How Important Is "Executive Intelligence" for Leaders?
The impact of one individual on the performance of an organization has long been debated, and the debate has focused most recently on the controversy over compensation for CEOs. Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton cite studies that maintain that no more than 10 percent of the performance of an organization can be attributed to its leader as opposed to other forces. There is also debate about the most important traits of leadership. Some recent studies continue to examine the personality and style attributes of effective leaders. Others are giving more emphasis to certain forms of intelligence.
In his recent book, Executive Intelligence, Justin Menkes proposes another set of hypotheses, among them that too much emphasis has been given to personality and style and too little to types of intelligence that enhance leadership performance. He argues that "when it comes to predicting work performance, cognitive-ability tests have been demonstrated to be approximately ten times as powerful as personality assessments. . . . Personality is not a differentiator of star talent. It is an individual's facility for clear thinking or intelligence that largely determines their leadership success." Menkes places his bets on an individual's "executive intelligence," the ability to digest, often with the help of others, large amounts of information in order to form important decisions that produce useful action with the right amount of deliberation.
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