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The problem with smart people

Sydney Finkelstein

When hiring, promoting, even just putting together your team, you should look

for the smartest people in the room, right? Not so fast.

Intelligence is one of those characteristics where there is a minimum level

needed to be in the game. Once past that, too much intelligence can be a

drawback or worse.

The Enron management team, for example, were known as the smartest guys in the

room. Consider how well that turned out. The former US energy trading company

tapped its top talent to run some of its most-profitable divisions, almost

without supervision. The managers, despite their smarts, were an arrogant,

insecure bunch who took wild chances and lost billions of dollars. The company

dissolved in 2001.

The problem with really smart people is that they often think they know more

than everyone else.

Certainly, the job for which you re hiring makes a difference. I do want

big-time intelligence for researchers, analysts, and coders, but you can lock

those folks in a room and let them do their thing because they work on their

own. If they lack emotional intelligence or interpersonal skills, any damage

they do is limited because of their independent work.

But do I really need to find the smartest managers?

The problem with smart people

The problem with really smart people is that they often think they know more

than everyone else. Maybe they do. But that doesn t help them when they re

trying to get others to buy into whatever they re selling. For example, I was

coaching one senior executive who always seemed to be one step ahead of

everyone else on her team. At least, that s what she thought. One of the

biggest challenges she faced was recognising that other managers didn t

necessarily view the world the same way. That meant she needed to invest the

time to bring them along if she wanted to get traction on her preferred

projects.

When you know the right answer, you often can t believe that everyone else

doesn t just see the same thing, and fall into line.

Unfortunately, organisations don t work that way. Especially when working with

peers when you don t have direct authority over them, the only way to get

momentum toward your preferred outcome is to sell them on the idea. Imposing

your superior solution just doesn t work.

The irony is that sometimes the most talented person can make for one of the

most ineffective managers. You can see this in sports, for example, where

retired superstars often find it difficult to coach or manage successfully

because they are now supervising lesser mortals that weren t blessed with the

same degree of innate talent.

Wayne Gretzky, the Canadian hockey legend who retired with more personal

scoring records than anyone in the history of professional hockey, was

remarkably ineffective as a head coach. The same may be said about Michael

Jordan, perhaps the greatest basketball player ever, who has never been able to

lead a successful basketball organisation whether as general manager, president

or owner.

It could be just as bad when we let the A-level crowd go to market with what

they see as the best product. I remember talking to managers at Singapore-based

Creative Technology, Inc after the iPod had just been introduced by Apple.

Creative had a technologically superior MP3 player, but customers preferred the

iPod, to the utter dismay of the Creative managers. They just couldn t

understand how customers were so irrational!

But it turns out that the best technology doesn t always win, just like the

smartest people don t always succeed.

It s not just brainpower where more may also not be better. For example, is it

good to keep reducing the time it takes for technicians to help customers

requesting assistance via call-in centres? What about the quality of the

advice, how the customer perceives the value of the advice or even whether it s

such a great idea in the first place to try to optimise on speed?

Zappos, the US-based online shoe store, actually rewards employees for spending

more time with customers who call in with questions about products they are

thinking of buying. For Zappos, customer experience on a call trumps any simple

metric that, in its view, can actually detract from profitability.

When employees are motivated to cycle through customers as fast as possible,

platitudes that the customer comes first are just that empty, cynical slogans

that mean nothing to sales staff.

And let s not forget the side effect that accompanies this culture. People who

really care about service look elsewhere for work. That leaves demotivated

employees who actually do a good job of hitting their time targets. In the end,

you get what you want, but you lose because of un-nuanced thinking that more is

better than less.

Call it brilliantly fulfilling the wrong vision.

The quest for more may well be the defining ethos of our time, but the downside

that comes with this single-minded fixation warrants greater attention. Relying

on the smartest and the most talented to lead and manage people and teams may

be one of those things that sounds a lot better in theory than in practice.