Being the smartest person in the room may feel like an advantage, but it can increase a leader’s workload, weaken team capability and erode trust, writes Chris Power
I’ve worked with some very smart leaders over the last 26 years. They know it and the team knows it. They’re smart and they’re fast. They pre-empt the challenges and answer the questions before others have finished asking, solving problems out loud, in real time. Maybe this sounds like you?
It’s easy to become enamoured of the intellect and imagine it promotes a positive, can-do energy and a sense of security for the team especially in these uncertain times. Like many gifts, however, there’s a shadow side.
Being the smartest person in the room often says a lot about the room. What it usually means is that the room hasn’t been built to be smart without you. You have either failed to develop critical thinking in the team or created an environment where people don’t need to use it because you make the decisions. And here is the first hidden cost.
Research from McKinsey found that organisations that make decisions at the right level, rather than concentrating them at the top, are 6.8 times more likely to be high-performing. They also generate 2.5 times the growth and twice the profit of their peers. The smartest person in the room might feel like an asset. The data suggests they might also be a drain. And the costs add up.
Your workload increases
When you’re answering, solving, and making sure you’re in every meeting alongside your team, it can feel like leadership. You may even convince yourself you’re providing support during uncertain times. But what you’re really doing is simply doing.
There’s no time for strategic thinking, people development, customer and high-level sector engagement while you remain integral to the daily operations.
While you’re getting that dopamine hit from being right or smart or fast, you’re also ensuring your workload stays high and the time spent on strategic thinking is limited. Your overall effectiveness in the role is compromised.
Others stop building muscle
When you continually jump in, others take a step back. Rather than having the answers, the role of a senior leader is to build the conditions where good answers can come from anywhere. It’s hard to build capability in a room where the smartest person always speaks first.
Every time you jump in first, you miss the opportunity to build muscle in the team.
People stop reaching for the harder thinking because they’ve learned someone else will do it faster and better. I’ve watched senior team members become passive in ways that surprise even themselves in this situation. The energy is redirected away from contributing and toward watching, waiting and deferring.
Over time, the team’s collective intelligence doesn’t grow to match the complexity in front of them. It calcifies around whatever you bring that day.
Trust erodes
Trust isn’t built by being right or clever. It’s built by creating enough safety that people will bring you their unfinished thinking, their rough drafts and the thing they’re not sure about.
Google’s Project Aristotle found that creating the conditions in which people felt safe enough to speak was the most critical factor distinguishing their highest-performing teams.
That finding holds up in every executive team I’ve worked with too. You can have the best-laid plans and the most beautifully crafted strategy deck, but if your team can’t explore options, test left-field ideas, challenge self-limiting beliefs, or name the elephant in the room, you have to ask how many opportunities are being missed and how much profit is being left on the table.
What you can do
This isn’t an argument for leaders to dumb themselves down or sit on their hands. It’s about understanding your role and the impact you’re having. It’s about using your smarts to generate the conditions for better answers to surface. Instead of being first to speak, be the last.
Ask the question that forces the room to do its own thinking before you offer yours.
And a note: just as you will feel some discomfort in sitting back, hold your ground on letting people sit in the discomfort of not knowing. This is how you build capability and confidence to speak up in the team.
The leaders who navigate this well are the ones who learn to ask, in any given moment, what is actually required of me here? They explore what the team needs, not what their own personal preference is. Sometimes it’s expertise. More often, especially now in this time of change and uncertainty, it’s restraint.
Chris Power is a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator who works with senior leaders and executive teams navigating critical inflection points. With over 26 years’ experience, she helps leaders cut through noise, rethink how they lead and align their teams to deliver now and into the future.
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