Stop thinking you’ll get by on your high I.Q.
My son’s I.Q. is in the top .05% of all preschoolers, but he attended preschool in a special education classroom. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism typified by a distinctly high I.Q. and a notable lack of emotional intelligence. Asperger’s is thought to be genetic, and it is surging among kids in places like Silicon Valley, that attract math and tech geniuses who often have sub-par social skills.
We know one boy with Asperger’s who taught himself to read books when he was two years old. Scientists surmise that learning to read books so fast consumes the part of his brain that should be learning to read social cues.
My son’s special education classroom was full of kids like that one — who used to pass through the education system labeled eccentric geniuses, only to graduate having never learned social skills and consequently falter in adulthood.
Today, educators take a child’s lack of social skills seriously. Parents should also. For educators, any nonverbal learning disability (like not being able to tell if someone cares about what you are talking about) is treated as significantly as a verbal learning disability (like not being able to speak.) Yet I am stunned by how many parents brush aside recommendations from educators to get help for their children by saying to themselves, “My child is so smart.”
Smart is not an endgame. Even in a toddler.
To understand why, look to the workplace. After where you go to school, social skills are the most important factor in whether you succeed or fail. I link to this research all the time, but frankly, if you need research to understand that the people who are best at office politics succeed at the office, then you are missing basic social cues already.
But here’s more evidence: Nine out of ten business schools consider communication and interpersonal skills “highly underrated as a differentiating factor for students,” according to CareerJournal. And Jeff Puzas at PRTM echos a cacophony of workplace voices when he says, “Most of what I do every day as a management consultant has to do with interpersonal skills, not my I.Q.”
And when you think about someone finding his way to success in the real world, consider the Wall St. Journal’s list of the traits that recruiters look for in business school candidates:
Communication and interpersonal skills
Original and visionary thinking
Leadership potential
Ability to work well within a team
Analytical and problem-solving skills
Notice that most of these skills are independent of intelligence. Smart is even less of an endgame for adults than children-and the standard for ability to work well with others is only getting higher, not lower: Generation Y is more team-oriented than prior generations.
So, it’s time for us to stop making excuses for poor social skills and start taking the problem as seriously as educators do. It’s painful for both children and adults who cannot navigate social settings. Kids sit on the sidelines on the playground; adults can’t maintain close relationships. It’s a limited life and it’s limited in the area where people have an inherent need to thrive.
I sense that people are going to argue with me here, but please consider that all the positive psychology research points to the fact that work does not make people happy. Relationships do. But we see the history of people with Asperger’s – Einstein, Mozart, John Forbes Nash – they did amazing work but could not maintain stable, intimate relationships.
Parents: Stop pretending that your child’s I.Q. matters more than their social skills. Get treatment for your child as soon as a professional recommends it. Respect that the risk of not being able to transition to the work world is significant, and so is the risk of waiting to see if your child will fail despite being brilliant.
Human beings learn social skills best at a very young age, when their brain is still forming. So celebrate that the government provides free training for children lacking social skills by using it. Start studying the playground. Respect what often seems insignificant to parents with small children-diagnoses of speech delay or disorder, and diagnoses of sensory integration, for example. Those issues threaten future development of social skills.
As an adult, one of the hardest parts of having low emotional intelligence is that you don’t realize it. People who are missing the cues have no idea they are missing them. So the most unable often have the least understanding of where they fall in the spectrum.
I’m going to tell you something harsh: If your career is stuck, it’s probably because of poor social skills. People who don’t know what they want to do with themselves but have good social skills don’t feel stuck, they feel unsure. People who are lacking social skills feel like they have nowhere to go.
Lost people feel possibilities. Stuck people do not feel possibilities. Ask yourself which you are. And if you feel suck, stop looking outside yourself to solve the problem. You need to change how you interact with people.
Another idea for how to figure out where you fall in the social skills spectrum is to take a self-diagnostic test. Here is one at Wired magazine about Aperger’s, and here is one about emotional intelligence. Or give a test to the people you work with – a 360-degree review will tell you in no uncertain terms if you are being held back because people don’t like you.
Hold it. Did you just say, “If people don’t like me maybe it’s their fault!” Forget it. People with good social skills can get along with just about everyone.
So help your kids to form intimate relationships with peers, and help yourself, too. In fact, as an adult you can learn how to compensate for lack of social skills by watching how schools are teaching the kids to do it.
Pay attention. Because when it comes to our job – no matter what our job is – it’s the relationships that make us happy, not the work. That’s why I.Q. doesn’t matter.
Yes, social skills are critical for children (much more important than reading), but after a point the whole “social skills are the most important thing in the workplace” sounds like introvert-bashing.
The fact that sociopaths, who can fake sympathy and still screw everyone else in their climb to the top, end up as CEOs tells me there’s something seriously wrong in how workplaces in America are structured.
I have a 20 year old with high functioning autism who is still finding his way. He was in art school after high school, but the school relocated and he’s not ready to live on his own, so we have to find him something else. I had thought learning architectural stained glass in a certified program (along with the ceramics, pewter and other 3d art he likes) with a renowned artist as his mentor made a WHOLE lot more sense than sending him to university where he could have God-knows-who as a roommate and have to navigate a treacherous social landscape.
We’re still working to find him the right work situation. He’s been let go from TWO part time jobs with the employer REFUSING to explain why.
Voc rehab was useless – wanting him to work in some crowded, loud pizza place clearing tables. He’s NOT stupid! It’s just that it might not work out because of the possibility of it irritating his sensory issues. I pulled him out of social skills classes at school because he was smarter than the other children in it and it was not until high school that his social differences really became a liability. But, artists can be quirky and introverted so who cares.
Had we not been involuntarily REQUIRED to change plans, he would have been JUST FINE.
@Amy Peterson
Dear Ms Peterson,
I realize this reply is posted a few months after your post, and I hope your son is doing well. My take is that it would be good for him if you were to encourage him to go to a regular college and maybe take on a job like the one at the pizza place. Life isn’t always easy: he’s going to have to deal with new roommates and navigate unfamiliar social situations sometime. Better sooner than later; and it’s probably going to be a lot of fun. Regarding a career choice as an artist, college will broaden his skillset and horizons. If he wants to change his job in the future or can’t get a job as an artist in a bad economy, better to have many different skills to rely on. Also it may teach him standard art techniques that he wouldn’t learn if he immediately went into a niche.
That makes sense. No wonder my whole life’s spent in a ditch.
First off, I’d like to say that I enjoy reading your blogs. I am an ENFJ makeup artist and my husband is an INTP senior software engineer. For the longest time I’ve always been insecure about not being smart. I grew up poor, dropped out of high school (actually forced to drop out), but I got my GED, went to a community college and eventually went to Indiana University where I met my husband. My husband has a high IQ, he was accepted into Mensa, but does not like dealing with people. He would prefer to play video games over social interaction and tends to get social anxiety. While in college we both worked as computer consultants (he told me the answers to the technical test) but he eventually got fired and I was promoted do to my strong interpersonal skills. Right now I am in school part-time and raising our 11 month old son, but the goal is for me to be the bread winner! I now realize that my strong social skills are just as important as my husbands high IQ.
I struggled with my grades in school. I went through with peers my age. I socialized very well and I am not successful. I have had problems in my work place. I don’t have add or autism. I have a child with 138 over all iq, 144 alone in vocab. He is two years advanced in grades. He gets along great with peers 2 years older but could never get along with his teachers. His teachers always discriminated him because of his age. They did not like if he corrected them or showed high self-esteem in his capabilities. I am frustrated and annoyed with educators. My son is now doing the at home public education for free. Thank God for that!! I don’t have to deal with teachers! My son is now thriving. He gets socialization through extra curricular activities and no longer deals with negativity from teachers. He plays piano and is part of a music guild. He realistically socializes as he would have to do in the real world with people of different ages and capabilities. A classroom setting where they try to contain you and need you to fit in to a cookie cutter mold is not realistic.
Thank you for this article! I am going to share it with my friends. Aspergers is also common where we live due to the high concentration of engineers (of which I am one, albeit not an Aspie). I wish that more people here understood that EQ is just as important as IQ.
“The super smart are generally number crunchers and fact-mavens. But a computer can do that today. And any problem that needs solving in a room with the door closed does not need to be solved for high U.S. salaries – the job can be offshored. ” – Penelope
This comment greatly overestimates what computers can do and shows a rather shallow sense of what having a high IQ means. High IQ people are not just better with numbers and memorization. They are better at seeing how things relate including personal relationships. That is what math is at the core – relating. Computers are fantastic at crunching numbers and solving problems that they have programmed to handle but they are pretty bad when there is a new problem that needs to be solved or even identified. They are downright awful at understanding what we thought was a problem isn’t a problem at all, but instead an opportunity. Computers are downright lacking at realizing what is it their human masters want in the first place. Things have improved for sure in those regards, but I don’t see any data modelers losing their jobs…
The off-shoring comment is simply silly. Would you rather have a bunch of bright people who you can communicate with directly in your own language that they probably know better than you and who have also directly experienced your own culture – or have to negotiate with a bunch of bright folks who may speak your language, but not at the proficiency level of a high IQ native, through conference calls and requirements documents and who have also been immersed in a culture that is basically alien to your own? Your time is up…
… on social adjustment …
The fact is, and recent studies show, that most high IQ people are far better socially adjusted than those with lower IQs. Contrary to public opinion high IQ people commit suicide far less often and are in general much more sane than those with average and low IQs. The main reason many high IQ people do not use their skills to be the richest usually winds up being nothing more than personal choice. Opportunity does help however if you are smart enough you can force opportunity or even more easily – just place yourself in its path.
Something to consider…
With an IQ of 115 a person can do ‘almost’ any established job and although those jobs are important the truly important ‘jobs’ haven’t even been established yet and are being defined right now and mainly by those with higher IQs. There was a poster above who mentioned his c student friend in school – who should have realized what he was doing. I know plenty of super smart people who could ‘do the math’ but don’t care to because they see better and much more fun opportunities elsewhere.
Have a good life everyone,
CJ
I believe this article is right on the money about the state of affairs in many contexts. However, by and large, I don’t think this is a good thing. We can do better as a society. When social skills are rewarded over intelligence, it often means that people get into positions of power when there are better candidates for those roles. There are few settings where social skills really need to take precedence over intelligence and ability. Even in leadership roles, the ability to accurately assess and analyze situations is more important than sheer charisma. Ask yourself this: if you were a monarch, would you want to surround yourself with advisors who always made you feel cheerful or by people who always told you the truth? You are King Lear: do you choose Regan/Goneril or Cordelia? Do we wish to instill as a virtue the congratulation of the emperor’s “new clothes” or encourage the uncouth sincerity that tells it like it is? The comparison is apt, because usually the high-IQ solution is not the path of least resistance: precisely what we don’t want to hear (e.g., we’re not perfect; we must improve). In a technical situation, intelligence is even more important, because the intelligence/expertise required to push the envelope to the next level is typically substantial and possessed by relatively few. In fact, we might do well to sacrifice our affinity for charismatic leaders to allow high-IQ people more time at the helm. That would get us closer faster to long-term goals like world peace, emancipation from fossil fuels, and space colonization. That said, people who rely primarily on social skills are very valuable. One of their important contributions, I believe, is to nurture a team environment when individuals want to go in their own directions. I do not wish to draw a false dichotomy: both intelligence and sociability are important. But I think that sociability has been placed at a premium for too long (since the dawn of civilization) and we should strive more towards allowing intelligence to take charge.