A Manual For The Low-EQ CEO

As a leader, you might not think that you’re intimidating to people. Believe me, to many out there, you are. You might be intimidating to the people you hire, or to the ones who hired you. If you’re young, you may be intimidating to older people and vice versa. You can intimidate people because of your gender, your skin color, your accent, your clo

So to put it another way, chasing high-IQ hires with few other considerations is not a good way to find talent. The general danger is that smart people—and maybe you are one of them—overrate the importance of smarts. Perhaps that is not a huge surprise.

Daniel Goleman and other writers have contrasted academic intelligence or IQ with emotional intelligence: “abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and delay gratification; to regulate one’s moods and to keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathize and to hope.”5 Emotional intelligence is more crucial for happiness than in

Given this stress, CEOs often make one of the following two mistakes: 1. They take things too personally. 2. They do not take things personally enough.