The best leader is the most intelligent?
This is what the first students of organizations believed, such as Max Weber, who believed that the leader must be as intelligent as he is capable of repressing his emotions in order to make – in an exclusively rational way – the most appropriate decisions.
Why is the best leader today no longer the most unavailable to emotions?
Because of the experience that shows today that the best leader combines intelligence measured by IQ with emotional intelligence, which we measure with other tests such as the MSCEIT.
And do those who choose leaders really take these emotional tests seriously?
They do them, because we have shown that the best predictor of a leader’s success is their emotional intelligence.
How do your tests measure it?
From different angles: if you are asked the most used one, you will see that it consists of proposing emotionally defining situations so that you can choose what response to give.
For example.
You are on a diet and they proudly offer you a delicious chocolate cake that they have just made: do you eat it to look good? You say you’re on a diet and apologize? Do you make an excuse and leave? Do you eat it or not?
Can I imagine the answer that best suits me to get elected and lie?
It’s just that they will judge you by the expressions on your face. Today we also use videos and recordings in which the testee judges the emotions of the protagonists and thus we measure their accuracy in recognizing them.
For example.
A boss yells at a subordinate on video and you have to recognize his emotion and whether that emotion is constructive or not. And if, faced with the behavior of the employee who tries to deceive everyone, you would yell at him like that too…
What do you advise me to answer?
The truth in an interview always saves you a lifetime of lies. But no one knows better than oneself and we have traced the success of these emotional self-tests and verified their enormous predictive capacity for the success of a leader.
A tip to improve leaders… now!
That’s where you’re going well. It’s not just what you say when you plan what you should say, but how you say it when you say it: tone, gesture, attitude…
We take note.
No matter how much you plan a message to your loved ones, if it is not the right one – and to be good it has to be sincere – it will fail, even if it sounds convincing when you prepare it.
How to achieve the exact tone?
Send the message to your loved ones and ask them: how do I sound? Am I telling the truth?
What should I achieve?
That they give their best to the group – performing as a team and being recognized for it is gratifying for every human being – and provide them with support and self-confidence without giving them polite excuses to slack off.
As?
Is not easy. Very few achieve it and that is why corporations ask us for tests to predict their performance as leaders.
Who is your favorite leader?
President Eisenhower was demanding and at the same time empathetic: this is how he managed to get the best of the best America while dealing with egos like Churchill or De Gaulle or Patton himself.
¿Steve Jobs?
It is cited as oppressive leadership, but also great. The personal computer was actually invented by his first partner, Wozniak, but he knew how to appropriate that talent and that of so many other technological creators that he knew how to discover and universalize their achievements.
¿Bill Gates?
He is undoubtedly a genius, but…
Also somewhat autistic?
…He was criticized for his lack of empathy.
Like Elon Musk. Aren’t there many geniuses who are very unempathetic?
There is a popular theory that relates the genes that give us the capacity for abstraction and structuring with the lack of empathy. And my intuition is that perhaps as there are more and more late parents, we encourage them.
To change the world you have to be a little crazy and only they change it?
But the success of the greats is above all a team success. I am not a supporter of the cult of personality. The leader is also his circumstances and his generation and time.
Without Silicon Valley, there is no Jobs worth it?
Without a country and a system open to innovation, there is no genius.
Without emotional intelligence is there genius?
Another great leader and philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie, founder of an innovative industrial empire, acknowledged that “I have no idea how the machines that engineers design for us work, but I do know how something even more complicated works in their hearts and that is why they work with me.” ”.
