The influence and impact of a leader is fast accelerating into a new stratosphere of success. No longer will an individual rise to the top simply because he or she is a brilliant technician with a few good Success Skills at bay. Instead success will be recognized at the top because he or she demonstrates Hyper Intelligent Leadership. This is the Future of Leadership that will shape our future of work.
Why should you care? You should care because the future of work has already started to disrupt everything about how you live and work – and if you haven’t noticed the changes yet, then you’re already behind.
What is HyperQ?
In today’s world, IQ and EQ alone aren’t enough. HyperQ is the wave of the future, and at its pinnacle HyperQ Leadership is about Visionary Intelligence (VQ) multiplied by Emotional and Social Intelligence (ESQ).
HyperQ = VQ x ESQ
After more than a decade of working with leaders at Fortune 500 and Silicon Valley companies, my consistent observation was that those who succeeded as influential and impactful leaders held high levels of grit, self-awareness and confidence. The ripple effect of these three traits had a consistent extrapolation into additional Success Skills and impact driven business results.
In interviews with 125 industry leaders on the topic of HyperQ, the common thinking was that we need a way to deliberately develop Success Skills that allow individuals to succeed in a new world of intelligence.
Advancements in technology are predictable
The legitimate fear of machines replacing human job functions for increases in efficiencies and reductions in errors is real. That said we should not ignore the fact that past technological advancements often demanded greater levels of intelligence from humans. So what has changed? This time the intelligence demanded will require a significant uplift than ever before.
In some sectors and for certain jobs, artificial intelligence will still replace technicians, but not HyperQ leaders. Why? HyperQ leaders will bring more than technical expertise to the table. They will be required to build and manage the implications machines have on people and the environment. They will also be able to use predictive data that a machine spits out to create emotional, social and historic context that will influence direction and outcomes significantly. Additionally, they will provide the most important thing that machines will not be able to provide – human connection in a deliberate and meaningful way. So when HyperQ starts to exist in organizations it has the potential to extend into multiplied innovation and evolution for organizations, communities, and economies.
The state of education and HyperQ
If we are to challenge leadership, we have to start with the precursor to the workplace, which is education. For far too long, we have placed the sole value of education on traditional degree programs producing large numbers of technicians. The real question is – can we continue in the same direction and expect different results? The answer is no.
By elevating our young leaders beyond one domain of expertise (technical), we can start to build leaders who are multi-dimensional and demonstrate HyperQ. So how do we get there?
Education systems need to re-think what they teach and how they teach it. It is not an either/or game, it is an ‘and’ game. Our young leaders need to have opportunities to develop their technical skills funneled by degree programs, and they also need to develop Visionary, Emotional and Social Intelligence, best learned through non-traditional techniques such as executive coaching. Why executive coaching? Because executive coaching is a proven model, which can quickly shift mental models, create self-awareness, and change behaviors. Why else would CEOs and executives of multi-billion dollar corporations work with executive coaches?
So what now?
First, we need to create mass awareness of the need for HyperQ if we are to co-exist and excel in a world of advanced technology.
Second, we need to focus on developing higher education leaders to understand the tenets of HyperQ and how they themselves can embody it, which will then trickle into how education systems start to re-design overall learning experiences that incorporate HyperQ.
Third, we must create systems for HyperQ to scale in higher education. It cannot be a skillset or mindset that is only available to the privileged few; it needs to be accessible to all.
When these three things show progress, then we know we are actively working towards the Future of Leadership - towards a world of HyperQ.
Nishika de Rosairo is based in San Francisco and is the CEO and Founder of Experiential Insight where she has taken the executive coaching model off its pedestal and is offering it to university students, university alumni, and corporations through an affordable, scalable, virtual, and global model. Experiential Insight is best described as Uber meets TED – a curated digital platform of executive coaches around the globe that deliver live, high quality, thought provoking content for the Future of Leadership.