How to Manage People Who Don't Want to Be Led

Who most determines your company's success? Clever people--employees whose knowledge and skills enable them to produce disproportionate value for your firm. To ensure clever people do their best work at your company, you must harness their talents. But that isn't easy: Clever people don't want to be led.

So, you'll have to take a different approach. One strategy is to reduce administrative distractions. Protect clever people from rules and politics associated with big-budget activities. For instance, in a big consumer goods company, a leader filtered requests for information from the head office so a talented consumer profiler could experiment with a new marketing plan.

By washingtonpost.com Editors  |  October 28, 2008; 8:00 AM ET  | Category:  Management Tip of the Day
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