Question to reflect on: Are you worried about being the smartest in the room or are you trying to make the room smarter?

After reading Hidden Potential by Adam Grant, this question made me pause and provided a moment to reflect. It took me back to when I was first getting started in a consultant role at Principal Financial Group. My thought coming into the new opportunity was that I needed to become the smartest in the room. I must know every possible solution and every key little detail that will make a difference in being a top tier consultant. Shocking news…I was wrong.

As time progressed in my role and I learned from the exceptional Consulting team at Principal, it became very clear that going into a room focused on showcasing how many great ideas I have is a great way to fail. One of the big reasons for this is I would come in with my mind made up on what I thought a solution would be before completely understanding the client’s goals and objectives. I was solutioning based on my vantage point and failed to zoom out and see the perspective (and the most important perspective) of the client.

Once I came to grips of eliminating the mindset of being the smartest in the room as the priority, I opened up space to find ways to focus on collective intelligence. It’s not about one voice coming to life to educate, it’s about the collective voices that represent diverse experiences where the real potential of intelligence starts to form. The room gets smarter when we empower and promote the diversity of thought available.

How do we promote the idea of shifting from trying to be the smartest in the room to helping advocate for the entire room to get smarter? Let’s explore a few ideas:

1. Come with curiosity: if we show up with the openness to seek understanding from the other side, we create space to uncover insights from their experiences.
2. Play the game of addition: when we uncover insights from others’ experiences, we can add their insights to our own knowledge to produce a greater spectrum of knowledge.
3. Get real with your bias: when we show up to a situation, it’s natural to refer back to some similar scenario from the past to create an educated guess on how to handle or approach. We carry with us plenty of bias that’s been created by our own experiences. To tell yourself I’m not going to come to this situation with bias is not realistic. Being honest with yourself about your bias and being willing to challenge your bias is something realistic that you can do to unlearn the past and rethink the future.
4. Feed your learner mindset: when we connect with diverse people, read, volunteer our time in our community, and so many other ways to gain different perspective, we normalize the idea that what I’m thinking isn’t necessarily the reality. It may simply be my perspective while others may view the situation different. When we have a learner mindset, these differences of perspective isn’t a challenge but instead, an opportunity to learn. When we all bring a learner mindset we can feed off of one another’s experiences and perspective to expand our viewpoint.

Comment below on what you would add to this list shifting focus from being the smartest in the room to a focus on making the room smarter.

Take your step: take a few minutes to reflect on the last few times you’ve gone to a meeting or bigger group discussions. More often than not, are you on the side of trying to be the smartest in the room, trying to make the room smarter, or maybe somewhere in between? Pick one of the four above (or pick an idea you have) and before going into your next meeting or group discussion, take time to practice one of these methods to help make the room smarter. Start with one and as success builds, integrate additional ideas and let the compounding impact of helping make the room smarter start to unfold.