“When you hire people that are smarter that you are, you prove you are smarter than they are” …

“When you hire people that are smarter than you are, you prove you are smarter than they are”

R. H. Grant

“The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.”

Theodore Roosevelt

Much has been said of the fear some managers have of hiring people who are far more intelligent than themselves… But perhaps this is a thing of the past now. Surely for a company, isn’t it more important to select the right people for the existing vacancies?

Obviously this isn’t such a simple task, and even less so for people who not only are the right ones but also intelligent. And if they are smarter than their bosses, where’s the problem? The boss only has to exert sufficient self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do the work, as Roosevelt put it. 

In Silicon Valley, a simple rule says :A people hire other A people. B people hire C people.

If A people are smart people, B people are less smart people and C people are not so smart, then we have some interesting suppositions.

In the first case, smart bosses will surround themselves with equally smart employees. They will not feel intimidated by them and they will encourage their potential and creativity to the maximum.

In the second case, the not-so-smart bosses are intimidated by their smart employees, so they will avoid hiring this sort of people. And all because of a few basic reasons, like the fear of loosing their job due to an A type subordinate, the fear of not being capable of managing their team (of A people), and needing to appear like an A type, when in fact they are nothing but a B type.

The danger lies in not-so-smart managers who provoke a chain reaction by only hiring less smart people or rather dumb people. 

The real problem we face today in the talent crisis we find ourselves in and aggravated by the global recession, is how to identify A people. And not just identify them, but also how to make our company sufficiently attractive for these people to want to form a part of it.

But it’s a foregone conclusion that the global recession will pass, and with it, part of the talent crisis; there is no question that the longer we worry about finding these A people, the harder it will be for us to get ahead.