In the vehicle of success, high IQ gives you high octane but doesn't make you a good driver

From Very intelligent people make less effective leaders, according to their peers and subordinates by Alex Fradera. It's psychology, the sample size is small and a couple of the metrics are suspect, so legit cave.

There finding is consistent with something I have noticed over my career. Leaders in large complex organizations do tend to be intellectually a good cut above the average. However, the organization always has plenty of people who are smarter, but those people rarely reach the top - close but not the summit.

There are plenty of hypotheses why that might be the case. Leadership is about a whole range of skills, not all of which are associated with IQ - public speaking, personal motivation, persistence, etc. High IQ without those other skills might be the reason for the phenomenon. High IQ might simply have a different trade-off equation. Sure, top leadership brings high compensation but it is enormously constraining. Your time is never your own, you have to work other people's agendas, etc. High IQ people also tend to be intensely curious and in a time constrained role, that becomes a detriment. High IQ people also tend to operate at a level of abstraction which makes it more difficult for others to comprehend; they don't communicate well. And on. Lots of scenarios to explain the phenomenon.

Fradera reports.

John Antonakis at the University of Lausanne and colleagues recruited 379 mid-level leaders (27 per cent women, average age 38) at private companies in 30 mainly European countries, working in areas ranging from banking and telecoms to hospitality and retail. Each participant completed a personality questionnaire and a well-validated measure of intelligence, the Wonderlic Personnel Test. Their average IQ was 111 (the average for the general population is 100), with a fairly even spread of scores.

The researchers also had access to third-party ratings of the participants’ leadership performance from eight people: either peers or subordinates of the leader, who rated them on the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, which explores the degree to which the leader demonstrates various leadership styles, some known to be useful (e.g. a “transformational style” which inspires, or an “instrumental” style that removes stumbling blocks), others detrimental (e.g. a passive, hands-off style).

Overall, women tended to employ better leadership styles, and to a lesser extent so did older leaders, but the bulk of the variance was accounted for by personality and intelligence. Like so much previous work, intelligence showed a positive linear relationship with leadership effectiveness, but this association flattened out and then reversed at an IQ of about 120. For leaders with higher intelligence than this, their scores in transformational and instrumental leadership were lower, on average, than less smart leaders; and beyond an IQ of 128, the association with less effective leadership was clear and statistically significant.

Of note is that Antonakis’ team also predicted that very high intelligence would correlate not only with less use of effective leadership methods, but also greater use of harmful leadership styles (such as laissez-faire leadership). The data didn’t bear this out. Very smart leaders weren’t falling prey to bad approaches, they were struggling to use the good ones.

Two interesting elements in there. First is that break point of 120 - higher IQ is positively associated with improved leadership but only up to a point. Second is that finding that the inflection point is not due to bad leadership practices but to ineffective practice of appropriate practices.

These observations about what are the elements behind exceptional achievement are behind the model I have described elsewhere. I have posited, always contingent to external circumstances, that exceptional performance is a function of the appropriate mix of Knowledge, Experience, Skills, Values, Behaviors, Motivation, Capabilities, and Personality.