The leader's job is not to be the smartest

The first person I ever hired was not the obvious choice.

This was 2007, my second year at ITC. I was running rural retail operations in the Bhopal region, and I needed someone to help me cover more ground. The candidates with experience were all underwhelming; competent, careful, going through the motions. Then a young man walked in for an interview, fresh out of college, with no relevant experience whatsoever. What he had instead was energy. He talked about the work the way someone talks about a thing they have already decided to be good at. His ideas were not all good, but the way he talked about ideas told me he would have many more of them, and most would be better than mine.

I hired him.

For the first few months, he could not implement most of what he wanted to do. He did not know how to navigate the system. He did not know who to call when something broke. He did not know which battles were worth fighting. So I helped him execute, and he helped me see things I had stopped seeing. We rose together over the next few years, through different functions, through different roles, both moving faster than we should have. That hire taught me something I did not know I was being taught at the time: the most useful person in the room is not always the one with the most credentials.

It is sometimes just the one with the most energy.

I would have to relearn this lesson many times.

Specifically, I would have to relearn it every time I hired someone who was better than me at something. And each time, the lesson did not feel like a lesson. It felt like a threat.

I am writing this for the version of you who is in your first management role and is about to hire someone clearly more talented than you on some specific dimension, and is wondering whether to do it. I want you to know what nobody told me at your stage:

It is going to feel bad. And then you have to do it anyway.

The Flipkart years, especially after I crossed the senior manager mark and started building larger teams, are full of moments I am not particularly proud of. I would interview someone exceptional and walk out of the room thinking, they are sharper than me on this technical dimension. The honest part of me knew this was good news; exactly the kind of person I should be hiring. The less honest part of me, the part most senior people do not talk about openly, would quietly wonder what happens to me when this person joins?

The fear was specific. Will my own boss start asking them the questions instead of me? Will I look slow next to them in meetings? Will the team look at them and see what I should have been? Will I, slowly, become irrelevant in the very room I built?

I made a lot of these hires anyway. But I am not going to pretend I made them from a place of pure leadership wisdom. I made some of them while still carrying the fear. And the fear shaped how I worked with them in the early weeks; sometimes well, sometimes badly. There were moments I subtly held back information they needed. Moments I claimed credit a little louder than I should have. Moments I positioned myself in a meeting in a way that made my own contribution more visible than theirs.

I am being more honest in this essay than I usually am. I think it matters.

What changed, eventually, was simple but slow.

I noticed that the senior leaders I most admired, the ones I wanted to grow into, were not the smartest people in their rooms. They were the ones who had built rooms full of smarter people and seemed genuinely unbothered by it. When their team member solved a problem, they did not flinch. When their team member got asked the question instead of them, they did not get defensive. They just sat with it, looked pleased, and moved on. Whatever insecurity they had once felt, and I now believe most of them had once felt it, had been worked through years before I met them.

I started trying to be like that. Not by faking it, but by paying attention to my own reactions. When I felt the threat, I would notice it, name it inside my head, that is the fear talking, and then choose to do the opposite of what the fear wanted. The fear wanted me to compete; I would collaborate. The fear wanted me to take credit; I would give it. The fear wanted me to keep information close; I would share it.

It did not always work on the first try. But it worked enough, and over enough years, that the fear got quieter. By the time I was hiring directors and heads of functions at Flipkart, I had started actively looking for people I knew would be better than me. Not as an act of false modesty. Genuinely. The discipline had become a preference. And the work, the actual day-to-day quality of what I built, kept getting better in proportion to how much smarter the rooms became.

Here is the thing nobody told me, that I now want to tell you.

The leader's job is not to be the smartest. It is to make the room smartest.

That is the whole job. Everything else, the strategy memos, the all-hands updates, the operating reviews, the goal cascades, is downstream of this one decision: are you willing to surround yourself with people who could, on any given day, make you feel small? Most people are not. Most people, even the senior ones, hire one notch below themselves on every dimension that matters, because hiring at their level or above feels too risky. The result is a room full of people who quietly agree the leader is the smartest, and the leader quietly knows this, and everyone is comfortable, and nothing important gets built.

If you want to lead at scale, you have to make the opposite trade. You have to choose the slow discomfort of being outshone over the slow rot of being unchallenged. That is not advice anyone gave me at twenty-five. I am giving it to you now.

The fresher I hired in 2007 went on to hold roles I never held. People I hired at Flipkart went on to do things I could never have done. None of that diminished my own work. All of it made my own work possible.

You will not be the smartest person in the room. That is not a failure of your career. It is, eventually, the point of it.