what I'd like to do is share with you how emotional intelligence can help us be better betas and why it's this skillset particularly which is going to help along the way and buy emotional intelligence I simply mean how we handle ourselves manage ourselves lead ourselves and how we handle our relationships and I'll go into it in more detail interestingly I spent yesterday morning with one of the big four banks here in Australia the CEO his direct reports and his high potentials the people that they saw as next generation for top leadership there and they wanted
to learn about emotional intelligence and leadership the reason was that not only are each of those executives trying to improve themselves along these lines but they see that by doing it together they can bring the whole organization along and by doing that they can grow their business it's actually a strategic decision there are two kinds of strategy you know one is exploitation and one is exploration exploitation was embodied by the co-ceos of blackberry anybody here have a blackberry exactly my point so the could they had a wonderful product for a long time they were the
first in the smartphone area and in that space they captured the market until something else started to happen smartphones were developed by Apple by Samsung and they didn't see it coming they just kept developing their keyboard in fact in 2007 there was a small squib in what was then the major news magazine in America Time magazine it said you know there's a new word in the English language the word is Bissell it stands for puzzled and pissed off and it's how you feel when someone takes out their blackberry and starts talking to some one else
things have changed the norms for attention to changed now we don't feel fizzled but also you can tell it was ten years ago because they said blackberry instead of iPhone so the other strategic approach is exploration that's what Steve Jobs was brilliant at it's looking at the next new thing innovating being able to be there before your competitors so emotional intelligence may seem counterintuitive but I'm gonna argue that it's what makes us better betas I first started to realize the importance of emotional intelligence years ago when I went to college I grew up in a
farm town in the Central Valley of California and actually the outskirts of Perth reminded me of where I grew up but this town was not distinguished anyway but I managed to get into the most competitive college in America because they wanted to diversify they wanted a kid who was from a public school instead of an elite prep school and from somewhere else in those days that was considered diversification so I found myself at this fancy College and met a guy who had perfect scores on every college entrance exam this guy was brilliant high IQ but
he had a problem the problem was he couldn't get up in the morning on time never got to class never finished his papers took him eight years to get his bachelor's degree so he was brilliant on the IQ side he was lacking in terms of how he managed himself some years later I went to my 20th high school reunion and I met someone there who was the most successful person in our class at that time and I had known him pretty well in high school he was someone who was really not a good student he
was so-so like an average very average student but he was a fantastic human being he was the kind of person who you enjoyed doing things with who really listened it was very gracious but you at your ease you had fun with him 20 years later he was the senior vice president of a company that then it was the hottest company going the hottest sector going was cable television then at the 40th reunion I got the rest of the story this guy had left that company started his own company became CEO sold it at the peak
of the market and did something that from the point of view of all the people who lived in my hometown was a mark of success and that was that he lived on a golf course in Florida so he had a lot of emotional intelligence not much IQ and that makes sense to me it I met recently a the CEO of Blackrock Blackrock is the world's largest investment company it manages trillions of dollars and he he was puzzled he said can you explain why it is that I hire the best and the brightest from the very
best schools or companies and I still have a bell curve for performance what's going on here and I'd like to share with you the answer I gave him it has to do with some research I did after I wrote emotional intelligence I got very interested in business and remembered that my mentor at back in graduate school had written an article in the Maine psychology journal that was my field that was very controversial at the time he said if you want to hire someone don't look at their IQ don't look at their personality tests don't really
look at their business expertise what you want to do is look in your own company at people who hold that position now or of held it in the past identify by whatever metric makes sense for that position the top 10% the stars and compare the stars with people in the same position who are only average in performance do a systematic analysis and identify the skills or abilities or competencies you see in the stars that you don't see in the average it's called competence modeling anybody familiar competence modeling most world-class companies have competence models particularly for
top-level executives and I was able to get access to one to two hundred of these which was not easy because these are proprietary studies companies don't share the data they want to know they're doing it for competitive reasons but here's what I found I a grenade at the data and I just looked at this is very back of the envelope how many of those abilities the companies themselves independently have identified as distinguishing their stars how many of those abilities are based on cognitive strengths IQ and technical skills or emotional intelligence how we handle ourselves and
our relationships and what I found was it for jobs of all kinds emotional intelligence is about twice as important and it's twice as important in distinguishing that that blue line at the bottom is what you learned in school at your technical skills it's what everyone else has those are threshold competencies what you need to get the job but they don't tell you how you'll do once you're in the job will you be a star performer would be a great team member will you become a leader the higher you go in the organization the more emotional
intelligence matters so for top-level job c-suite jobs for example 80 to 90% of the competencies the companies themselves identify as distinguishing stars here are based on emotional intelligence it makes sense because what you're doing at that point is not using your technical skills or whatever you've learned for that position in terms of cognitive abilities what you're doing mostly is managing people the art of leadership is getting work done well through other people so there was just a study done of Engineers and what distinguished the best engineers from average engineers turns out success as judged by
their peers people who know the job well and the person well correlates zero with IQ and enormous ly with emotional intelligence why would that be it's because there's a floor effect to be an engineer to be an MBA to be a professional of any kind you need an IQ about a standard deviation above the norm above a hundred need to be 115 or better the for effect is once you are in that role everyone else is as smart as you are so IQ drops away as a predictor of success emotional intelligence remains this one ability
here in the top level jobs that's based on cognitive abilities is very telling its big-picture thinking pattern recognition understanding how a change here in a complex system is going to ramify over there or how a decision made today will matter in five years or ten years this allows you to identify your strategy but once you have your strategy you can only get there through your people you have to do what you have to communicate persuade listen dialogue inspire motivate and all of those are emotional intelligence skills
