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Ricardo (4s): Hello, everyone. Welcome to the five minutes podcast today, I'd like to go back to a sentence in a quote that I heard the first time I would say between one year in one year and a half ago, and the quote is: why it's hard to make smart people work together? And the first time I heard that was from Jack ma the founder of Alibaba. And last week in a webinar, I heard it again. And this, you know, when a quote stick to your mind and you say, God, this does not make sense. Because everything that you want in your teams in your company is a lot of smart people. And I said it doesn't make sense that you think that it's not extremely good or extremely healthy to have smart people working together.
Ricardo (52s): And then I tried it to analyze. So I started reading some articles and trying to understand why it's so hard. And then I found five areas that I want to share with you. So we can think Together on that. The first one is why it's so hard at first It's because of ego because if you are smart in a world that is so complex. You are already putting yourself in a very different step comparing to the others. So we start thinking that the world exists just because of you and you start what professor Henry Mintzberg said in his webinar, you start like an ego trip.
Ricardo (1m 33s): You know, you start only thinking about yourself and then you just start becoming deaf. You start becoming unable to listen to others. The second aspect for me that is very clear on Smart People is the sense of individuality or individualism because you are so smart that sometimes you say why I need to do a group work. It's much better if I do it alone. Do you remember the time at school, when the smart people in the room that just want to do homework and group work alone, they say no, can I do what I can do for everybody because they don't feel that the others are contributing.
Ricardo (2m 14s): So they start seeing everything through their own lenses. And this drives me to the third one, these very smart people. They think, they truly believe that success is equal to credentials. It's equal to top a education. So they usually over evaluate education. And let me tell you, I'm not saying at all that education, a good education is a bad thing. But it's not everything. You know, it's not because you just received a degree from a top university that you automatically became a top professional. Exercise the work, for example, being a project manager and being certified people start to think that they're the same thing or very similar.
Ricardo (3m 4s): They are complimented because of course, the credential gives you a path to understand the profession. But what really matters is the delivery of your project is, you know, the taste of the experience of producing a project or failing, succeeding. And the fourth one is all about UQ and IQ. So emotional quotient and intellectual quotient, several people think, Oh, these are the same thing. No, they're not. And they're not at all. So you should never think that because you are ultrasmart that you will succeed in the same way in the emotional side.
Ricardo (3m 47s): So most of the time, if we see a movie about this topic, or if we see just very smart people, we see even a disconnection between this and working together, working together is an emotional activity. It's not necessarily an intellectual activity. So you need to have the emotion to be able to listen to others, to understand that people think different. Then one of the things that I like most when I talk about teamwork, means people working together is that what makes it a successful team It's not just putting a bunch of smart people together, but creating the right mix that enables diversity.
Ricardo (4m 34s): Imagine a football team or a basketball team, with only stars, but the stars do not know how to pass the ball to each other. So it creates not a sense of team. So you are not able to win the game with that. So you need to have this mixed, this diversity on your team. And this is all about emotional intelligence and less, but not least that is very common is overconfidence. So the smart people usually tend to be extremely confident because they have such a track record on the intellectual side, on their credentials, on their individual accomplishments.
Ricardo (5m 18s): That they say, no, this is right. So they start to become a little deaf, you know, they start not listening and this is all combined because people that are overconfident are usually people with very high egos and People, but that are very hard to work in a group. So we can see that easily in several country leaders today or corporate leaders today. Because I'm not saying that they are not smart, they are it's smart, but their intelligence did not develop in a sense of working as a group and this is the biggest challenge. So if you are ultra-intelligent or a gifted person please this is wonderful.
Ricardo (6m 1s): Now it's your time to develop this other area. When I graduated from engineering, everything was about this intellectual capability. So tests mathematics, physics, whatever. And then when graduated, I started seeing real life and real challenges and I thought God if I don't know how to talk to different people if I don't know how to write something that people will understand I can not accomplish anything. So that way this is why is so hard because most of the time when we do recruitment process, we try and just to bring the smartest people in the room from the best of the best and then suddenly they're not able to deliver the results you're looking for and to work as a team, think about that and see your next week with another five minutes, Podcast.
