Holistic Intelligence – Don’t Settle For Anything Less

As we enter the midpoint of the 2014 Holiday Season, the best and worst of humanity is on display.  Making people work on Thanksgiving a few weeks ago to increase already robust corporate profits is just the tip of the iceberg.  You may wonder, how can a nation that is full of “intelligent” people allow this to happen?

Intelligence can be a very subjective thing.  As we come to know about more aspects of the human mind’s effect on our personal and professional lives, we start to see that intelligence is much more than what is routinely captured in IQ scores, grades, standardized tests, or whether you graduated from a particular college.  We have realized that things like EI (or EQ) – Emotional Intelligence (or Quotient) –  is an absolute necessity to function effectively in society, make wise decisions, and succeed in interpersonal relationships.

EQ more readily captures what we’ve traditionally referred to as character, values, judgement, empathy, and heart.  When people, companies, industries, and countries proceed by maximizing just the IQ side of things (i.e.., figuring out how to do complex things) but then not making thoughtful judgements about whether they should actually put those things into practice,  is where we see systemic failure in our society.  Just rewind to the financial meltdown of 2008 to see that in full living color.

Let’s take the example of bosses.  We’ve all worked for a boss who was highly skilled in the technical aspects of his or her job, but whose weak social skills and emotional immaturity made the work environment unpleasant.  I once had a boss while working at a large multinational high tech company who was off the charts in terms of IQ.  He was brilliant in his ability to think through complex technical challenges and create effective product strategies.    In addition, he would allow all of his managers great autonomy, and as a young manager early in my career, I felt this was great.   For the most part, he was happy to have minimal contact with his staff and allow everyone to do their own thing.

But over time, I started to notice that this was less a form of enlightened management philosophy and more a case of inadequate communication skills.  If you were to have a meeting with this person, it would appear if his body was uncomfortable in its own skin. He made awkward gestures and was not able to connect with you on an emotional level and his infrequent attempts at humor would reveal a dark cynicism.  This seemed to be driven by his belief that he was much smarter than everyone around him and that he only needed to focus on achieving his professional objectives quickly so that he could take his rightful place among the highest level of executives at the company.  Ultimately, that didn’t pan out.  His boss, an equally intelligent individual but one with much better communication and relationship building skills, blocked his career path and one day he ubruptly left the company.  A couple of years later, I learned that he had subsequently gotten divorced and his children were living with their mother back in their home town.

Fortunately, mid size and large corporations have become (somewhat) better over the years of screening and evaluating their leaders on this broader view of intelligence and emotional intelligence in particular has become a strong predictive evaluator of a person’s leadership effectiveness.  In this way then, Holistic Intelligence = IQ + EQ.  You may have a high IQ, but if you have a lower EQ, that brings down your overall intelligence and effectiveness and negatively alters how you are perceived and experienced by others.  Not to mention how you experience your own life.

Alternatively, if you possess a high EQ – the proverbial warm, caring, and compassionate personality – but have a lower IQ, you may not be as effective in getting things done in your personal and professional life.  The good news is that  neurosocience is telling us that neither IQ or EQ is fixed, and you can improve both with focus and practice.  And of course, there is no better equalizer than focus, will power, and hard work.

For our purposes in this article, let’s focus more on EQ – something that over the years has gotten less attention than IQ.  But what exactly is EQ?  In 2007 , Michael Akers and Grover Porter outlined an excellent definition of Emotional Intelligence in an article titled What is Emotional Intelligence (EQ)?:

Understanding the Five Categories of Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

1. Self-Awareness. The ability to recognize an emotion as it “happens” is the key to your EQ. Developing self-awareness requires tuning in to your true feelings. If you evaluate your emotions, you can manage them. The major elements of self-awareness are:

Emotional awareness. Your ability to recognize your own emotions and their effects.
Self-confidence. Sureness about your self-worth and capabilities.

2. Self-Regulation. You often have little control over when you experience emotions. You can, however, have some say in how long an emotion will last by using a number of techniques to alleviate negative emotions such as anger, anxiety or depression. A few of these techniques include recasting a situation in a more positive light, taking a long walk and meditation or prayer. Self-regulation involves:

Self-control. Managing disruptive impulses.
Trustworthiness. Maintaining standards of honesty and integrity.
Conscientiousness. Taking responsibility for your own performance.
Adaptability. Handling change with flexibility.
Innovation. Being open to new ideas.

3. Motivation. To motivate yourself for any achievement requires clear goals and a positive attitude. Although you may have a predisposition to either a positive or a negative attitude, you can with effort and practice learn to think more positively. If you catch negative thoughts as they occur, you can reframe them in more positive terms — which will help you achieve your goals. Motivation is made up of:

Achievement drive . Your constant striving to improve or to meet a standard of excellence.
Commitment . Aligning with the goals of the group or organization.
Initiative. Readying yourself to act on opportunities.
Optimism. Pursuing goals persistently despite obstacles and setbacks.

4. Empathy. The ability to recognize how people feel is important to success in your life and career. The more skillful you are at discerning the feelings behind others’ signals the better you can control the signals you send them. An empathetic person excels at:

Service orientation. Anticipating, recognizing and meeting other’s needs.
Developing others. Sensing what others need to progress and bolstering their abilities.
Leveraging diversity. Cultivating opportunities through diverse people.
Political awareness. Reading a group’s emotional currents and power relationships.
Understanding others. Discerning the feelings behind the needs and wants of others.

5. Social skills. The development of good interpersonal skills is tantamount to success in your life and career. In today’s always-connected world, everyone has immediate access to technical knowledge. Thus, “people skills” are even more important now because you must possess a high EQ to better understand, empathize and negotiate with others in a global economy. Among the most useful skills are:

Influence. Wielding effective persuasion tactics.
Communication . Sending clear messages.
Leadership. Inspiring and guiding groups and people.
Change catalyst. Initiating or managing change.
Conflict management . Understanding, negotiating and resolving disagreements.
Building bonds. Nurturing instrumental relationships.
Collaboration and cooperation. Working with others toward shared goals.
Team capabilities . Creating group synergy in pursuing collective goals.

How well you do in your life and career is determined by both. IQ alone is not enough; EQ also matters. In fact, psychologists generally agree that among the ingredients for success, IQ counts for roughly 10% (at best 25%); the rest depends on everything else — including EQ.

The executives and financiers driving the trend to open stores on Thanksgiving, and those of us who oblige them by showing up to those stores, have failed in the Empathy department. A key component of being Emotionally Intelligent. Embedded within Emotional Intelligence is Spiritual Intelligence (SI) – the ability to see the interconnectedness between all beings and the natural world. Which points to our common bond and duty to each other and the planet.  When we start to see how all our actions and decisions impact not just ourselves but others and then take action in line with that understanding of interconnectedness, our SI increases dramatically.  Furthermore, I believe the EQ component of Holistic Intelligence becomes even more important as our society evolves over the next fifty years:

Tasks that require a high level of IQ will become more and more outsourced to robots with artificial intelligence.  Humans in turn will need to use more EQ based skills such as creativity and empathy to make sense of this new world and how to best use human talents to evolve our consciousness beyond where it is now.  (See NYT columnist David Brook’s excellent essay – Our Machine Masters to get a glimpse of the possible future scenario).  What this implies is that we should be making EQ skills a core component of the school curriculum for our children who will enter the work force in this new reality.

But this is not the only equation for intelligence out there.  Here is one additional example we should consider:

Michael Scharf on his blog highlighted a new definition of intelligence created by physicist Alex Wissner-Gross which he published in a physics journal in April 2013.  “A new Equation for Intelligence F = T ∇ Sτ – a Force that Maximises the Future Freedom of Action.  Intelligence is defined for Mr. Wissner-Gross, as a Force with the Power to Change the World.
Describing intelligence as a physical force that maximises the future freedom of action, adds a new aspect to intelligence that is often forgotten: the power to change the world.  Like many physical laws or equations the idea behind it is simple:

Intelligence is a force that maximises the future freedom of action.


It is a force to keeps options open.


Intelligence doesn’t like to be trapped.

But what is necessary to keep options open and not to be trapped? Intelligence has to to predict the future and change the world in a direction that leads to the “best possible future”. In order to predict the future, an intelligent system has to observe the world and create a model of the world. Since the future is not deterministic the prediction has to be based on some heuristics. Prediction is a kind of statistical process. In order to change the world, the intelligence has to interact with the world. Just thinking about the world, without acting, is not intelligence, because it produces no measurable force (well, sometimes it is intelligent not to act, because the physical forces drive you already in the right direction, but that is a way of optimising resources). The better it can predict the future and the better it can change the world in the desired direction, the more intelligent the system is.”

 

Folding the Wissner-Gross model into our Holistic Intelligence equation,  we now would have HI (Holistic Intelligence) = IQ + EQ + AQ.  Where AQ is your Action Quotient (as described by Wissner-Gross).  I find this a very interesting model as it points out that intelligence is innately equated to action.  There are a lot of people talking about things, but to investigate all options and then actually do something, get involved, and enact change is what is really required to make intelligence come to life.  Overall, the model takes into account the four major components of our human existence – the Mental, Emotional, Physical, and Spiritual.

Having worked on my EQ for the last few years, I’m now going to make enacting Mr. Wissner-Gross’s further definition of action-oriented intelligence in all parts of my life one my resolutions for 2015.  Please join me!

-Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

 

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