The best leaders don’t try to be the smartest person in the room.
Instead, they guide the room, so its collective intelligence shows up.
By making the room smarter, they raise the ceiling of what the team is capable of. Decision quality and after-decision execution both benefit when team members are invited to bring all their intellectual assets to every discussion.
Leaders make the shift to a smarter room by exploring how people think about issues rather than simply soliciting their opinions.
Where good leaders invite and reward answers, great leaders require and reward reasoning. They ask everyone to talk out loud about why they believe what they do.
Statements and questions like “Walk us through how you got there,” “What would change your mind?” “Defend that position with evidence,” “What are we presuming?” and “What are we missing?” change the conversation from viewpoint to rationale and from decision to judgment.
Of the many additional ways leaders can make the room smarter, three stand out for their immediate effect.
First, good leaders elevate the discussion by deliberately distributing airtime.
They notice who hasn’t spoken and who needs space to think. They ask to hear from team members who haven’t weighed in yet and forecast to those who need extra time that they need to register their views and reasoning when they are ready.
When voices are highly distributed, people get less defensive and internal politics lose currency.
Second, the best leaders know that the sequence of who speaks and in what order has a tremendous influence over what ideas get taken up.
They commit to never speaking first and turn to a pre-selected team member to kick off any discussion. Because the first opinion and rationale anchor the discussion going forward, they select the team member who will likely set the right tone.
They understand that highly experienced or senior voices collapse the breadth of arguments and ideas that others are willing to put forward.
Lastly, leaders elevate the collective wisdom by protecting fragile insights and the half-baked ideas that often turn into something special.
They do this by staying in exploration mode just a little bit longer than would be expected, expanding an idea or digging into the reasoning behind it to give it some oxygen.
By not letting others brush past it, novel ideas can gain a foothold. If the team doesn’t pick up and run with an insight after the leader hovers over it for a moment, then they move on.
The best leaders double the room’s intelligence by refusing to show people they are the smartest person in the room and thereby choking off candid debate.
They see team discussions as a full-contact sport where everyone must engage and bring their A-game to the table.
When they go beyond simply inviting everyone to register their views and look to the team to explore the judgment and reasoning underlying their opinions, everyone gets smarter, even the brilliant leader.
A Daily Dispatch from the Front Lines of Leadership.
