How do you manage smart people?

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

How do you manage smart people?

- You don't make very smart people do anything. What you do is, hopefully, you inspire them to want to take action. And it's a difference between leaders and managers. Managers tell people what to do, oftentimes without very effective results, leaders inspire them to do it. And I've been very fortunate, from a pretty young age, to have the ability to recognize really talented people. People way more talented than I am, way smarter than I am. And once you can recognize those folks, if you can get an understanding of what whey want to accomplish, and you can find alignment between what you're trying to accomplish and what they're trying to accomplish, and you can authentically get across why it's such a strong fit, why their skill set, their unique set of skills, their intelligence, their resourcefulness, their passion, their compassion, how it can be brought to bear to create this huge amount of value on a global basis, hopefully they're going to want to do that.

And hopefully they'll buy into that. And that's very different than telling them what to do, and especially with the kinds of people you were describing, like the smartest people you know, they're not going to respond very well to being told what to do.

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/jeff-weiner-on-establishing-a-culture-and-a-plan-for-scaling/how-do-you-manage-smart-people