The more we expect people to recognize, appreciate or be dazzled by our leadership brilliance, the less they listen or follow, even if we do have better ideas.
When others stop listening and following, we isolate ourselves not only from their interest in our ideas, but their brilliance in making ideas better. Then we’re left less informed and with less influence—the opposite of what we thought we were getting by showcasing. That’s why showcasing is the ultimate irony; whether we dominate a conversation, grandstand to show how much we know, name-drop to dazzle, choose words or phrases to impress, pontificate to promote ourselves, or pay superficial attention to what others say, the more we showcase, the less brilliance surfaces—and the less brilliant we’re likely to be. There’s nothing wrong with being brilliant or capitalizing on our talents. After all, what’s the value of having brilliance if we don’t use it? But we cross the line from sharing to showcasing when we use it to feed our ego.
In the pursuit of brilliance, most of us want smart people around, but only under one condition; if they share their brilliance in a way we can take. When people move from sharing to showcasing, the smartest people are ignored—even when they’re needed most. For example, if you were under pressure to get big-time results and were putting together your project team, would you choose someone you like who’s not quite genius, but easy to get along with, or someone who’s brilliant but hard to tolerate? The politically correct answer is, “Hire the showcaser. We may not like him, but brilliance is hard to come by.” It’s hard to argue with that.
Except, when push comes to shove and we have to make that choice, we actually do the opposite. In a study of over 10,000 real-time working relationships, Tiziana Casciaro of Harvard Business School and Miguel Sousa Lobo of Duke University discovered that while people say they would choose someone who’s “brilliant” but arrogant, they actually chose those they liked. One of the reasons we’re excluded when we showcase is the trace of intellectual arrogance people feel from us. That separation “…gives the segregator a false sense of superiority” said Martin Luther King, “and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.”
As our perceived brilliance separates us from others, it leads to a one-way mindset—everyone else is a student, and we’re the teacher. Our impulse as “the teacher” is to have the first and last word, with as much stage time in between as possible. The “students” aren’t excluded from participation, but they’re not actively invited either. If you watch conversations carefully, showcasers can rarely tell the difference between obligatory tolerance by others, and genuine interest. Then dialogue becomes monologue, and blank stares are interpreted as engaged, attentive eyes. All the while, the teacher is clueless. “Intellectual arrogance,” wrote Peter Drucker, “often causes disabling ignorance.” Or career-threatening ignorance.
When we begin our career, start work with a new employer, or take a new leadership role in our current company, there’s a leadership training learning curve. Because of that individual leadership curve, we’re not likely to be as relevant or valuable today as we will be in, say, six weeks or six months. No one expects us to be. But they do expect us to get up the curve as quickly as possible. The higher our position on the curve, the more indispensable we are to our company and the greater the demand for our services in the labor market. But there’s a requirement for staying on top or moving toward the peak of that curve—our willingness and desire to learn.
If we lose that desire, we’re susceptible to a delusion of adequacy. When ego is out of balance, there is an inverse relationship between amassing knowledge and learning; the more we know, the more confident we become. When our confidence in what we know increases to the point we think there’s little left to learn, we’re less open. That’s the point of danger; learning closes down. As it closes, new ideas have a harder time getting in, flawed ideas have a tough time escaping, and we slide down the other side of the curve. The faster our mind closes, the faster our descent.
The slide down the curve is evidenced in our vocabulary: “If you’d been here as long as I have . . .” or “I know my experience speaks for itself, but…” Down goes our relevance. Once the boxed is locked, we slide to the bottom on the other side of the curve—as relevant at the end of our careers as we were when we began.
To avoid the slippery slope of irrelevance, think of the knowledge we have in the same way scientists look at isotopes. One of the properties that govern isotopes is a phenomenon called “half-life”. The half-life of an isotope is the amount of time it takes for half of its atoms to decay. But as an isotope goes through natural decay, it doesn’t just become less potent—it actually loses its original identity. For example, oxygen17 decays first into nitrogen17 and then fluorine17.
In much the same way, our leadership ability and knowledge has a half-life or can actually lose its original relevance. “There’s good evidence that once physicians leave their residency,” says Larry Gruppen, Ph.D and cognitive psychologist at the University of Michigan Medical School, “the currency of their information starts to decline fairly steadily.” That decline isn’t reserved for the medical field.
Keeping our own box of expertise open is vital. It’s also not enough. In an organization, no one person is an island of brilliance, and no single box of knowledge is sufficient for progress. Unfortunately, the “lone genius” is the message that’s sold and people are inclined to buy. Too many articles treat “the one” who gets the credit for a success as if they’re isolated from the people who work with them. Who gets credit for inventing the assembly line? Henry Ford. Who made flight possible? The Wright Brothers. And what about the telephone? Alexander Graham Bell. Who should we thank for the happiest place on earth? Walt Disney. Who made us fashionable? Liz Claiborne. Who ran the company that could sell you a refrigerator, a light bulb, and a jet engine all at the same time? Jack Welch. Who has women driving pink cars? Mary Kay. Who does Windows? Bill Gates. The list could go on and on—and not surprisingly, people know the answers. But when one person gets the credit, it skews our perspective about what really happened behind the scenes.
The question is how alone, really, were the lone geniuses?
Research shows the most likely source of brilliance doesn’t spring from flying solo. Take one example from the list above: Henry Ford invented the assembly line…right? As it turns out, it wasn’t originally Ford’s idea. In 1799 Eli Whitney was the first to take a different approach to manufacturing. He used the ideas of division of labor and engineering tolerance to create assemblies from parts. Whitney’s ideas just happened to be borrowed from political economist Adam Smith. Then in 1901, Ransom Eli Olds patented the first assembly line which he put to work in his Olds Motor Vehicle Company factory.
Olds was the first company in America to mass-produce automobiles. But it was Henry Ford’s engineers who perfected the assembly line concept. How? It was an evolution by trial and error; not any single event, idea or person. More importantly, it was a collective effort consisting primarily of Peter E. Martin, the factory superintendent, Charles E. Sorensen, Martin’s assistant, C. Harold Wills, a draftsman and toolmaker, and Clarence W. Avery, and Charles Lewis, first line supervisors. Among other improvements, they added a conveyer belt and built factories around the assembly line. With these improvements, in 1916 Ford cranked out over 700,000 Model T’s, which was twice the output of all competitors combined. The increased efficiency allowed Ford to cut prices in half, selling a car for $360 in 1916. By 1924 the price was down to $290. The old convention “two heads are better than one” is true.
Not only are two heads better than one, research shows many heads are better than two—but collaboration isn’t practiced nearly as well as it’s preached. The culprit may be misperceptions about how to get the most out of intelligence. The answers to the following questions may reveal the misconceptions. Consider the following scenario: you’re faced with a big problem. If you get it wrong, you’re fired. If you get it right you’re promoted. With X years of experience (you fill in the number) you probably could solve it on your own. But would you? Or—given the stakes are so high—would you opt for collective intelligence just to be on the safe side? How would you include others—would you rather have a randomly selected team, or would you prefer to hand pick the players personally? If you’re in human resources, do you gather mostly HR types? Or if you’re in sales, do you pull in the best salespeople that are hitting the biggest numbers? Which approach is the safest bet for your career?
Scott Page, a political scientist and economist at the University of Michigan, answered some of those questions—and the answers aren’t conventional wisdom. Page created an experiment where groups of people were challenged to solve the same complex problem. When people were isolated and worked on their own, as expected some were good at solving the problem, while others weren’t as good. But the next step in his research didn’t produce an outcome as easy to predict. Page teamed the good problem solvers with the not-so-good. What effect would the “weakest link” have on their collective ability to solve the problem? Would the good be dragged down by the not-so-good? Together, the mixed teams almost always did better than those who were good problem-solvers on their own. But wait—what if you created a team made up of only those who were the best problem-solvers on their own. Wouldn’t that produce the best results? Actually, no.
Even when the “smartest” individual problem-solvers were put on the same team, they weren’t as good as the teams made up of both the good and not-so-good problem-solvers. In other words, the people we already have in our companies are exactly who we need.
“Together they possess the knowledge we need to solve the toughest problems we face, or to innovate and seize new opportunities,” writes Page. “The idea that our individual differences – the differences in how we think, in the cognitive tools we possess, in our perspectives - was far outside the mainstream in a society that prizes individual talent and achievement. It shouldn’t be. Our collective ability depends as much on our collective differences as it does on our individual IQ scores. [Does] this logic imply that we should abandon the meritocracy? That we should remove those ‘my child is an honor student at Neil Armstrong Junior High’ bumper stickers from our mini vans and randomly allocate spots in our top colleges? Of course not. Obviously, ability matters. But, here’s the catch, so does diversity. [We’re] limited in our abilities. Our heads contain only so many neurons and axons. Collectively, we face no such constraint.”
When showcasing interferes, collective IQ drops and diversity disappears.
There are, of course, exceptions to the rule that collective brilliance trumps individual genius. But those exceptions are rare. If a theatrical play was written by committee, you wouldn’t expect it to reach Broadway, let alone win a Tony. Poetry is most likely beautiful when penned as a solo effort. It seems unlikely a painting created by a team of artists would eventually find itself on display at the Louvre.
But you probably DO want computer viruses tackled by a team (i.e., letting the best idea win) rather than a “lone genius.” You DO want medical science teams solving the dilemmas of disease. You DO want government by the people and of the people. But in business, even when the one outdoes everyone, what happens when the one leaves or runs out of relevance? The culture is empty of any collective history, habits, or ability to innovate. Increasing the odds of brilliance is an interdependent task.
In the arithmetic of true brilliance, any number (you) multiplied by only one (your solo effort) is only equal to the original number (you, by yourself). The likelihood of success for that equation requires once-in-a-lifetime brilliance—which isn’t a sound strategy. While great ideas will continue to spring from the minds of the brilliant few, the vast majority of smart ideas and excellent execution are waiting for the rest of us. Being smart will, as long as the group is diverse, contribute to brilliance. Laboring to be the smartest person in a room of smart people won’t.
The fact is there are dozens of people behind the faces of lone geniuses responsible for the organization’s success. In an issue of Fortune that explored the performance of Apple, Steve Job’s picture is on the cover, but the article picture inside shows six people sitting next to him—not behind him or in front of him. The article refers to them as the “brain trust”—a collective brilliance. And for every person sitting next to Jobs, there’s another picture worth taking that would include the people who sit next to them. Working with people—not above, below, or around them—is where true genius is consistently found.
