Tacit knowledge in managerial success

What accounts for managerial success? Certainly hard work plays a part, and perhaps luck as well. But what else characterizes successful managers? What do successful managers know that less successful man agers do not? What do successful managers do better than less successful managers? To answer this question, we began by asking highly successful man agers and executives what they thought accounted for their success. They showed more disagreement than agreement in answering our question, with two notable exceptions. First, our informants were in agreement that IQ and scores from other ability and achievement tests are not predictive of managerial suc cess. Most knew of colleagues who obviously had a very high level of gen eral intelligence, yet who were only moderately successful in their career pursuits. Conversely, the most successful colleagues they knew were rarely those they would rate as the most intelligent. Some of our infor mants even expressed the view that a very high IQ can be a detriment to managerial success, observing that some highly intelligent individuals lack patience with their less able peers, subordinates, and even their su periors. Further, such individuals tend to rely too heavily on their ex traordinary analytical powers, thereby neglecting important advice from others. An ability that counted more than IQ for managerial success, ac cording to our informants, was common sense or practical intelligence (see Sternberg & Wagner, 1986, for recent conceptualizations of practical intelligence).