How to hire and manage people smarter than you.

Every founder and leader is given this advice: Hire people smarter than you. But how?

This is one of those axioms, almost a Zen-level paradox that sounds so wise, brilliant, and humbling that we think: Totally. That’s it. That’s what I need to do! But anyone who has done this knows it’s one of the hardest things to do.

• What is “smarter” than you mean?

• How do we know the person we’re hiring knows more, a hell of a lot more, than we do?

• How do we maintain our leadership authority and our unique POV while enabling experts to do their magic?

• How do we know when this hire is not working?

Like I said, not easy at all.

In this post, I will share my experience hiring people smarter than me, the challenges I faced in the process, and what I’ve learned from it.

Get real with yourself.

I come from a CRM, brand, and product marketing background. While I could navigate numbers, I was not a quant head. I also did not have rich experience in customer acquisition.

When I became a VP of marketing, I felt anxious about the gaps in my expertise. I felt the need to throw myself at the functional areas where I was the weakest and try to master it.

This was a mistake.

While I needed to understand the function and know what great, mediocre, and terrible looked like, I did not have to become an expert at that function. That’s not why they hired me to be a VP of marketing — they hired me because of what I was good at, and they had confidence that I’d figure out the rest.

💡Takeaway: Having a clear-headed conversation with yourself (or with your CEO/board of advisors) about your strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots is super important. This enables you to make smart decisions on who you want to surround yourself with and how the people you bring on board can complement your skills.

Hiring for expertise when we are not the expert.

It became clear to me that I needed to hire someone who was an expert in demand generation. Someone I can trust to lead that function. Someone I can also learn from.

The person I found, I’ll call him B, was exactly that person. He had deep functional expertise, a great e-commerce background, and the depth of analytical expertise necessary for this role. I was confident that B was the right functional expert. But how can I be sure that he can also walk the talk?

I developed a few exercises with the help of my previous boss, who was exceptional in customer acquisition. I build an analytical exercise, a channel budget allocation exercise, and a situational analysis to test his decision-making abilities.

B crushed all three. But most of all, it was I who gained the most from investing the time in developing these exercises:

• I learned a lot about the functional area while developing these exercises.

• I learned what great, mediocre, and ugly looked like so I could evaluate the candidates.

• Watching how candidates approached these exercises, the assumptions they made, the questions they asked, and their reasoning ability taught me a lot about their thought process.

💡Takeaway: Take the time to develop thoughtful exercises for prospective hires. The more senior they are—director and above—the more time you need to spend thinking about how you want to interview them, the exercises you want them to do, the kind of discussion and panels you want to have, and the framework for evaluating their performance.

Beyond functional expertise.

Most of us think of functional expertise when hiring someone smarter than us. But is that sufficient? When we are building a team, other skill sets—both hard and soft—matter. Here are a few that I think are useful to evaluate, whether you are a first-time founder or a first-time marketing leader:

• Maturity — Can they handle conflict of opinion, stress, feedback, and failure with maturity?

• Strategic thinking — Do they see beyond the immediate problem? A hire who can think strategically and align their work with broader company goals will help you steer the ship rather than just row.

• Emotional intelligence — It’s proven that leaders with emotional intelligence are more likely to cultivate high-performing teams because they foster relationships built on trust and empathy.

• Collaboration — Can they work across the aisle? Are their leadership principles anchored on competitiveness or teamwork?

• Reflection — When things go wrong, can they reflect and take responsibility for their contribution? Or do they assign blame and point to external factors outside their control?

💡Takeaway: Over-indexing on functional skills without accounting for other skills and behaviors can make your team dysfunctional. You may have a bunch of rockstars who cannot get along with each other, and that will sink your startup.

Empower without losing authority.

Once we’ve hired someone smarter than us, the next challenge is to let them thrive without micromanaging. This is where many founders struggle. It’s natural to want to maintain control, but giving talented people the autonomy to lead is essential for scaling the business.

Here are three approaches that have worked well for me:

• Context, not demands: Our role as a leader is to set the vision and provide the context for decision-making, not to dictate every move. If we’ve hired a strong functional expert, trust them to make the right decisions—but make sure they understand the company’s broader goals and strategy. As Adam Grant points out, “Leaders who share the ‘why’ and give autonomy over the ‘how’ create environments where talent flourishes.”

• Coach, not a referee: Hold the smart hires accountable by setting clear expectations and measurable goals. Check-in regularly to discuss progress, but avoid stepping in to make decisions or veto theirs. Responsibility goes hand in hand with authority. We cannot make someone responsible and not give them the authority to make decisions.

• Curiosity over control: We hire people smarter than us so we can learn from them. This requires us to be insanely curious about “why” they are doing what they are doing. Inquire, engage, and observe rather than assert control.

• The learning burden is on us: The people we hire are not here to educate us. That’s not the job they were hired for. It is on us to learn their functional area by observing them, staying curious, and engaging actively. It’s also important to do our own learning—books, blogs, podcasts, and conversations with advisors.

💡Takeaway: In my experience, whenever I’ve undermined a team member’s authority, I’ve come to regret it. Over time, I’ve learned to trust them, seek their counsel, and share my fears. This has helped increase our bond, and it builds trust in the team.

Detect failure early and course correct.

It’s a huge bummer, not to mention a tremendous waste of time and money, when the new hire we were so excited about didn’t work out. When this happens, it’s usually misaligned expectations. We can mitigate this quite a bit by doing all the above well, but still, sometimes, we’ve checked all the boxes, and the hire still doesn’t work out.

Detect signals early — Make the new hire draw out their 30/60/90-day plan and identify clear milestones for each phase of their plan. Have frequent check-ins and identify early warning mechanisms (feedback from peers and direct reports, their proactiveness, engagement with the larger business beyond their functional area, etc.,) to detect early signals of their performance.

Don’t brush it under the carpet — When they miss a milestone, have an open discussion on why they missed it. Are they proactive in observing that they missed it? Are they taking responsibility? If they are not, this is a great coaching opportunity. Are they able to take feedback?

Course correct fast — This is one of the biggest errors a new leader makes. They think time will fix the problem. It will not. The more time we give a poor hire, the bigger the burden on the rest of the team. Not only are we wasting time by not parting ways with this person, we are creating stress for the other team members and also risk losing some.

💡Takeaway: Don’t wait for things to get worse. Rip the bandaid fast. Acknowledge the mistake and move forward.

Hiring people smarter than us is a delicate balance. It requires humility to admit that we don’t know everything and confidence to empower others to lead while maintaining our authority. Mastering this balance can help a startup build a better team than its competitors, and it can be the difference between winning and losing.