IQ Test for Executives

Executives and senior leaders can take this IQ test in about 12 minutes: 25 abstract reasoning puzzles, private results, no sign-up to start.

What's your IQ?

Take the IQ test

25 questions · about 12 minutes

What would you score? Try question 1.

Which option completes the grid? One tap, no sign-up.

The test at a glance

Questions: 25 visual puzzles
Question types: 5 sets, each easy to hard
Time: 12-minute timer
Scoring: Same for every age, not age-adjusted
Cost: No sign-up to start. When you finish, you choose a report to see your result.

Scores are not age-normed, and this is not a clinical or diagnostic test.

Leaders rarely get a clean read on their own reasoning. Everyone around them has an interest in the answer.

A short, private puzzle test is one of the few places where the feedback is purely objective.

Can a leader be too smart?

Possibly. In a 2017 study, John Antonakis, Robert House and Dean Keith Simonton measured the intelligence of 379 business leaders and compared it with ratings from people who worked with them. Ratings rose with intelligence up to a point, then fell for leaders far above the average of their group. The sweet spot was roughly 1.2 standard deviations above the group mean, about 18 IQ points.

The researchers' explanation: very high-IQ leaders may communicate in ways their teams find harder to follow.

How this test works for executives

Private: nothing goes to your company, board or HR.
Twelve minutes, so it fits between meetings.
It tests fluid reasoning only, not judgement, experience or people skills, which do most of the work in senior roles.

What scores mean for executives

Large studies of CEOs, such as work using Swedish military conscription tests, find they score above average on cognitive ability but usually not at the extreme top. Those studies found non-cognitive traits, such as emotional stability and social skills, mattered alongside ability.

A million conscripts and the CEO question

The best-known study of CEO ability, by Renee Adams, Matti Keloharju and Samuli Knupfer, used the military conscription tests that almost all Swedish men took at around 18. Linking about a million men's results to their later careers, they found CEOs were above average on both cognitive ability and non-cognitive traits assessed at conscription, such as social maturity and emotional stability.

CEOs were rarely extraordinary on either measure alone. What stood out was the combination.