Leadership ‘gurus’, business schools and management consultants are bombarding the business world with an alphabet soup of Qs. A quick internet search will reveal intelligence, learning, emotional, decency, teamwork, social, passion, meaning and organisational quotients (and more). 

There’s a good reason. Leading in the 2020s has seen a step change in complexity compared to decades past, which in turn demands more diverse leadership skills.

Expert partner in leadership and talent at management consultancy Bain & Company, Sara Nilsson Dehanas, highlights some of the newer complexities: the ‘always on’ workplace coupled with hybrid and remote working; previously private management practices effectively moving into the public domain (fire employees over Zoom and the video can end up on CNN); social media increasing the power of employees’ and customers’ ‘individual voices (#MeToo for example); and investors and others demanding companies be managed to benefit a range of stakeholders, not just shareholders.

We’ve teased out and elaborated on what we think are five important Qs to consider.

1. Intelligence quotient: table stakes for leaders (but no more than that)

There’s no hiding from the fact that a minimum level of ‘raw intellectual horsepower’ is needed to succeed as a business leader. But David Peck, partner and Americas executive coaching head at executive search firm and leadership consultancy Heidrick & Struggles stresses that intelligence is only one of the pieces of the leadership puzzle.

He says: “We’ve studied high-correlation leader behaviours among the top performing companies globally over many years and what we’ve concluded is that having a combination of a range of harder and softer traits and skills is key to successful leadership, a combination we’ve called ‘agility’. That includes ‘thinking dexterity’ [which they define as ‘a leader’s ability to solve complex problems, think logically, and develop effective solutions’] and foresight, curiosity, tenacity and social agility.” Those factors map quite closely to some of our Qs (curiosity to learning quotient and social agility to emotional quotient, for example).

2. Learning quotient: curiosity saved the cat

The importance of wanting to learn and instilling a learning culture is also identified by London Business School professors Herminia Ibarra and Aneeta Rattan in their article ‘From know-it-alls to learn-it-alls: how leaders can instil a growth mindset’.

They present the example of Microsoft’s re-invigorated success under CEO Satya Nadella from 2014 onwards (after a period of relative stagnation in the decade or so prior to his appointment). Nadella recognised that Microsoft had not kept up with newer technologies such as cloud computing and AI, and was not capturing the associated opportunities. The firm had a ‘play it safe’ culture, sticking to areas where it had existing expertise. He started working on instilling a ‘learning culture’, with huge success.

Jon Evans, assistant professor and lecturer in leadership development at the University of British Columbia, Sauder School of Business, also stresses the importance of curiosity in leadership and elaborates on how leaders might improve their own and others’ LQs: “Being a good leader is less about being the person with a good answer or being the smartest person in the room, and more about being the person who can come up with the right questions. This can unlock the unique pieces of information and knowledge that exist in the team. When a leader admits to not knowing something and is asking insightful questions, that leader is signalling that it’s OK not to know, that it’s OK to have to learn and adapt.”

3. Emotional intelligence/quotient: “the soft stuff is the hard stuff now” (David Peck, Heidrick & Struggles)

EQ as a concept has been around for over 20 years –  the term is presented by Salovey & Mayer in their 1990 paper, ‘Emotional intelligence'. Like IQ, many definitions exist but one of the simplest descriptions is that of Bill Boulding, dean of the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, in his 2019 Harvard Business Review article ‘For leaders, decency is just as important as intelligence’: “Possessing high EQ means a manager can understand how someone is feeling and can read a room and act on that information.”

According to Ingo Holzinger, distinguished adjunct professor at the Schulich School of Business, EQ demands on leaders are intense and ratcheting up even further: “While possessing softer skills obviously does improve leadership effectiveness, that in my opinion is not the main reason for the increasing importance of EQ. It’s more because leaders simply have to build many more relationships today and those have to be relationships of trust. As the world and the world of business becomes more complex, expecting one leader at the top to ‘have all the answers’ is simply impossible. So leaders have to integrate their decision-making with many others. They need the input and knowledge of others, and to get that, they need to build more trusted relationships.”

But the idea of EQ is also considered inadequate by some. Boulding (in the above-cited article) writes: “EQ doesn’t mean a person’s actions take into account what is best for others. Emotional awareness and empathy don’t equate to compassion and integrity. People can have EQ yet use it to manipulate people for self-interest. EQ doesn’t always mean doing the right thing."

4. Decency quotient: genuine care for othersBoulding expands on these comments by arguing that decency as a leadership capability needs to be recognised and elevated in importance: “DQ implies a person has not only empathy for employees and colleagues but also the genuine desire to care for them. DQ means wanting something positive for everyone in the workplace and ensuring everyone feels respected and valued.”

He is also clear that DQ applies beyond the workplace to society as a whole. And he singles out the obligation on the financial sector to rebuild trust with customers, pointing to the Edelman Trust Barometer 2019 which finds financial services to be the least trusted sector out of nine listed, with a score of 57% trust. It remains the least trusted sector in the Edelman Trust Barometer 2021, with a score of 52%, but looking at the longer term, the barometer shows a gain of eight percentage points since 2012, when financial services scored just 44%.

Unrealistic performance expectations can lead to employees crossing decency or ethical lines to meet targets Celia Moore, professor of organisational behaviour and director, Centre for Responsible Leadership at Imperial College Business School, says changing decency, morality, or ethical norms in the workplace can be an especially tough task: “It’s usually fairly easy for teams to have open and honest feedback meetings on ‘day-to-day’ business issues such as a product launch and to analyse what went well, what could be improved, and even admit to mistakes. But when it comes to decency, ethical or moral issues, say an accusation of mis-selling or sexual harassment, individuals are rarely prepared to admit to a failing, and organisations are often fearful of bad press or legal liability. So these problems tend to be ignored or skirted around with ‘solutions’ like ‘we’ll have a workshop’.”

She highlights the importance of senior leaders needing to put systems and processes in place so that staff can speak up on issues of decency without fear (such as having designated mentors as a first point of contact). She also stresses that speaking up and ‘standing your moral ground’ is something that needs to be practised. Discussions about decency need to be frequent events, not only occurring at a time of crisis.

Also important, she says, is to avoid unintentional facilitators of unwanted behaviour. One of the most common of these is unrealistic performance expectations – which can lead to employees crossing decency or ethical lines to meet targets. Another is the cultural norms and management role models which staff are exposed to. Celia highlights an example of this from the ‘rogue trader’ case of Kweku Adoboli at UBS. According to the Financial Services Authority’s Final Notice (2012), Adoboli was congratulated for the profit he made on a day when he was found to have breached his trading risk limit.

5. Team quotient™: tying the Qs together

Most of the experts interviewed for this article cite teamwork as an essential leadership trait and key to organisational success (although the use of the terms ‘team quotient’ or ‘teamwork quotient’ is not common – perhaps because leadership consultant Douglas Gerber has trademarked the term Team Quotient and come up with a way of scoring and assessing it).

Bain & Company runs a senior leadership programmes which Sara says recognise the need for leadership skills at a team level. “This is a different approach than was typical in the past, which focused more on improving leadership only at an individual level,” she adds.  

The programme assesses and then attempts to amplify those traits that determine how well senior leaders operate as a team: trust, commitment, inclusion, and a focus on the greater good. Bain research (covering around 1,250 organisations) has shown that executive teams scoring in the top quartile on the above traits are six times more likely than those in the bottom quartile to have a superior financial performance (measured by revenue growth, profit growth, and total return to shareholders).

Sara says: “The focus is on how the collective team can improve. We work to help them come up with solutions which they own and implement. Change happens with them, not to them.” She says examples of what teams have come up with in her previous work would be things like introducing a team charter which everyone has input on and signs up to (for example, defining exactly how they will contribute to the greater good of the organisation and society), and introducing ‘check ins’ and ‘check outs’ at the start of all team meetings which might involve a conversation on how everyone is currently feeling about team performance. She says: “This process works well. Peer support and team accountability can be highly effective.”

Developing your Qs

So where might organisations, leaders and aspiring leaders start if they want to learn about and develop their various Qs? According to business psychologist Caroline Gourlay, the key to unlocking this is about improving self-awareness.

She recommends ‘360 feedback’ as a particularly useful self-awareness tool, where a range of views are sought from peers, subordinates, bosses, possibly even clients and suppliers, about a person’s performance in relation to the various Qs. And also to make use of some of the tools and tests which are readily available to assist with self-awareness, or tools that assess the ‘dark side’ of personality, such as the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), which shows those aspects of someone’s personality, often their strengths, which they might overplay under pressure. The HDS identifies ‘derailers’ that disrupt or interfere with effective performance.

It might be a daunting task to tackle the whole range of Qs, but they are so important to leadership in the 2020s, it is certainly worth spending time to understand and develop them.

Pandemic highlights widespread ‘soft-skill’ leadership deficiencies

Management consultancy McKinsey has highlighted the emergence of a gap between management’s soft skills and those demanded of management by employees.

The September 2021 McKinsey Quarterly article ‘Great attrition’ or ‘great attraction’? The choice is yours^* highlights that 40% of employees are somewhat likely to leave their jobs within the next three to six months, and that among employees who had quit in the previous six months, 36% did so without having a new job in hand.

The underlying cause of these worrying statistics was found to be a fundamental misunderstanding by senior executives as to why employees were leaving. The top three factors employees cited as reasons for quitting were: they didn’t feel valued by their organisations (54%) or their managers (52%); or they didn’t feel a sense of belonging at work (51%).

Employers meanwhile, when asked why their people had quit, cited compensation, work–life balance, and poor physical and emotional health as reasons. These issues did matter to employees – just not as much as employers thought they did.

The article concludes: “Employees crave investment in the human aspects of work. Employees are tired, and many are grieving. They want a renewed and revised sense of purpose in their work. They want social and interpersonal connections with their colleagues and managers. They want to feel a sense of shared identity. Yes, they want pay, benefits, and perks, but more than that they want to feel valued by their organisations and managers. They want meaningful – though not necessarily in-person – interactions, not just transactions.”

^*Based on a multinational survey of nearly 6,000 employees and 250 managers ‘specialising in talent’ and was triggered by the record numbers of employees quitting their jobs during the pandemic.