Is intelligence in executives like height for professional basketball players?
It might be…but not the way you think it is.
David Epstein, a performance expert, analyzed the relationship between height and scoring in the NBA (U.S. National Basketball Association). His findings are nuanced.
If you look at the general U.S. population, there's a clear correlation between height and increased odds of being a top NBA scorer. However, this trend does not hold up when you look only at NBA players.1
In fact, height doesn't predict scoring ability at all on NBA teams.2 This is because basketball success relies on a variety of factors beyond height.3 Guards, who tend to be shorter than centers or forwards, are often the highest scorers due to their agility, ball-handling, wingspan and shooting skills, demonstrating that while height can be an asset, it's not the sole determinant of a player's scoring capacity.
“Academic intelligence”4 and executive leadership seem to have a similar relationship. Senior executives have a higher general intelligence than the average population.
In fact, there’s likely a threshold level of academic intelligence for senior executives just like there is for height in the NBA. If a leader doesn’t exceed a certain baseline of academic intelligence, it is much more likely they will plateau or underperform.5
At the same time, when you only look at the senior executive population, there is just a modest correlation between general intelligence and performance, since other factors can either hinder or amplify the impact of a leader’s high intelligence.6
Leadership Principle: Pedigree is insufficient as a proxy for leadership potential. You need a more expansive, data-oriented model.
So how is this useful when thinking through the relationship between pedigree and executive potential?
Given that a certain level of academic intelligence is required to succeed in the C-Suite, organizations tend to rely on academic and company pedigree as a proxy for potential. Despite being a common practice, this is like NBA teams only looking at prospects from Top 25 U.S. college basketball teams. They would have missed 4 of the last 8 Most Valuable Player award winners.7
On a practical level, there are two glaring problems with relying on pedigree as a proxy for executive potential.
First, pedigree can be misleading as a measure of academic intelligence. Consider that at one company, two individuals scored the same high score on a validated cognitive reasoning test. The first had all the trappings of pedigree - Ivy League grad, a medical degree from a top institution and an elite management consulting firm on his resume. The second went to an unranked regional public university for her nursing degree and started her career as an ER nurse in a rural hospital.
Despite these differences in pedigree, they had the same high level of cognitive reasoning ability. This example illustrates that overly relying on pedigree as a proxy for academic intelligence increases the likelihood of missing out on high potential talent that is already in your organization.
Second, even when pedigree serves as a solid proxy for academic intelligence, it is much less reliable as an indicator of executive or upside potential. It’s like using height alone to predict whether someone will be a leading scorer on an NBA team.
In fact, my esteemed colleague Jim Intagliata developed a model that outlines four categories of factors that matter when thinking about executive potential8:
Cognitive intelligence (Analytical, Creativity, Pragmatism)9
Drive (Drive to achieve, Resilience, Drive for Broader Impact)
Emotional Insight (Self-Awareness and Regulation, Awareness of Others’ Emotion(s), Influencing)10
Demonstrated Learning Agility (Breadth and Pace)
Considering this constellation of factors is critical when evaluating potential. The aggregate picture gives insight into how likely and quickly an individual can succeed in new situations and close developmental gaps.
Although changing how your organization recognizes potential might not happen overnight, especially in a large organization, as a leader, you can start applying this mindset to your key hiring decisions and the development of your team members.
Take Action: Practical and Proven Steps
Embrace the idea that cognitive abilities, and potential more broadly, are nuanced and multi-faceted. This means you need to be cautious in over-relying on pedigree as shorthand for cognitive abilities. It’s a modestly helpful proxy for academic intelligence, yet it can cause you to miss high potential leaders without pedigree. It also does not capture other cognitive factors like creativity, pragmatism and wisdom.11 And it certainly is insufficient when thinking about other elements of potential like drive, emotional insight and demonstrated agility.
Be clear on what you need to measure when evaluating potential. The key to being rigorous about potential is to have a multi-factor model that measures different elements of potential versus relying on things like pedigree, network or how effectively people present. This is particularly important from a talent development lens, because once people are in your organization, it is just plain lazy to rely on pedigree as a proxy for potential. The model for potential outlined above is universal and yet it’s important to calibrate it to your industry and the ultimate “destination” for which you are measuring potential (e.g., C-suite potential, VP potential, etc.)
Use rigorous and holistic methods to evaluate potential more broadly. Consider using a “rubric” that allows you to evaluate what “great” looks like on each element of potential. As you evaluate individuals or groups of individuals, ensure you have an objective way to gather data and specific examples that enable you to rate them against that rubric. Validated surveys, structured interviews and even psychometric tools can help you be more data-driven in evaluating each of these potential categories.
Reflect: Some Questions to Consider
How do you need to evolve your approach to evaluating cognitive capability in those you hire and lead?
How effective and rigorous is your / your organization’s approach to evaluating potential?
In what upcoming people “decisions” can you apply a more rigorous lens of potential?
If this week’s Friday Reflection was practical or enjoyable (or maybe even both!), please share it with your colleagues and friends.
Epstein has two fun and insightful books - The Sports Gene (where this research comes from) and Range (about how generalists can excel even in a world of specialists).
Fans of basketball will say, “No duh, Sean.” But stay with me here.
And these are just the individual attributes. The team surrounding any player also has a huge impact on their scoring outcomes. Think of the players that took a “smaller” role to be a key part on a championship team (e.g., Chris Bosh for 2000s Miami Heat, Dennis Johnson for the 1980s Celtics)
Intelligence is a highly nuanced and complex area of psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science. For a high-level summary on the science, this is a helpful yet dense podcast by Scott Barry Kaufman. He posits that Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices test is the most effective existing tool to measure academic intelligence or fluid reasoning (though nothing is perfect).
In fact, in one study, CEOs with insufficient levels of intelligence were 9.8x more likely to underperform. This intuitively makes sense and when you break down different components of academic intelligence - processing speed, working memory, analytical reasoning (quantitative and qualitative) - you can see why a certain level of these would be required for decision-making as a CEO.
One interesting study shows that self-awareness (a component of emotional insight) brings out the positive aspects of other characteristics in executives including high IQ. Alternatively, high IQ leaders with low self-awareness were some of the lowest performers. In other words, the degree to which you embrace the Delphic maxim “Know thyself” is indicative of your ability to unlock other positive attributes.
Steph Curry went to Davidson; James Harden went to Arizona State; and Giannis Antekoumpo (Greece) and Nikola Jokic (Serbia) only played basketball outside the U.S.
These factors I outline here are grounded in ghSMART’s potential model developed by Jim Intagliata in partnership with many of my colleagues: Cognitive Quotient, Drive Quotient, Emotional Quotient and Demonstrated Learning Agility. The more detailed model contains 24 factors - 6 factors per category. The analytical factor is the one the most closely tracks with academic intelligence. You can read a high-level summary of the potential model here.
The various types of cognitive intelligence do not necessarily correlate with academic intelligence / fluid reasoning, which reinforces that they are indeed different forms of cognitive intelligence. Robert Sternberg’s theories on analytical intelligence, creative intelligence and practical intelligence (“street smarts”) help to flesh out the differences. The one element that I’ve started thinking about more in addition to the core of ghSMART’s model on cognitive intelligence is Wisdom. More to come on this in a future reflection.
It can be helpful to spell out the sub-factors of emotional insight clearly, because there is a lot of pop psychology out there about “emotional intelligence,” even bogus claims that it is more important than cognitive intelligence. A better way to put it is that a high degree of these factors (self-awareness, self-regulation, awareness of others emotion, influencing) can distinguish leaders with at least the appropriate baseline of cognitive intelligence. And this baseline of intelligence is also going to vary based on the industry.
Furthermore, let’s just say not every Harvard student I encountered was the sharpest tool in the shed. After working my ass off in the classroom and on the tennis courts for all four years of high school, I sought to make my entry into a college a bit less stressful. Instead of taking Math 21 - an advanced math course - I opted to take a course entitled “The Magic of Numbers.” While the concepts came easy to most of the students in the class, there were more than a handful who seemed to really struggle in what was supposed to be a relatively easy course.