Why I Don’t Want to Be the Smartest Person in the Room
- John
- Mar 28
- 4 min read
There was a time when I did want to be the smartest person in the room. Not because I thought I was better than anyone else, but because I was terrified of being irrelevant. I felt like my value hinged on how much I knew, how fast I could solve problems, how often I could say, “I got it.”
It started early in my career. I was 19, had a newborn son, no college degree, and I was trying to prove I belonged in the tech world. I went from Help Desk to Infrastructure to DevOps to leading teams across the country. Every step was built on grinding harder, learning faster, and being the person people could rely on.
And for a while, that mindset served me. It helped me stand out, get promoted, and build credibility.
But eventually, it started to hurt more than it helped.
The Shift Happened in a Room I Was Supposed to Be Leading
I was running a technical strategy session with stakeholders from across multiple teams: developers, network engineers, product leads, and security. We were scoping a rollout that touched nearly every part of our infrastructure.
And I walked in prepared to be the guy with the answers.
Halfway through the meeting, someone asked a question about the downstream impact of a system change I hadn’t considered. Another person brought up a process gap that would affect compliance.
My first instinct? Fix it. Solve it. Talk it through out loud so everyone could see I was on top of it.
But something told me to stop.
Instead of reacting, I asked, “What do you think we should do?”
That moment changed everything.
Because what followed was 20 minutes of the smartest, most thoughtful back-and-forth I’d ever heard from a team. Not because I drove the conversation, but because I stepped back and made space for it.
I realized then that my job wasn’t to be the smartest.
It was to make the room smarter.
The Trap of Needing to Know Everything (The Smartest Person In The Room Syndrome)
In tech, it’s easy to equate value with knowledge. We’re conditioned to measure ourselves by how many problems we can solve, how many systems we understand, how many calls we can answer with confidence.
And if you came up like I did — young, scrappy, without credentials to fall back on — you probably doubled down on that belief.
But here’s the problem: needing to be the smartest makes you fragile.
You talk more than you listen
You fill silence instead of inviting thought
You answer too fast
You micromanage solutions
You intimidate instead of empowering
Eventually, you create a culture where people wait for you instead of thinking for themselves.
That’s not leadership. That’s bottlenecking.
What Real Leadership Looks Like
Real leadership isn’t about being right. It’s about creating the conditions where the best ideas can win.
Sometimes those ideas come from the junior engineer who’s never spoken up before. Sometimes they come from someone in a different department. Sometimes they come from the person who doesn’t look or sound like you.
Your job as a leader is to:
Ask better questions
Create psychological safety
Hold space for disagreement
Amplify voices that go unheard
Challenge your own assumptions
You don’t need to be the expert. You need to be the enabler.
Letting Go of Ego (Without Losing Confidence)
This was a tough one for me.
Letting go of being the smartest doesn’t mean checking your experience at the door. It means recognizing that your experience is more valuable when it’s shared, not shown off.
It means being confident enough to say:
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s figure it out together.”
“That’s a better idea than the one I had.”
“Tell me more.”
Those phrases used to feel like weakness. Now, they feel like power.
Because every time I say them, I see the shift in the room. People lean in. They contribute. They own it.
The ROI of Not Being the Smartest
Since changing my approach, here’s what I’ve seen happen:
My team solves problems faster without me jumping in
We avoid blind spots I would have missed on my own
People feel more invested because their ideas drive the outcome
I spend more time coaching, less time firefighting
Trust goes up, burnout goes down
And personally? I’m less anxious. Less reactive. More focused on leading people than performing knowledge.
I have more energy to think long-term. To mentor. To grow the next leaders.
Because here’s the thing: when you stop needing to be the smartest, other people start rising into their potential.
Where This Shows Up Day-to-Day
This mindset shows up in the small stuff:
Holding silence in meetings so others can speak first
Letting someone else present the solution
Redirecting praise to the team, not just the leader
Asking questions that unlock thinking, not show off yours
Giving feedback that makes people better, not just feel corrected
And it also shows up in how I parent.
When my 9-year-old asks questions, I try not to default to answering everything. I ask what he thinks first. I want him to learn how to trust his thoughts.
When my 3-year-old is exploring something new, I hold back from showing her how to do it “right.” I let her try, fail, and smile through it.
Because leadership isn’t just what you do at work. It’s how you show up for the people who watch you the most.
The People I Learn From Now
These days, I seek out people who:
Think differently than I do
Ask better questions than I ask
Have experiences I don’t understand yet
Make me pause and reconsider what I thought I knew
I don’t want a team full of people who think like me. I want a team that challenges me. That sees around corners I didn’t know were there.
That’s how we build better systems. That’s how we grow.
Final Thoughts
There’s a quiet shift that happens when you stop needing to be the smartest person in the room:
You become someone who builds smart rooms.
You stop performing, and start empowering. You stop hoarding answers, and start spreading insight. You stop leading with ego, and start leading with trust.
And ironically?
That’s when people start seeing you as a real leader.
Because leadership isn’t about what you know. It’s about what you help others become.
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