Sources: Fort Worth Star Telegram; Palm Beach Post Sports, 3/3/2011
The National Football League sets an interesting example for human resources with its annual Scouting Combine that just happened in February. It’s the NFL’s way of triangulating data, because players that may not have stellar college seasons behind them might still have what it takes to play professional football.
The Combine assesses candidates from a different perspective. Top college players are invited to Indianapolis for a weeklong assessment of all the job qualifications you might expect: size, strength and speed. The NFL also conducts cognitive testing during the Combine.
This year’s Combine had the sports press scratching its head over the question of whether or not a player can be too smart when candidate Tim McElroy nearly “aced” the Wonderlic assessment. The Alabama quarterback scored 48 out of a possible 50 points.
The Wonderlic was developed by E.F. Wonderlic in the 1930’s and served a similar role during World War II. NFL teams have used it for many years to help identify smart players. We periodically use cognitive assessments in our work with clients. The Wonderlic is primarily for entry-level positions. For management positions, we most often use the Hogan Business Reasoning Inventory. The Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Inventory is ideal at the executive level to evaluate critical thinking skills. It’s also one of the assessments used for screening into the “high IQ” MENSA society.
Aptitude and intelligence testing has a long history. Alfred Binet developed one of the first systematic assessments in France in the late 1800’s, and it was used to distinguish between “educable” school-age children, and those who would not benefit from a public school education. In World War I psychologists used intelligence tests to identify potential leaders, using a written form for those who could read and a symbolic version for those who could not.
All of the assessments of this type reflect a secret widely known in industrial psychology: Smart people do better. Like any rule of thumb, though, it doesn’t tell the whole story. The truth is that being smart helps to a point, but being very, very smart may not be so good.
As with the NFL, corporate HR is wise to balance its assessments to get a complete “picture” of any candidate.
So let’s go back to our very smart quarterback. With the NFL average Wonderlic score at 24 and McElroy at 48, what might be worrying people?
For starters, being smarter than the coaches can be challenging to team hierarchy. Then there is the fact that any extreme ability can be distancing from others who see the person as very different. Great insight can come across as arrogance if it isn’t tempered by an appropriate sense of position.
Sometimes very smart people can’t make a decision; because they love considering the many possible ways a problem can be studied. And it’s a cliché, but true, that some very smart people get separated from “common sense” by considerations the rest of us would never contemplate. Most of us probably encountered a professor along the way who had two feet firmly in the air.
My father was a great supporter of education, the more the better. But he also once told me, during my trek towards a Ph.D., to make sure that too much education didn’t make me stupid. While educational achievement and being smart don’t necessarily go together, I understood his point. I met quite a few very smart people who did very stupid things as I navigated graduate school and then when I entered the world of work.
So like any other trait, motive, or capability, when taken to an extreme, being smart can hurt you. But most of us don’t have to worry about that, do we?
