Spiritual intelligence is a relatively new metric for measuring executive capacity

Emotional intelligence changed leadership. When Goleman, Emotional Intelligence‘ in 1995, it fundamentally reoriented how organizations thought about what makes a leader effective. The claim — backed by substantial research — was that EQ predicted leadership success better than IQ in most contexts. This was revolutionary. And it was right. But it was not the whole story.

The Limits of Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence describes a person’s capacity to recognize, understand, and manage emotions — their own and others’. It encompasses self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, social skill, and motivation. These are real capacities and they matter enormously in leadership.

But EQ, even at its highest levels, does not answer the question that drives the most consequential leadership failures: for what? An emotionally intelligent leader can manage relationships brilliantly in service of goals that are narrow, self-serving, or ultimately hollow. A highly empathic CEO can build a company culture that feels warm and human while pursuing a purpose that benefits no one beyond the shareholders. Emotional intelligence is a capability. It does not determine the direction in which that capability points.

This is where what researchers are beginning to call Spiritual Intelligence — or SQ — becomes relevant. Not as a replacement for EQ, but as a deeper level of intelligence that provides the orientation EQ lacks.

Zohar & Marshall, SQ, in their 2000 book ‘SQ: Connecting with Our Spiritual Intelligence,’ define spiritual intelligence as the intelligence with which we address and solve problems of meaning and value. It is the capacity to ask not just ‘how do I achieve this?’ but ‘is this worth achieving?’ Not just ‘how do I manage this relationship?’ but ‘what am I actually in relationship for?’

The Neuroscience Behind SQ

Zohar and Marshall draw on neurological research to argue that spiritual intelligence is not a metaphor but a genuine cognitive capacity, associated with what neurologist Michael Persinger and others have called ‘neural oscillations’ in the brain’s temporal lobes — the ’40 Hz oscillations’ that Zohar suggests function as a unifying neural correlate for integrative, meaning-making cognition.

More broadly, the neuroscience of meaning-making is a growing field. Research by Steger, Frazier, Oishi, and Kaler, published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology in 2006, demonstrated that the experience of meaning — the sense that one’s actions are connected to something significant — is a distinct psychological variable that predicts wellbeing, resilience, and sustained motivation independent of mood, stress, or circumstance.

Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, developed in part from his experiences in Nazi concentration camps, made a similar clinical argument decades earlier: that the primary human motivation is not pleasure or power but meaning, and that the inability to find meaning is the root of the deepest human suffering.

In leadership terms: leaders who operate without a developed SQ — who are technically skilled and emotionally competent but have not genuinely wrestled with questions of purpose and meaning — are managing well toward an uncertain destination. They produce performance. They struggle to produce the kind of commitment and engagement that only comes when people feel connected to something genuinely worth doing.

What Kabbalah Adds to the SQ Conversation

The Kabbalistic tradition is, among other things, an extraordinarily sophisticated system for developing what we are now calling spiritual intelligence. Its central preoccupation — across centuries and across diverse thinkers — is the question of how a human being aligns their interior life with the deepest sources of meaning and truth available to them.

The Zohar describes the human soul as having multiple layers: nefesh (the instinctual, survival-oriented self), ruach (the emotional-moral self), neshamah (the intellectual-spiritual self), and higher levels beyond these — chayah and yechidah — which connect the individual soul to its deepest source (Zohar, Bereishit, 206a). This is not merely a religious taxonomy. It is a map of the levels at which a human being can operate.

Most leadership development operates at the level of nefesh and ruach — managing instincts, developing emotional capacity. SQ operates at the level of neshamah: the level at which the person is capable of genuine wisdom, genuine self-transcendence, and genuine commitment to something beyond personal survival or social belonging.

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov taught that the highest form of intelligence is the one that recognizes its own limits — that can sit inside a question without forcing a premature answer (Likutey Moharan, Torah 64). This capacity — what psychologists call negative capability, after Keats’s famous formulation — is a hallmark of SQ. It is the ability to function with genuine uncertainty rather than manufacturing false certainty.

SQ in Practice: What Spiritual Intelligence Looks Like in the Workplace

Organizations with leaders who have developed SQ look and feel different. They are not necessarily more religious or more explicitly ‘spiritual.’ They are more honest. They are more willing to surface uncomfortable truths. They are more coherent — the stated values and the daily behavior are more aligned.

Research by Raj Sisodia, Jag Sheth, and David Wolfe in ‘Firms of Endearment’ found that companies driven by conscious purpose — what they called ‘firms of endearment’ — outperformed S&P 500 companies by a factor of 9:1 over a ten-year period. These companies were characterized not by spiritual rhetoric but by a genuine orienting commitment to something beyond shareholder return: to employees, communities, customers, and the broader world. That orienting commitment is the organizational expression of SQ.

The Ben Ish Chai wrote that a person’s speech is the mirror of their inner world — that what someone says, and how they say it, reveals what they actually believe (Ben Ish Chai, Shana Rishona, Parashat Bereishit, section on speech). In organizational terms: the culture of a company is the collective speech of its leadership. And you cannot manufacture an authentic culture with strategies that are not grounded in genuine inner conviction.

SQ is what makes the difference between a mission statement and a mission. It is what makes the difference between values that are posted on the wall and values that are present in the room.

Developing SQ: The Practices That Build It

Unlike IQ, which is relatively fixed, and EQ, which can be trained through coaching and feedback, SQ is developed through a different order of practice. It requires what might be called contemplative engagement — not just learning about meaning but genuinely wrestling with it.

This can take many forms. Reflective journaling — not productivity journaling but genuine inquiry into what you believe and why. Philosophical or wisdom reading that challenges your existing frameworks rather than confirming them. Mentorship or coaching relationships that are explicitly about interior development rather than performance improvement. And some form of silence — regular periods of genuine stillness that allow the signal beneath the noise to become audible.

The Chida wrote that wisdom is a gift that arrives in proportion to the preparation of the vessel — and that preparation is measured in the degree to which a person has genuinely emptied themselves of the noise and assumption that fills the average mind (Kikar LaAden, Maareches Nun, 5).

For executives, this is demanding. Their entire professional environment is designed to fill silence with action. Developing SQ requires deliberately creating conditions that their professional culture actively discourages. That counter-cultural discipline is itself a marker of developing SQ.

Conclusion

EQ was a revolution in how we understand leadership effectiveness. SQ is the next frontier — and arguably the more urgent one, at a time when leaders face decisions of unprecedented scale and consequence and when the organizations they lead are populated by people who are asking, with increasing insistence, whether the work they are doing means anything.

A leader with high IQ and high EQ can execute brilliantly. A leader who also has developed SQ can answer — honestly, from the inside — whether the execution is pointed at something worth pointing at.

That capacity is not a luxury. It is what organizations, and the world, most need from the people at the top.