Understanding intelligence

by Harvey Schachter

By now, we’re generally familiar with the notion of multiple intelligences, first delineated by Harvard Professor Howard Gardner in 1983. He alerted us that intelligence measured by IQ tests is not the only valid one. He outlined seven intelligences that we possess to varying degrees: verbal-logical, mathematical symbolic, spatial, kinaesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and musical.

With a nod in Gardner’s direction, a spate of books has been issued in recent years defining varied intelligences that leaders need. It’s easy to dismiss that outpouring, as each writer stresses the ultimate importance of that specific intelligence, often with his consulting company on standby to assist us in getting up to speed, but the reality is that in the tricky world that is management these various intelligences all play a role, and the tips the books offer can help us to perform better at work. So let’s look at some of them.

Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence, of course, is the best known, and a book that’s worth reading, recently reissued and updated in paperback, is The EQ Edge (Wiley, 288 pages, $26.99) by Canadians Steven Stein, a clinical psychologist, and Howard Book, an organizational consultant and psychiatrist. They fall back on the work of Reuven Bar-On, who measures our emotional quotient by looking at five general areas or realms which drive performance: intrapersonal, interpersonal, stress management, adaptability and general mood. Each of those, in turn, subdivides into different elements, with 15 that we need to be alert to:
§     Emotional Self-Awareness: The ability to recognize your feelings and to differentiate between them, to know what you are feeling and what caused the feelings.
§     Assertiveness: The ability to express feelings and beliefs openly, and to stand up for your personal rights.
§     Independence: The ability to be self-directed and self-controlled in your thinking and actions, free of emotional dependency.
§     Self-regard: The ability to respect and accept yourself as good.
§     Self-Actualization: The ability to realize your potential capacities.
§     Empathy: The ability to be aware of, to understand and to appreciate the feelings and thoughts of others.
§     Social Responsibility: The ability to demonstrate that you are a cooperative, contributing and constructive member of your social group.
§     Interpersonal Relationships: The ability to establish and maintain mutually satisfying relationships characterized by intimacy and by giving and receiving affection.
§     Problem Solving: The ability to identify and define problems as well as to generate and implement potentially effective solutions.
§     Reality Testing: The ability to assess the correspondence between what is experienced and what objectively exists – to see things the way they are, rather than the way we wish they would be.
§     Flexibility: The ability to adjust your emotions, thoughts and behaviours to changing situations and conditions.
§     Stress tolerance: The ability to withstand adverse events and stressful situations.
§     Impulse Control: This involves controlling aggression, hostility and irresponsible behaviour.
§     Happiness: The ability to be satisfied with life, to enjoy yourself and others, and to have fun.
§     Optimism: The complementary ability to look at the brighter side of life and to maintain a positive attitude even in the face of adversity. Optimists view downturns in their lives as temporary blips, believing the situation will turn around.

The book takes you through those various elements, showing how to improve where you are weak. That’s an important aspect of emotional intelligence and many of these other intelligences: Unlike IQ, they are not innate but something you can augment by practice. And boosting EQ can boost your work performance, Stein and Book advise. Whereas studies have shown IQ can predict on average six percent of work success, they say EQ has been found directly responsible for between 27 percent and 45 percent, depending on which field is under study.

The authors have tested individuals in various endeavours and determined the five most important criteria for success in each. For public servants, in order of importance, it’s stress tolerance, optimism, self-regard, self-actualization, and flexibility. For managers in general, flexibility drops out in favour of happiness, with the following array: optimism, happiness, self-regard, stress tolerance, and self-actualization.

Executive Intelligence
Executive Intelligence (Collins, 306 pages, $18.95) by consultant Justin Menkes disputes the notion that emotional intelligence is the key to success, lumping it with personality as a sideshow. He argues that not one published study has shown emotional intelligence to be a meaningful predictor of job performance beyond what has been long explained by other measures. Moreover, he contends the behaviours that have been widely cited as indicators of emotional intelligence have long been recognized as personality traits and personality traits are not an indicator of intelligence or success. Successful people have quite diverse personalities.

What successful people share, he insists, is strength at critical thinking – not the critical thinking of IQ tests, but an applied, practical intelligence that allows them to clarify complex workplace issues and identify appropriate responses. Unfortunately, hiring in recent years has downplayed IQ tests and in turn downplayed the importance of critical thinking, replaced by a focus on personality assessments, emotional intelligence scores, and behavioural questions. While those play a role in assessing talent, he believes we have to swing back to evaluating critical thinking ability, and has devised a system.

It’s based on three essential aspects of work where leaders must excel: Accomplishment of tasks, working with and through other people, and judging oneself and adapting one’s behaviour accordingly. In those areas, he teased out 17 essential skills for thinking through problems:
§     Appropriately define a problem and differentiate essential objectives from less relevant concerns.
§     Anticipate likely obstacles to achieving objectives and identify sensible means to circumvent them.
§     Critically examine the accuracy of underlying assumptions being relied on.
§     Articulate the strengths and weaknesses of the suggestions or arguments posed by others.
§     Recognize what is known about an issue, what more needs to be known, and how best to obtain the relevant and accurate information needed.
§     Use multiple perspectives to identify likely unintended consequences of various action plans.
§     Recognize the conclusions that can and cannot be drawn from a particular exchange with another person.
§     Recognize the likely underlying agendas and motivations of individuals and groups involved in a situation.
§     Anticipate the likely emotional reactions of individuals to actions or communications.
§     Accurately identify the core issues and perspectives that are central to conflict.
§     Appropriately consider the probable effects and likely unintended consequences from taking a particular course of action.
§     Recognize and balance the different needs of all relevant stakeholders.
§     Pursue and encourage feedback that may reveal an error in judgment and then make appropriate adjustments.
§     Demonstrate an ability to recognize one’s own personal biases or limitations in perspective, and use this understanding to improve one’s own thinking and plans for action.
§     Recognize when serious flaws in one’s own ideas or actions require swift public acknowledgement of the mistake and a dramatic change in direction.
§     Appropriately articulate the essential flaws in the arguments of others, and reiterate the strengths of one’s own position.
§     Recognize when it is appropriate to resist the objections of others and remain committed to a sound course of action.

“Star executives consistently outperformed their peers in employing these cognitive skills,” he says. “What is more, all of these aptitudes were found to be interdependent and necessary for effective leadership decision-making.”

Executive intelligence can be evaluated in hiring or promotions through conversations in which the individual is given a business scenario and asked to evaluate the situation. That echoes modern behavioural interviewing, but the focus is on assessing the individual’s critical thinking in real time, simulating what leaders do every day in the workplace as they face a barrage of complex issues. The scenarios aren’t geared to one of those 17 skills, where the answer might be obvious, but instead allow a number to emerge, depending on how the individual addresses the puzzle.

Social Intelligence
In Social Intelligence: The New Science of Success (Pfeiffer, 304 pages, $31.99), Karl Albrecht, a management consultant, focuses on the ability to get along well with people and to get them to cooperate with you as a vital intelligence we need to hone. This is a subset Reuven Bar-On’s map of emotional intelligence, the interpersonal dimension, which Daniel Goleman popularized in his landmark book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. But Albrecht argues it makes more sense to view emotional intelligence as a dimension of internal competence – self awareness and skilful deployment of one’s emotional competence – and to separate out the externally-oriented competencies under social intelligence. He stresses we need both the internal and external competences for interpersonal success.

Social intelligence is more deeply layered than what we normally call “people skills.” He defines five elements, which can be remembered by the acronym SPACE:
§     Situational Awareness: The ability to read situations and to interpret behaviours of people in those situations.
§     Presence: The ability to make an impression through appearance, posture, voice quality and the like.
§     Authenticity: Whether people judge us as honest, open, ethical, trustworthy, and well intentioned.
§     Clarity: Our ability to express ourselves clearly.
§     Empathy: the ability to develop a shared feeling with someone else.

In team building sessions, when he asks group members to list the qualities of their best and worst boss, inevitably the individuals who make the best boss list have a high social intelligence and those on the worst list don’t. “Their inability to manage with situational awareness, presence, authenticity, clarity and empathy – never mind compassion, direction, energy, honesty, etc. – makes them hard to work for,” he says. And he stresses that doesn’t mean leaders need to be inoffensive, meekly going along with the crowd: “In particular, we need leaders who can articulate a positive vision of development and progress – even if it doesn’t make all of us happy.” They just need to do it in a socially intelligent way.

Appreciative Intelligence
Tojo Thatchenkery, a professor of organizational learning at George Mason University, and Carol Metzker, a consultant, highlight another facet of leadership in Appreciative Intelligence: Seeing The Mighty Oak In The Acorn (Berrett-Koehler, 213 pages, $32.95). The word appreciation when used with respect to leadership usually turns our attention to recognition and praise, or to appreciative inquiry, an intriguing new form of change management that focuses on the positive. Those are both worth our attention as leaders, but here the context is developing and implementing innovative ideas. Appreciative intelligence is the ability to perceive the positive inherent generative potential in the present.

It’s best understood through the metaphor in the book’s subtitle. Some people look at an acorn and see an acorn. Others look at an acorn and can see the mighty oak that will exist some day in the future. That latter group often includes individuals who claim they aren’t very smart but are able to devise breakthrough products, champion top talent, or concoct a solution to a problem that seems insurmountable. They see what others couldn’t see.

Appreciative intelligence involves three components:
§     Reframing: The individual develops a different perspective on an object, another person, a context, or a scenario. When everybody sees the glass as half empty, he or she sees it as half full. It’s a value-based, judgment call, placing attention on one aspect of a situation and ignoring others. But it opens new possibilities that others don’t see.
§     Appreciating the positive: That reframing is positive – it appreciates something valuable or of worth in the person or possibility being considered that others have missed.
§     Seeing how the future unfolds from the present: Many people have the ability to reframe and the capacity to appreciate the positive. But individuals with appreciative intelligence connect the potential today with the desired end goal. They see how the future unfolds from the present. A sports or talent scout sees a future star in a young athlete or actor. A government executive sees a way to integrate programs and provide better service to citizens.

To capitalize on appreciative intelligence, four qualities are necessary: Persistence, conviction that one’s actions matter, tolerance for uncertainty, and irrepressible resilience. In developing the skills of appreciative intelligence, the authors urge you to approach it appreciatively. Determine what your abilities and qualities are, where they are the strongest, and build upon them.

“The most effective and successful people exhibit the ability to perceive reality in a way that brings out the positive inherent generative potential. It is more important than IQ, subject matter expertise, environmental context, or resources at hand,” they conclude.

Risk Intelligence
These days, government executives are sensitive to another talent: managing risk. In Risk Intelligence: Learning To Manage What We Don’t Know (Harvard Business School Press, 210 pages, $36.95) consultant David Apgar tackles this ability in a business context, but with applicability to public servants.

He defines risk intelligence as an individual’s or organization’s ability to weigh risks effectively. It involves classifying, characterizing and calculating threats; perceiving relationships; learning quickly; storing, retrieving and acting upon relevant information; communicating effectively; and adjusting to new circumstances.

We tend to view risks as random. But the most important concept of his book is the point that while some risks are indeed random, others aren’t. There’s a difference between the risk of interest rates increasing by three percent this year, which is subject to the vagaries of the markets, and the risk of someone swindling funds from your department or your latest program initiative flopping. He calls that second group learnable risks – risks that we could make less uncertain if we had the time and resources to learn more about them.

At first glance, all risks seem random since they reflect uncertainty. But uncertainty doesn’t necessarily mean they are random. In many cases, the uncertainty simply reflects limits to our knowledge. We can learn more about the risk, and reduce the scope of the uncertainty underlying the risk.

His first step in risk intelligence is to separate the learnable risks from the random ones in decision-making. For business, that unleashes competitive advantage if you can learn more about certain risks and gain an edge over your competitors because of that knowledge. In government, it would seem to serve as a risk management guide, helping you to decide what new initiatives to bring on and where pitfalls may lie. Beyond that, he urges you to score your personal and organizational risk intelligence, in terms of how good you are at learning about risks; explains how to conduct a risk intelligence audit; and shows how to systematically raise your risk intelligence.

Emotional intelligence. Executive intelligence. Social intelligence. Appreciative intelligence. Risk intelligence. That’s a long, daunting list, and no doubt it will be added to in coming months, as authors open our eyes to other aspects of a leader’s intelligence. But in each case, it does allow us to reflect and learn, foundational elements for a leader’s success.