it’s ok to be the smartest person in the room
There’s an adage you’ll bump into regularly in IT: “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”
Intelligence. Image via Big Stock Photo/Orla
where “smartest person in the room” comes from
I’ve tried to trace the smartest-person saying, but its origin seems to be a bit nebulous. There’s some discussion here, and over time it’s evolved into a cautionary story about businesses that make poor decisions or atrophy by not listening to all the voices in the room — or assuming only some voices in the room are valid.
It’s important to keep in mind that this phrase can be valid. The worst kinds of IT managers and Team Leaders get hung up on not hiring people who will “outshine” them, technically. And “diva” senior technical staff have been known to do their best to relegate smart juniors to the sidelines. No matter the role of the person involved, this is a bad idea because it stifles innovation within teams and IT departments. Without a doubt, I’d counsel these sorts of IT pros to keep the phrase in mind.
But the phrase gets used like a battering ram, constantly and mistakenly, as if it’s some golden rule that must be followed without exception, or else You Are Doing It Wrong.
i’ve got ham, but i’m not a hamster
A song from The Killers’ Hot Fuss album (2004) features the seemingly deep and insightful line, “I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier”. (All These Things That I’ve Done.)
Comedian Bill Bailey is well known for mocking this line, noting that while it sounds impressive, it’s actually pretty lame and nonsensical — he notes it would be like singing, “I’ve got ham, but I’m not a hamster”.
So usually, when someone blithely says “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room” without context (as if the statement in a vacuum is objectively and indisputably the sage truth), I immediately find myself singing, “I’ve got ham, but I’m not a hamster”.
why it’s ok to be the smartest person in the room
You could go for a glib logical-consequences answer here: if you’re the smartest person in the room and you leave the room, then the next smartest person in the room will become the smartest person in the room, and that person should leave the room — and this would continue until the room is empty, or just has one person left feeling pretty damn despondent about their place in the knowledge hierarchy. But it’s not the glib answer we’re looking for here. So instead, let’s consider a few facets in the problem.
being smartest can be your job
Large slabs of my career have been spent in consulting and technical specialist roles. It’s fair to say in those scenarios that part of my role has literally been to be the smartest person in the room.
In essence, as a knowledge-worker, there’ll be times when it’s highly desirable to be the smartest person in the room (physical or virtual). Support specialists, trainers, implementation specialists, solution architects, consultants — they all aim to be (or may want to aim to be) the smartest person in the room because it’s what the customer is paying for.
But this has consequences, and it’s the consequences that we sometimes forget.
being smartest doesn’t mean being the smartest at everything
Just because you’re the smartest at something doesn’t mean you’re the smartest at everything.
It’s a trap to think you should be the smartest at everything when you’re working with others. I know a lot about backup and recovery, for instance — and since backup and recovery touches just about everything in an environment, that’s meant knowing enough about operating systems, enough about databases, enough about networks, enough about storage, and so on.
If I’m in the room with customer infrastructure teams, I’d like to think there’s a good chance I’ll be the smartest in the room when it comes to backup and recovery — but I’d be a bloody idiot if I thought I’d be the smartest when it comes to operating systems, networks, the cloud, and so on. Recognising you’re not the smartest person in the room on all subjects helps to temper your experience and attitude. So the net result is: you should be prepared to listen.
just because you’re the smartest doesn’t mean you have nothing left to learn
You can break this down into two categories:
- There is no pinnacle in a field.
- You should remain curious about the things outside of your knowledge domain.
For the former: just because you’re smart at X doesn’t mean there’s nothing left about X for you to learn. Even in niche fields, there is rarely, if ever, a ceiling in knowledge — there’ll always be something else to learn about a topic, even if you do know the most on the topic in the room. But more than this — be open to the ideas of people who are still learning in your field. In the same way there’s no pinnacle in a field, you can also be guaranteed to bump into people in your career who will give you new insights into something you happen to be an expert in, even if they’re still learning. Encourage questions, let people express their ideas — this will not only help them gain confidence and understanding, but it may very well give you a new perspective, too.
For the latter: just because you’re smart at X doesn’t mean you can’t learn anything about Y.
In any knowledge-based field, the real path to atrophying is a lack of curiosity. So don’t ever let being the smartest person in the room stifle your curiosity.
use your knowledge to uplift others
Everyone starts somewhere. I was particularly lucky when I started my career to work with some senior system administrators who believed in knowledge-sharing, and that was an important experience for me. It gave me the confidence to ask questions, because I knew I’d be listened to.
“you’re in the wrong room” is as much as anything a jab at people who get smug about being the smartest person in the room. If you hold your knowledge clase and refuse to share it, you’re doing it wrong.
A lot is said about mentoring processes within knowledge-based fields. Formal mentoring can certainly bring significant benefits, but simply using your knowledge on a day-to-day basis to help lift people with what they’re doing is another form of mentoring, and it’s arguably just as important. That doesn’t mean solving problems — if the senior system administrators in the team I started in had stepped in and solved problems whenever I’d encountered them, I’d have not learned anything. In emergencies, for sure, they gave me the answer. But they weren’t above using their knowledge to help me acquire the tools to reach the right answer, too. Teaching people how to do root-cause analysis, for instance, can be far more valuable a lesson than peering at a log file over someone’s shoulder and opining, “Z happened”.
wrapping up
It’s OK to be the smartest person in the room. You shouldn’t feel, in IT, like you should shy away from situations where you’ll be the smartest person in the room. But that doesn’t mean you should just coast through it, either. Even in situations where being the smartest person in the room is a job requirement (written or otherwise), as long as you stay aware of and meet the obligations that position places on you, it’s even, dare I say, something to aspire to.
This blog post was originally published on musing about tech, a site I’ve since closed down. It has been edited slightly in the republication here.
Disclaimer: All content is the work of the individual and is in no way affiliated with or representative of any employer, past or present.