Good leaders tend to use the intelligence of their team to determine direction and design. They have meetings and empower team members to perform at 110% by giv

Good leaders tend to use the intelligence of their team to determine direction and design. They have meetings and empower team members to perform at 110% by giving the team members ownership and clearing away obstacles. Less intelligent people are better at this because they have no choice but to do this. Less intelligent people do not have the cognitive power to design the full system so they have to resort to relying on the team to do it. Very intelligent people tend not to do this. They rely on their own intelligence to direct the team and often times just use the team members as grunts to implement there grand designs. No matter how smart you are, your cognitive powers will always be lower than the cognitive powers of the entire team combined, therefore any attempt to have the team follow your lead rather you following the lead of the team will be worse off. The science supports this. Teams with leaders that empower team members are statistically more successful than teams that don't. My anecdotal observation is that these types of leaders tend to be the less intelligent types. They empower you and than get out of your way because they really don't have the intelligence to get in your way. Here are two statistics about humanity that will lend support to my thesis. Your IQ does not correlate with how successful you will be in life, success being measured as how high you climb the corporate ladder and how much money you make as an individual. This is an actual correlation. In direct contradiction to this... the average IQ of a country highly correlates with the economic success of that country. These two statistics say something about the nature of leadership. It says that leaders succeed off the backs of people more intelligent than them.