By Dr Aaron Mujajati
WHY ARE LEADERS OFTEN LESS INTELLIGENT AND LESS SKILLED?
At the start of your career, promotions often come from being the best at the job, mastering technical skills, solving problems quickly, and showing high intelligence. Your value is measured by what you can personally produce.
After a certain level your intelligence and skills are not enough get you promoted. Director and CEO positions are more about people skills and your capacity to live with the consequences of your decisions. That is why in most cases leaders are not the most intelligent or most skilled.
Generally speaking highly intelligent people do not rise to the top because they struggle to connect with others on an emotional level; they overcomplicate decisions instead of acting decisively; and they have low tolerance for the compromises that leadership requires.
If you want to rise to higher levels like CEO or Director understand that your intelligence and skills are a very small part of what is needed to get you promoted. As you move up the ladder jobs become less about doing the work yourself and more about getting results through other people. This requires:
1. People skills like empathy, persuasion, conflict resolution, communication and motivating teams.
2. Political awareness. You need to learn the skills required for navigating power structures and building alliances.
3. Decision making under uncertainty. You need skills on making tough decisions with incomplete information and living with the consequences.
Now you see why you are smarter than your boss and why you will never get his job until you learn the skills that get people to the top. You have heard.
Ba Dr. Mujajati, what is intelligence? Being good academically is just one form of intelligence. For you to rise to the top of an organisation you need social intelligence or more broadly, emotional intelligence. Social intelligence is the ability to understand others and act WISELY in human relationships.
That is why you find that often times, people with less academic accomplishment preside over those with high academic qualifications. Mr. Adolf Hitler, the fuhrer of Germany literally had rocket scientists reporting to him during the second world war. Regardless of what people say about Adlof Hitler, one thing you cannot take away from him is that he had high social intelligence despite not having gone to college. That is why he was able to take on the whole of Europe and whip them to some extent. Mr. Donald Trump also falls in this mould. He has got the MAGA base fawning at his feet and he can do no wrong.
So Dr. Mujajati, intelligence is not just about academic capability. It is more broadly defined.
JMC, let us not even go very far to Germany and USA, even here at home, those with a Cadre Mentality often get to the top. They have perfectly honed and perfected their Social Skills. One of Murphy’s Law is “The Debris always come to the surface and float on water”