2014-06-02 11:54:29
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.