What Predicts Success? It's Not Your IQ

The CEO of one of the world’s largest money management firms was puzzled. He wanted to know why there was a Bell curve for performance among his employees, with a few outstanding, most in the middle, and a few poor. After all, he hired only the best and brightest graduates from the top schools – shouldn’t they all be outstanding?

That same puzzle was explored in Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller David and Goliath, which I recently read. Malcolm was befuddled by the finding that many of those in the mid to low achievement spectrum of Ivy League schools did not turn out to be world leaders – despite their SAT scores being higher than even the best students at the so-so colleges, who fared better.

Gladwell and that CEO share a certain muddle in their reasoning: they assumed that academic abilities should predict how well we do in life. They don’t.

Gladwell proposes that the relatively poor performance of students who scored average grades at highly competitive schools suffer from a learned low self-confidence from being small fish in a big pond. That may be part of the picture, but there’s much more to it.
Studies at the University of Pennsylvania have found that students who don't have the highest IQs in their class but get high grades share an attitude called “grit.” They keep plugging away despite any setbacks or failures.

And a 30-year longitudinal study of more than a thousand kids – the gold standard for uncovering relationships between behavioral variables – found that those children with the best cognitive control had the greatest financial success in their 30s. Cognitive control predicted success better than a child’s IQ, and better than the wealth of the family they grew up in.

Cognitive control refers to the abilities to delay gratification in pursuit of your goals, maintaining impulse control, managing upsetting emotions well, holding focus, and possessing a readiness to learn. Grit requires good cognitive control. No wonder this results in financial and personal success.

To further understand what attributes actually predict success, a more satisfying answer lies in another kind of data altogether: competence models. These are studies done by companies themselves to identify the abilities of their star performers. Competence models pinpoint a constellation of abilities that include grit and cognitive control, but go beyond. The abilities that set stars apart from average at work cover the emotional intelligence spectrum: self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and social effectiveness.

Both grit and cognitive control exemplify self-management, a key part of emotional intelligence. IQ and technical skills matter, of course: they are crucial threshold abilities, what you need to get the job done. But everyone you compete with at work has those same skill sets.

It’s the distinguishing competencies that are the crucial factor in workplace success: the variables that you find only in the star performers – and those are largely due to emotional intelligence.

These human skills include, for instance, confidence, striving for goals despite setbacks, staying cool under pressure, harmony and collaboration, persuasion and influence. Those are the competencies companies use to identify their star performers about twice as often as do purely cognitive skills (IQ or technical abilities) for jobs of all kinds.

The higher you go up the ladder, the more emotional intelligence matters: for top leadership positions they are about 80 to 90 percent of distinguishing competences.

That’s why I’ve argued we should be teaching these life skills to every student. It’s your expertise and intelligence that get you the job – but your emotional intelligence that makes you a success.

Daniel GolemanInfluencer

Author of FOCUS: The Hidden Driver of Excellence

3 leadership lessons from a CEO

There are three elements to effective leadership.                                            Everyone has his or her own individual style—no one brand of leadership works all the time for everyone. But, I’ve found there are three key elements to effective leadership. The first is authenticity. Organizations have finely tuned BS meters and can tell when a leader isn’t being authentic. When you are at the podium, you should be—at most—one degree of separation from the real you.
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The second element is self-awareness. When a leader—any type of leader, not just a CEO—walks into a room, the dynamic of the room changes. You need acute self-awareness and need to know when your message is veering off course. For example, I like to use humor and sarcasm in my conversations with people. Occasionally I’ll say something that gets a laugh from the room, but the person I directed it at feels a little uncomfortable even though it was intended to be good-natured. At that point, I try to find a way to send a signal that I regard that individual highly. Self-awareness can be exhausting if you do it right!

The third element is vulnerability. You need to show it. Too many people think that leaders can’t show weakness. But people need to know you’re human and they can relate to you. I get the best responses when I tell stories about me not as the hero, but as fallible.

Avoid talent gaps: build a pipeline.
Years ago at our company, I set up a talent review process. This involves bringing our most senior staff together and discussing the broader management team. We spend half the day reviewing the people, their positives, negatives, and where they need to grow. We then spend the second half of the day talking about key roles in the organization and identifying the three best candidates for each. We have rules—for example, no one person can be listed for more than three jobs. Then we look at the list from a diversity perspective and seek a balance. We also identify what each person needs to succeed in that potential role. Do they require some coaching, mentoring, public speaking training, or something else? Before we started doing this, we had talent gaps in the organization. But with this process, we now have a talent pipeline.

Leadership advice for young professionals: Mind your Qs.
I love talking to young people about leadership. A lot of people believe that if they come into an organization and do a great job for their boss, they’ll be magically lifted up and promoted. But the reality is that some bosses don’t advocate for their people. Others are selfish and don’t want to lose good people to promotions. So I always tell young people that the first thing you need to do is network. The second thing is what I call “three Qs”: IQ, EQ, and PQ. IQ is about intelligence, and we like to think that we hire intelligent people. But I’ve noticed that a lot of young people who are really intelligent believe that it trumps everything. They think that if they just show how smart they are, they’ll be whisked to the top.

Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. Because how effective you are is a matter of how you combine that intelligence with emotional intelligence or EQ. You need EQ to help people feel that you are working with them. And finally, you need to be able to read the room. You need to know the reaction you are creating. You need to be aware when you are in political territory. That’s political intelligence—PQ. It’s not about being a backstabber. It’s about understanding the political dynamic of the organization. You need to find the balance between IQ, EQ, and PQ—you can’t expect just one of those to skyrocket you to the top.

Do the leaders in your organization share George’s passion for developing talent? How does that affect the culture? 

George Borst, CEO of Toyota Financial Services (TFS), received the “Outstanding CEO Award” at our 2013 Women in Leadership Institute™. In September, he retired after 16 years at the helm of TFS. George recently shared what he has learned about leadership and employee engagement throughout the course of his career.

The Best Ways to Sharpen Your IQ

Deepak Chopra MD (official)Influencer

Founder, Chopra Foundation

When they were first devised, IQ tests were intended to be bias-free. Intelligence was modeled as a fixed trait, untouched by a person's environment. But over the years this pristine model has been subjected to considerable criticism. A poor child raised in a home where English is a second language, attending an inferior school, and facing an environment where there is daily violence isn't the same as a child growing up in an educated home, attending a privileged school, and surrounded by an environment conducive to learning.


Does this affect the second child's IQ? I have my suspicions, as do various professional psychologists specializing in this area. But in practical life, I think what's most important is how you use the intelligence you're given. Like any other function that is dependent on the brain, intelligence is expressed in specific situations. It's used to make decision, for example, and every decision is subject to emotions, information, stress, and the people who are in the room when the decision has to be made.


This led me to coin a term - functional IQ - that describes IQ in action. No matter what you believe your IQ to be, there are definitely ways to sharpen it.


First, attend to the well-being of your brain. You are its user, just as you use your car, and a tuned-up brain works much better than a carelessly used one. Your brain needs to be rested with a good night's sleep. It should be focused on one task at a time, since multitasking decreases your ability to perform each task well. Alcohol, smoking, and probably a fatty diet damage the circulatory system, which over time leads to impaired brain function. A quiet workplace free of distractions isn't always easy to achieve, but it makes things easier on your brain.


Next, attend to detriments that affect your mind. We don't have to bring up the controversies over how mind and brain are related, because in general, every cell in the body is chemically connected to a person's mood, stress level, and state of well-being. There is a floating communication system that brings messages to the outer membrane of every cell, and the headquarters for this constant messaging is the brain. It receives complex input from the mind, which then gets translated into output. This feedback loop works best if you aren't

• anxious
• depressed
• fatigued
• obese
• ill
• addicted to various drugs and abused substances
• highly medicated
• malnourished.

The mind is involved in all of these detriments, and as the user of your brain, you should look upon these things as enemies of using your brain efficiently (in addition to harming your well-being in other ways).

Finally, functional IQ depends on the quality of your attention. Being able to focus sharply while remaining relaxed is a skill that can be trained. Meditation is a prime tool here, and to some extent so are simple relaxation techniques, such as sitting quietly for a few minutes with eyes closed in a quiet place. Avoiding work fatigue is essential, which begins by getting up from your desk once an hour and moving around. But if I had to name one factor that even highly intelligent people tend to overlook, however, it would not be maintaining sharp focus, but rather expanded awareness. When you make any decision, you can draw on the shallow part of the mind, which is impulsive, easily distracted, overly influenced by others, and constantly in motion. Or you can draw from the deeper part of the mind, which is centered, stable, self-reliant, and ultimately the source of wisdom.


It's been shown that older people score better on tests that require accumulated experience and wisdom than younger people, who are quicker and intellectually more nimble. But you can have the best of both worlds by expanding your awareness. And the best means for developing this are meditation, mindfulness, self-reflection, and similar techniques.

Constricted awareness is prey to all of the detriments listed in this post, while expanded awareness not only protects you from them - largely by making you more attentive and self-aware - but also leads to a style of functioning that is creative, open, intuitive, insightful, and always growing. We tend to think of the most enlightened states as somehow mystical and reserved for a small band of sages and saints. But I propose that enlightenment is simply the highest attainment of functional IQ, which anyone can achieve if they put their minds to it.

Deepak Chopra, MD, Founder of The Chopra Foundation, Co-Founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, coauthor of Super Brain with Rudolph Tanzi and for more information visit The Universe Within.

Posted by:Deepak Chopra MD (official)