The Challenge Of Leading Truly Clever People

A new book suggests how to make the most of those you need the most in the new knowledge economy.

The knowledge economy is not like the industrial one that preceded it. It used to be that organizations were distinguished above all by their systems and procedures. Now it is their best people who make all the difference. Clever: Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People (Harvard Business Press, 208pp., $26) by Rob Goffee, a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School, and Gareth Jones, a fellow at LBS's Centre for Management Development, is all about the especially smart people who are the motive power of the new economy, and the challenge every organization faces in managing and leading them.

That challenge has become a familiar one. All leaders deal with keeping the best of their employees engaged. But this book turns the challenge upside down. It is much more about making your organization fit its people than about the other way around. The authors have conducted extensive research at international businesses in a wide range of industries. They have identified what they conclude are common traits of the smartest, most valuable people, whom they call "clevers," and they describe the dynamics of the smartest teams, to come up with ideas to help you lead those people effectively.

Leading clevers is not like leading everyone else. Most people in an organization look up to their leaders; clevers focus more on the value they themselves bring to the equation. Therefore leading them begins with understanding that your relationship with them is a kind of interdependence between equals. You must create an organization of choice for them, not just make small adaptations to the existing one.

One of the great insights of the book is that you can't exactly lead clevers hands on, but you can be a guiding force in their lives. However, you must do so humbly, because they almost always know their specific domains better than you do. In the new knowledge economy, if you've got the best people working for you, you can't know more than them. So your job isn't to be smarter than them but rather to make sure they appreciate what you offer them as a leader.

In other words, as a leader today you are really a facilitator who provides his or her people with sociability, infrastructure, credibility, resources and reward. Your job is to unleash your clever people's potential by getting them the resources that can help them and thus help the organization. It's also to remove any obstacles that stand in the way of their doing what they do best. Sometimes that means knocking down barriers. Sometimes it means keeping the red tape at bay.

As we move more deeply into the knowledge era, we all need more of the kind of wisdom this book offers about what it takes to lead the new kind of best and brightest.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

"The Leading Edge" periodically reviews books, examining new volumes that take unusual approaches to helping us learn about leadership.

Sangeeth Varghese, 08-03-2010