Always be the dumbest person in the room.

Robert Eenhoorn said that at a lecture this week. He played for the New York Yankees, he was technical director when the Dutch baseball team became world champion, and then he switched to football. Ten years running AZ Alkmaar, and now Feyenoord, two of the biggest clubs in the Netherlands. He could talk about sport all evening and nobody in that room could correct him. And what he tells you to go for is being the person who knows the least.

Most founders believe the opposite. They think they're the one who knows the most about everything in their company, and they act like it.

It doesn't show up as a big statement. It shows up in small moments. Someone on your team explains how they want to handle a client, and you don't disagree with them. You just add one sentence. You point out a detail they missed, or you tell them how you did it yourself two years ago. You think you're helping them. What the room hears is that your version is the real answer.

Now look at how often you lose an argument in your own company. Probably never. That's not because you're always right. It's because you decide about their work, their salary and their next step, so people stop pushing back long before you notice they stopped. You leave the meeting thinking your team agreed with you. They didn't agree with you. They gave in. So you don't have proof that you're the smartest person in the room. You have proof that you're the boss.

And the person who gave in learned something that day. Being right in your company is worth less than being easy to work with. Do that for a year and people stop bringing you what they actually think. They bring you the version they know you'll approve. Your meetings get faster and your company gets dumber.

Somebody who knows more than you about their part of the business is not a threat to you. They're the reason your company can keep going on a day when you're not there. And they don't just take work off your hands, they make better decisions than you would have made yourself. If there is nobody in your team who can beat you at anything, you haven't hired a team. You've hired a group of people who wait for you.

I work in companies of fifteen to eighty people. Every one of them knows that business and that market better than I do, and they've known it for years. I'm not going to walk in and pretend otherwise. I'm there for the things nobody else is looking at. Whether the management meeting produces decisions or only updates. Whether two departments are both waiting for the other one to start. I know less about their product and their clients than anyone in that building, and that is exactly why I see things they can't see anymore.

Try this in your next leadership meeting. Pick the subject where you already know what you want, and say nothing about it. Don't nod, don't steer, just wait. Somebody will eventually say what they really think, and that will be the first honest answer you've had on that subject in a long time. Then go back over the last few months and find one moment where somebody told you that you were wrong and turned out to be right.

If you can't find that moment, you're not the smartest person in the room. You're just the one nobody corrects.