went on to be teachers. We remained friends. Eventually, I got promoted to principal. After a while longer, I became a superintendent for the district.”
“And George?” I asked again.
“Well, George is still a teacher at the school we started out at. I still see him about once a month. Last time we met he said he was looking forward to retirement. George worked under me for all these years – most of our working lives. So I guess you could say that our expectations for him career-wise were a lot greater than teaching at the same school all these years. And I never thought that I, the C+ student, would ever be his boss. Crazy world, huh?”
For years we've relied on and many employers still believe that cognitive intelligence, or IQ, is a good predictor of leadership abilities. While it's quite likely, on average, that leaders may have higher IQs than followers, IQ is not a very good predictor of leadership ability. In fact, there are now studies that have found that high IQ leaders may be less effective than others with lower IQ scores. But before we get to that, let's look at how we became so reliant on IQ as a predictor of successful leadership.
The Evolution of Intelligences
It's now been more than 100 years that psychologists have been testing IQ, or cognitive intelligence. Interestingly, after all these years, and hundreds of research studies, we still don't have an agreed-upon definition of cognitive intelligence. How is it that IQ and its related ability and achievement tests have dominated our society – through schools, college entrance tests, professional school admissions, and many workplaces?
Well it all started back in 1905 when the French psychologist Alfred Binet, together with his colleague, psychiatrist Theodore Simon, developed the first formal intelligence test.29
Binet had been asked by the Parisian school commission to come up with a way children could be categorized according to ability. The aim was somewhat less than benign: to weed out the “feeble-minded” (i.e., those who would not benefit from a publicly funded system). Binet had long believed that intelligence was an interlocking process that involved judgment, problem solving, and reasoning. Now he could put his theories into practice. He and Simon completed and published an IQ test – administered, at first, to children – that enabled him to obtain performance standards for different age groups. These formed the basis of what became known as “mental ages.” The results of the test would give the mental age of a person in relation to average levels of growth and intellectual development.
In 1910, the Binet-Simon test migrated to the United States, where the educator and psychologist Henry Goddard30 founded his own school for the “feeble-minded” in New Jersey. Later the test was modified and standardized for a wider American population by Lewis Terman at Stanford University, and it began to be administered to both children and adults, and became known as the Stanford-Binet test.31
At this time, the ability to measure cognitive intelligence assumed new importance. Not only could it identify and sidetrack the “feeble-minded” who could only marginally benefit from education, but it could pick out those who scored high and could be expected to put their learning to best effect. IQ soon took on a life of its own. It was generally viewed as a major factor not only in school but in the workplace and in personal relationships.
Subsequently, there has been a lot of controversy around the concept of IQ, both at schools and in workplaces. There have been debates around the influence of genetics and the environment (i.e., nature vs. nurture). More controversies arose over cultural and racial differences. Nevertheless, IQ or cognitive intelligence has been a powerful force in the selection of students for university, graduate and professional programs, and for many workplaces.
What Is IQ?
IQ testing has evolved somewhat since the days of Binet and Simon. Let's look at what cognitive ability tests actually measure today. They evaluate your ability to concentrate and plan, to organize material, to use words to understand, assimilate, and interpret facts. In essence, IQ is a measure of your personal information bank – your memory, vocabulary, mathematical skills, and visual-motor coordination. Some of these skills are clearly relevant in the workplace.
We've had a hundred years of research on cognitive intelligence testing and its ability to predict outcomes. Where do we stand on the ability of IQ to predict work success? Richard Wagner, in a major review of the topic, examining reviews of reviews and covering hundreds of studies with thousands of subjects, came to some interesting conclusions. His review of reviews (or meta-analysis) found that overall, proponents of IQ testing interpret the research estimating that it accounts for 25 percent of the variance in predicting job performance. In other words, 25 percent of an individual's job performance is attributable to their IQ. However, looking more realistically at the studies, and taking out some of the inflationary estimates, Wagner concludes the number is closer to 4 to 9 percent of the variance.32 Even if 25 percent of job performance was accounted for by IQ, that leaves 75 percent unaccounted for. The left-out factors could include experience, education, technical skills, and others.
In another review by Robert Sternberg when he was at Yale University, the IQ was estimated to account for only 4 percent of the variance in job performance.33 That means about 96 percent of work performance was due to variables other than cognitive intelligence. Sternberg goes on to stress the virtues of practical intelligence, or common sense, in predicting job success. In my own experience, emotional intelligence can account for a substantial amount of variation in job performance.
What Is Emotional Intelligence?
While emotional intelligence is a relatively new concept, the skills we talk about have been around as long as humans have lived together in groups. The set of skills that make up emotional intelligence have evolved along with humankind. The need to cope, to adapt, and to get along with others was crucial to the survival of the early hunter-gatherer societies. The human brain reflects this undeniable fact. Sophisticated mapping techniques have confirmed that many thought processes pass through the brain's emotion centers as they take the physiological journey that converts information into individual action or response.
On the one hand, then, emotion is as old as time. In the 1870s, Charles Darwin published the first modern book on the role of emotional expression in survival and adaptation.34 Darwin's book was titled The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. As already mentioned, there has been a great deal of controversy over our measures of cognitive intelligence being fair among races and cultures. In fact, there are prohibitions on this type of testing in some jurisdictions. When it comes to understanding emotions, however, Darwin went beyond cultures and examined the transferability of emotional expressions among species. I often ask audiences in my presentations if they have pets. Of the many that do, I ask how many pet owners recognize when their pet is happy, sad, excited, or scared. Without hesitation they all nod and smile. Well, if we can read emotions across species, then there should be fairly clear rules that work across cultures and race. And our research demonstrates this to be true. Of course sometimes it takes a lot of effort and expense for researchers to discover things that many people already know from their own experience.
Why is this important? Darwin documented the importance of emotions as a signaling system. The angry look on the wolf's face serves as a signal that the hunter ignores at his peril. The flight-or-fight response kicks in when reading the anger on the wolf's face. This ability to read these emotions, according to Darwin, led to humans' survival. The lower, more primitive areas of the brain mediate this response. These are the same parts that control your emotional responses today. The sections of the brain are called the limbic system and the hippocampus.
A. Binet, “Les Premiers Mots de la Thèse Idéaliste,”
H. H. Goddard, “The Binet and Simon Tests of Intellectual Capacity,”
L. M. Terman, “The Binet-Simon Scale for Measuring Intelligence: Impressions Gained by its Application,”
Richard K. Wagner, “Intelligence, Training, and Employment,”
Robert J. Sternberg, Richard K. Wagner, Wendy M. Williams, and Joseph A. Horvath, “Testing Common Sense,”
C. Darwin,
