Jason became CEO of a $2.3B enterprise software company at 46, the youngest person to hold the role in the firm's history. He'd earned it. Twenty years climbing from product manager to division head. An MBA from Wharton. A track record of turning around struggling units. In every room he entered, he was the sharpest strategic mind.
Eighteen months into his tenure, the Board grew concerned. Revenue was flat. Two key executives had left. Employee engagement scores were falling. The strategic pivot he'd championed, brilliantly reasoned and meticulously planned, was stalling.
In the post-mortem with his executive coach, Jason said something that stopped them both: "I hired people to execute my vision. I'm realizing now I should have hired them to bring me a vision I couldn't see."
He had been so busy being right, he'd forgotten to be curious.
The Intelligence Trap
For most of their careers, senior executives are rewarded for being right. They rise up through the organization by mastering complexity, seeing patterns others missed, and having answers when uncertainty prevailed. Over time, this capability becomes their identity: I am the person who knows.
In the executive suite, that identity is rarely questioned explicitly. It's reinforced in interactions. People defer. They bring conclusions, not explorations. They wait for the leader's signal before committing to a position. Yet research points to a profound paradox: the very intelligence, expertise, and cognitive authority that elevated leaders can quietly constrain them, not through incompetence or arrogance, but through invisible psychological dynamics that narrow perspective, dampen collective intelligence, and reduce adaptability precisely when it's most needed. The cost is not obvious failure. It is foregone insight.
Why Smart People Learn Less
Organizational psychologist Chris Argyris spent decades studying a counterintuitive pattern: highly intelligent professionals are often less effective learners than their less credentialed peers. Not because they lack curiosity or humility in principle. Because they've spent a lifetime excelling and have unconsciously built sophisticated defenses against situations that might expose gaps in their thinking. The smarter someone is, the better they become at avoiding the discomfort of not knowing.
In executive contexts, this manifests as:
• A preference for familiar frameworks over novel approaches.
• Subtle dismissal of dissenting views ("Yes, but we tried that in 2019..." or "That doesn't account for...").
• Premature convergence on the answer before the problem is fully explored.
• Overconfidence in intuition shaped by past success, which may no longer apply.
Often, leaders don't see it happening and that's the point.
The Impact of Power
Power reduces perspective-taking (Keltner, et al, 2003). Research shows that leaders tend to trust their own gut reactions and assumptions more, while paying less attention to what others are actually saying or showing them. Executives are measurably less likely to notice emotional cues, less likely to seek disconfirming information, and more likely to assume their understanding is shared by everyone. Crucially, this is not about character flaws. It's structural. As executives accumulate authority, the system around them adapts. The CFO stops mid-sentence when the CEO starts speaking. The head of HR brings the solution, not the dilemma. The strategy team presents three options, but everyone in the room knows which one the leader will choose. Over time, leaders experience a world that appears aligned and coherent. But disagreement hasn't disappeared. It's gone underground. Being the smartest person in the room becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, reinforced by silence.
When Expertise Becomes a Cage
Expertise is invaluable, until it isn't. In stable environments, deep pattern recognition is an advantage. But in volatile, ambiguous contexts, the kind most executives now inhabit, it becomes a liability. Research on cognitive entrenchment shows that experts tend to:
• Frame every problem through familiar lenses.
• Underestimate anomalies that don't fit their models.
• Discount outsider perspectives as uninformed.
• Over-apply yesterday's solutions to tomorrow's problems.
This explains why transformation initiatives so often stall, not because leaders resist change, but because they unconsciously place too much trust in their own models of reality. Consider the example at the start of this article. Jason knew enterprise SaaS better than anyone on his team. He'd lived through three market cycles. When his CTO proposed a radically decentralized product architecture, he saw the risks immediately, technical debt, coordination overhead, customer confusion. He'd seen it fail before. What he couldn't see was that his mental model was built in an era of on-premise deployments and annual release cycles. The game had changed. His expertise had become a filter screening out the signal. Curiosity doesn't decline from disinterest. It declines from confidence.
The Hidden Human Cost
There's a quieter cost to being the smartest person in the room, isolation. When their team members consistently defer, executives carry disproportionate responsibility for sense-making. They can't think out loud without it becoming policy. They can't express doubt without triggering anxiety. Mistakes feel existential. Research on leader loneliness shows that perceived distance from others correlates with chronic stress, reduced well-being, and impaired decision quality. The pressure to have the answer prevents leaders from accessing the collective intelligence around them. They become bottlenecks in their own organizations.
The Collective Intelligence Paradox
Group intelligence is not determined by the highest IQ in the room. It depends far more on social sensitivity, conversational turn-taking, and openness than on individual brilliance (Woolley and Chabris, 2010). The best-performing groups are not those with the smartest person, they're the groups where no single voice dominates. When leaders consistently occupy the role of chief thinker, something insidious happens, others disengage cognitively. They wait for the leader's cue. They optimize their own domain but stop thinking systemically. They become executors, not thinkers.
What Jason Did Next
Jason made a decision that felt unnatural to him. He would stop being the smartest person in the room. Not by hiring people less capable than him but by changing how he showed up. At his next executive team meeting, when the CFO presented three strategic options, Jason asked: "Before I share my thinking, what are we not seeing? What data would change our minds?" The room went silent for eight seconds. Then the CTO spoke up. When the Head of Sales proposed a major account strategy shift, Jason's first instinct was to explain why it wouldn't work. Instead, he said: "Walk me through your reasoning. What assumptions am I making that might be wrong?"
He started weekly Question Hours where he explicitly couldn't provide answers, only ask better questions. The first three sessions were excruciating. By the fifth, his team was solving problems he didn't know existed. Eighteen months later, employee engagement had rebounded. Revenue grew 13%. Two product innovations came from unexpected corners of the organization. He hadn't become any less intelligent. He'd become more permeable.
The Leadership Shift
The most effective senior leaders are not those with the sharpest answers. They're those who create conditions for better thinking. This requires a profound identity shift from expert to facilitator of insight, from authority to curiosity, and from being impressive to being permeable. Research on learning-oriented leadership shows that leaders who model fallibility, ask genuine questions, and invite challenge measurably increase team learning, innovation, and performance. This is not abdication. It's discipline. It takes restraint to withhold an answer. Courage to say "I don't know." And maturity to tolerate the temporary inefficiency of real exploration.
A Diagnostic Question
We encourage leaders to ask themselves this critical question, "What intelligence is not making it into the room because of me?"
The answer is rarely comfortable. It often involves noticing who speaks last in meetings, or not at all, which ideas surface repeatedly and which never do, where conversations close prematurely, and where consensus arrives suspiciously fast. The quiet cost of being the smartest person in the room is not personal failure. It's a lack of development of other leadership skills hidden beneath competence. And it's reversible.
The Choice
In an era defined by complexity and uncertainty, no individual, however intelligent, can out-think the system on their own. The future belongs to leaders who can hold their intelligence lightly, make space for other minds, and resist the seduction of always being right. Not because intelligence doesn't matter but because at senior levels, the leader's job is no longer to have all the answers. It's to make better thinking possible. The smartest move any executive can make is creating a room where they're not always the smartest person in it.
References
Argyris, C. (1991). Teaching smart people how to learn. Harvard Business Review, 69(3), 99–109.
Dane, E. (2010). Reconsidering the trade-off between expertise and flexibility: A cognitive entrenchment perspective. Academy of Management Review, 35(4), 579–603.
Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley.
Inam, A., & Khan, S. (2021). Why loneliness is a growing problem for leaders. MIT Sloan Management Review, 62(2).
Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Anderson, C. (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychological Review, 110(2), 265–284.
Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330(6004), 686–688.
