

Relational Intelligence
This is how you relate to others, communicate, listen, build relationships and connections with others, seeing inter-connectivity across functions and departments within a system, awareness of and sensing of the connection between things and people outside yourself.

Functional Intelligence
This is our area of expertise or industry-relative knowledge. This is what we went to school for, got degrees in, what our titles say about our domain of expertise, what we have gained in experience reflected in where we’ve worked, areas of systems we have focused and focus our functional brain activity.

Analytical Intelligence
This is our analytical brains, cognitive intelligence, problem-solving capabilities, see challenges and find solution.

For Organizations, the 4 Intelligences can be defined as:

Emotional Intelligence
is the culture that supports a sense of belonging, its ability to cultivate and sustain its relational intelligence throughout the organization. It’s the ability of the organization to sense itself, to have awareness of it’s own system that feeds perspective, innovation, and decision-making.

Relational Intelligence
is an organization’s capacity to work together as a team, create healthy working relationships that are both fulfilling and yield value toward the organization’s mission and goals.

Functional Intelligence
is the content expertise held by an organization. This is tied to their reason for being and the problems they solve in the world.

Analytical Intelligence
is how an organization strategizes and makes decisions. It is how they organize themselves functionally around the work that they do.

Intune cultivates all 4 Intelligences within humans and systems, simultaneously supporting growth and critical business needs. We have a variety of solutions presented in Team Coaching, Leadership Development, 1:1 Executive Coaching, and Diversity and Inclusion Training. Here are the solutions in each area:

Find out more about what areas of intelligence you need to build and how we can help! Email us at team@intunecollective.com or schedule a 30-minute complimentary consult here.