Send to KindleLeaders, How Smart Are You?
You’re never the smartest person in the room.
A bold statement? Perhaps. But one I’ve found to be a guiding light for leaders at any level and a critical concept for leaders to grasp. In any meeting or on any team there will almost always be someone who knows more about the topic, or a part of it than you do. The higher your leadership position, the more this is true. A good leader will leverage that knowledge others possess to make the organization more successful.
I’ve known this for a long time but it was driven home to me in one of my last assignments in the Air Force. I was assigned to lead a large and very complex maintenance organization. Their primary responsibility was one of the service’s largest munitions storage areas. Though I had experience with related policy at the staff level, I had very little actual operational experience in this area. To top it off, the organization had endured some significant problems in the recent past and morale wasn’t the best.
My boss expected me to be the expert. The organization expected me to know what I was talking about. More important they expected me to know what they were talking about. I read and studied extensively in preparation, but a few months of study wasn’t going to put me on a par with people who had 20 or 30 years of experience.
Fortunately, I’ve had some pretty good role models who had trained me to lead in situations like this. When I sat down with my section leaders I was honest that I would need their help and together we would make the organization successful. Had I tried to be the smartest guy in the room, I would have prevented, or at least hindered the great work those people did.
Of course, lessons sometimes need reinforcing. One afternoon, after a year or so at that job, I was sitting in my office reflecting on the past year. We were in the midst of several very significant and stressful changes but things were going fairly well. I was secretly feeling pretty proud of myself and thinking that I sure was a lot smarter than when I had arrived. My private reverie was interrupted by my secretary who, for some reason decided this was the perfect time to tell me that I should join Mensa.
For those of you who don’t know Mensa is an organization for people with very high IQ scores.
I laughed and said that I was flattered at the suggestion but my inside voice was saying, “Right, I’ve never known anyone with a Mensa level IQ.” She said that she was serious, so I asked her how one became a Mensa member. She explained the process, which I could easily see was beyond my feeble capabilities. Then, the clincher. A candidate had to be sponsored by a current member.
And she would be happy to sponsor me.
My secretary had just told me that she possessed a significantly higher level of intelligence than me! I wasn’t even the smartest guy in my own private office. That’s probably why she did such a terrific job of keeping me out of trouble.
Never get too impressed with yourself. There’s always someone who knows more than you do and you’ll be much more successful if you listen to them.
