Liz Wiseman
Our organizations and our work teams are more intelligent than we can see with our naked eye. There is more intelligence inside of our companies than we are using essentially. There is latent intelligence all around us. A kind of leader who gets access to that intelligence realizes that there are a lot of people who are working extremely hard, they might even be overworked but they are underutilized, and these leaders who utilize the intelligence of others are called Multipliers. They use their intelligence to access, grow, multiply the intelligence of people around them. I also studied leaders I call ‘Diminishers’. These are leaders who are smart. They solve problems that get things done, but they use their own intelligence in a way that tends to drain intelligence from people around them. They are smart, but the organization around them isn’t smart. An Interesting about these multiplier leaders and these ‘Diminisher’ leaders is that these ‘Diminishers’ get less than half of the intelligence in people around them where these leaders that I call Multipliers get all of it. The idea behind Multipliers is that leaders can use their intelligence to amplify the intelligence of others. At the top of the intelligence, hierarchy isn’t the genius who has the answers who gets it done but the genius maker, the leader who uses his or her intelligence to ask the question, to issue the challenge, to unleash and harness intelligence across the entire organization.
