Recently, Google decided to data-mine their own employee reviews and promotions to identify what factors got people promoted to leadership roles within the company. While Google has a reputation for hiring and promoting based on technical expertise, the results surprised them.
They determined eight skills that the promoted managers possessed that others did not. Listed in rank order, they are:
- Coach your team members well.
- Lead your team without micromanaging them.
- Take an interest in team members’ success.
- Focus on results.
- Be a good listener and communicator.
- Focus on career development for your employees.
- Develop a strategy for your team.
- Possess technical skills to advise your team when needed.
Three are skills: Â #8 is a technical, #7 is strategic, and #4 is tactical execution.
Five (#1, #2, #3, #5, and #6) are people-management and emotional intelligence (EQ) type skills.
In other words, it seems that Google hires for technical IQ type talent, but promotes for EQ oriented skills.
Experience with the CEOs I work with who have technical staff suggests that this is true for many organizations. To lead a team of engineers, you don’t have to be more brilliant than everyone else. You need enough technical knowledge to hire the right people and to ask the right questions. After that, executive effectiveness depends on listening (skill #5) to your smartest engineers and developing rising stars and helping them manage teams of their own (skills 1, 2, and 3). In other words, you need to be a coaching leader. And it you want to expand and take on more projects, you need to give your rising stars a path to upward mobility – which means training them to also be coaching leaders. The more sub-projects they can manage, the more effective you become in creating a profitable, growing company
It’s one of the reasons our Vistage CEOs this year are focusing on creating performance –driven job descriptions with measurable KPIs, understanding people’s Culture Index scores and learning more about how to measure leadership skills.  What’s your experience with EQ when it comes to career advancement and corporate growth? Share them with us!