Intelligence is the most important quality that a leader needs to have. To what extent do you agree?

Intelligence is the most important quality that a leader needs to have.

To what extent do you agree?

It is suggested that intelligence is by far the most important attribute of a leader. While I admit that intelligence has a role to play in leadership, I believe that there is one (other) quality that matters most.

While running a business or a country, leaders come up against difficulties (I would recommend a topic sentence here that presents the topic of the paragraph, which should be you acknowledging the role of intelligence or explaining the other role you mentioned in the intro). The minute they arise, leaders need to take an immediate action to overcome them. To be able to find the root of the problems and resolve them, leaders should be intelligent. Without this quality, they may not look at the situation from different perspectives and consider it thoroughly, thereby failing to find a feasible solution. Take the presidents of countries as an example, when problems such as public riots or economic instability occur in their countries, they do everything in their power to solve them. In these situations, it is their intelligence that comes into play and helps them reach a better decision and tackle the problems. (in this paragraph you take the reader on a journey and come to the ‘topic sentence’ content in the last sentence… this style is appropriate for university writing, but my recommendation is to start with the position of the paragraph and then justify it - video 1 is the approach I would use… I’m just recommending this based on feedback from examiners rather than what is technically ‘good writing’)

Having said that (this), it is my firm conviction that there is (a) more important quality that a leader should possess (yes… I like this topic sentence). It is diligence (you could incorporate this sentence into the topic sentence… it’s awkward to have such a tiny sentence here unnecessarily). Simply put, a leader needs to be hard working. Not only does this facet of personality help a leader to be a good role model, but it also enables him (we don’t default to male gender in modern writing… go with plural pronouns if gender is unclear) to manage incredible feats (‘manage a feat’ isn’t a natural collocation… also, I’m not exactly sure what concept it is trying to convey). More often than not, employees follow the example of their bosses. If they see their bosses working hard and trying their best to make a success of their company, they also want to contribute by putting all of their energy and effort into work (nice sentence). Also, attaining something difficult requires one to be so diligent that he or she should never get tired of working hard until the goal is achieved. Elon Musk can be (is) a good example for this. He has manufactured an electric car and a reusable space ship (rocket), both of which were deemed to be impossible to produce, and he always attributes his success to his hard work.

To conclude, although being intelligent makes it easier for a leader to cope with problems, diligence should be regarded as easily the most necessary personality trait that a leader should have, to my mind (it sounds more forceful and natural without this).
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Overall: The good news is your grammar and vocab are excellent. It’s a real relief as we can concentrate on structure and ideas going forward. They are easily both 8 in my opinion. I do think that body 1 could have had a better CC score if you had constructed it like you did body 2. Honestly, I think this would get an 8, but there is a chance that CC could be 7 because of the body 1 issue I’m talking about. Aside from that, the only changes I would make are in the corrections above. Well done.

Score: TR 8, CC 7+, LR 8, GR 8 = 7.5 (could be higher)