Managing Super Smart People

The smartest people I've worked with don't need to be told what to do. They need context, autonomy, and trust.

What they get instead, in most organizations, is the opposite. Brilliant people attract requests: every hard question, every escalation, every "quick look" gets routed to them, and they bounce from demand to demand like a pinball in an organizational machine. Lights flashing, points racking up everywhere, going nowhere in particular. The machine looks spectacularly busy. That is precisely the problem.

So most of the job is protection and framing. Give them problems, not solutions: hand a smart person a solution and you've taken away the interesting part, and they will know it. Defend their time, because nobody else will; the requests are individually reasonable but together leave little time for focused work. And step in when they're stuck, not to solve it for them, but to help them see it differently: a fresh perspective, or a connection to someone who has solved something similar.

The best compliment I've received as a manager: "You helped me do the best work of my career."

That's the goal.

I've written in more depth about how management practice got here in the evolution of performance management.