Leadership Traits - IQ Matters

Leadership Traits: Intelligence

Leadership requires intelligence, yes, the plain old IQ kind. Ram Charam recently used the term “intellectual bandwidth.” Leadership, particularly during change, requires several components of intelligence: IQ, mental complexity and complex time span.

While it has been popular to talk types of intelligence, as yet, instruments that establish other “intelligences” as a separate artifacts from IQ and personality are not sufficiently validated to use other than as feedback tools.

What we know is:

• Intelligence and leadership effectiveness are correlated particularly for complex tasks
• Time span is an aspect of leadership ability that should be considered when succession planning. The length of time span a leader must effectively plan for lengthens as one moves up the hierarchy. While supervisors may need a span of weeks to months, “C” suite leaders must be able to span one or more decades
• Relationships and emotions are important in leadership but the popularly termed "emotional intelligence" may or may not exist as a mental artifact separate from the combination of IQ and personality.

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