How to improve your judgment at work       

Frank, a brilliant software entrepreneur, had a critical decision to make, one that hinged on his ability to assess others. Over the past several years, his firm had grown its core business to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The firm was poised for even more impressive growth thanks to forthcoming product launches in new markets. But this rapid growth confronted Frank with a quandary: although he had poured so much of his focus into developing and managing the company’s core product, he now needed to devote himself to overseeing the company’s broader business portfolio. Another leader would have to step in to operate the core business, becoming president of the division and managing a team of hundreds while reporting to Frank.                         



After an extensive search, Frank wound up with three strong candidates for the job. One was a brilliant strategist currently working at a major Silicon Valley tech company. Frank knew him and had been his mentor for years. Another was a talented young executive who had worked at the company for a year and had already shown himself to be highly ambitious, loyal, and a big thinker. The third was another industry veteran who had distinguished himself in previous positions as an extremely hard worker and an exceptional decision maker.                                                       



Frank had a lot of practice sizing people up over the course of building the company—it was a regular part of doing business. But never had the stakes been quite so high. If his core business faltered, he would have to drop everything else he was working on and reassume oversight. The company’s other growth prospects would suffer, translating into tens of millions of dollars in lost revenues.



Our ability to judge people —including ourselves—looms large throughout our lives. It determines how adept we are at choosing others to partner with as bosses, employees, spouses, and friends. It also determines how well we manage relationships in our lives and how well we handle conflict when it arises. It even determines how effectively we steer our own path in life—our ability to pick a direction for ourselves and take meaningful steps along that path.                                    



But what constitutes good judgment ? Until a few decades ago, most people equated decision making prowess with intelligence, assuming that people who make the right calls and judge others shrewdly are, above all, smart. That is, they are able to analyze data, understand complexity, and determine the right course of action almost intrinsically. They are also wise, possessing a perspective that is informed by their past experiences (a subject covered in my previous book, The Intangibles of Leadership ). Today, people tend to point to something else: the ability to read, understand, and respond to emotions—what is popularly known as emotional intelligence , or EQ—claiming that it is what sets the successful apart. Some individuals just seem to “get” others’ emotions and be in touch with their own. They’re more empathetic, more aware of their own feelings, more sensitive toward others, and easier to get along with. As a result, the thinking goes, they tend to make better decisions than those who are weak in these areas, and they tend to communicate their decisions in ways that inspire and engage others around them.1                                  



Consultants, journalists, and business leaders often present emotional intelligence as somehow more critical to success in business and in life than conventional intelligence. In 2022, incoming New York City mayor Eric Adams proclaimed that emotional intelligence would be the “No. 1 criteria” he would use to pick top people for his administration, a trait more important, in his view, than raw intelligence or academic pedigree. “Don’t tell me about your Ivy League degrees,” he said. “I don’t want to hear about your academic intelligence. I want to know about your emotional intelligence.”                          



But is emotional intelligence really the superpower we all need to make better decisions, manage relationships better, negotiate better, and generally reach our life and career goals? The answer is no . Emotional intelligence as popularly conceived is, to be blunt, bullshit. The popular definition of EQ is a mishmash of research-based EQ, aspects of personality, and common components of positive social behavior (for instance, being a nice person, showing empathy, and so on). EQ is appealing because it should mean that people who have more sensitive dispositions could be better leaders. We intuitively resonate with the idea that old, stodgy directive management styles don’t work, and we presume that we need a new, more emotional kind of leadership. We have to be nicer, gentler, and more sensitive now. Nice people apparently don’t finish last, don’t ya know—it turns out they’re more likely to finish first.                         



But are they really? Unfortunately, little, if any, evidence supports the idea that EQ actually predicts leadership success separate and apart from personality and general intelligence. The truth of the matter is that EQ has little actual effect on long-term success. New York City is a case in point. Despite Eric Adams’s move to hire people based on their EQ, the city hasn’t yet seen a renaissance in public management. On the contrary, residents have dealt with a rise in crime , worsening challenges with affordable housing , an immigration crisis, and a host of other socioeconomic issues. Of course, these are all highly complex matters, involving state and federal policy, and Adams himself has demonstrated strong leadership impact at times. The point is that EQ is not some sort of leadership panacea and should not be the basis of a hiring strategy.                                           



Another, more profound approach to judgment does have science behind it: the ability to understand and assess human personality, what I call perceptivity. EQ is about cueing into emotional states, which are largely fleeting. As research has shown, the chemical signature of emotions triggered by external stimuli lasts only about ninety seconds, although our own thought processes can prolong this response.5 By contrast, our core temperaments—how creative, trustworthy, industrious, or sociable we are—remain constant, evolving at a slow pace, with changes only becoming apparent over a period of decades. I once read a journalist who likened personality traits to “tectonic plates shifting rather than an earthquake.”6 It’s true: personality is stable. It doesn’t change much, and in many ways it defines exactly who we are and how we differ from others. Personality is a deeply researched construct, one of the hallmarks of the science of psychology. We know a lot about personality, and it’s as real as it gets. Perceptivity is about cueing into these core, stable traits and extrapolating how they affect people’s ability to do something that needs to get done.                       



EQ can help us to recognize, say, anger in a manager or in a customer service representative, and adjust our style in the moment to navigate for that emotion. However, we’re dealing with a moment in time, a transactional awareness of and a reaction to what we might assume is a stand-alone event. How much more powerful might it be to determine if someone is an angry person —that is, anger as a trait—and adjust our general approach to dealing with this person accordingly? Put another way, EQ helps us modestly understand how a person is experiencing a given situation, while perceptivity helps us robustly understand who a person is . If we can understand people and how they tick, and if we can learn to discern deeper personality traits by analyzing behavior, we enjoy a decisive edge when making decisions in business and in life. We can anticipate how people are likely to behave, and shape our decision-making accordingly. Perceptivity, not EQ, is truly the essence of good judgment.







Excerpted with permission from GOOD JUDGMENT: Making Better Business Decisions with the Science of Human Personality (HarperCollins; 6/11) by Dr. Richard Davis .