Poll in a moment. And now, I’m not goign to define “smart.” That wouldn’t be any fun. I’ll make the poll private, though.
Sure, I guess I would say that. But my bosses have at least 8 years of experience more than me (some have up to 13 more years of experience) which make a huge difference. Raw smarts are rarely that important.
I guess we’re about the same, but smart in different areas. I wouldn’t want to see him try to write code, and I’m sure no one wants to see me cutting people open.
Insofar as intellect matters in my job, which it doesn’t (attendance and being nice matter much, much more), my boss is actually one of the approximately 4 people in my department (out of 100+) that I’m confident is smarter than me. I love my boss!
My boss’s boss, on the other hand, couldn’t think her way out of a wet paper bag. She’s like Sarah Palin, except much nicer. She must have had a marginal amount of business savvy in her youth to have gotten where she is, but she has nnnoooo common sense whatsoever. I miss my old boss’s boss, who was intelligent as hell and cute as a button. But of course, with smarts like his, he got promoted out of this shithole :mad:
Now make with the baked goods, bucko!
RhymerPoll desserts are delivered by teleport pad. Everybody knows that.
If my “boss” is the department chair or dean, I would say they are both about as smart or possibly slightly smarter than I am. I do, however, suspect that I may be smarter than a lot of the higher-level administrators; but then again, they have obviously figured out how to get paid more than I do, so I guess there are all kinds of smart…
I am no slacker in that regard but my boss is unusually smart in many of the same ways I am so it is a direct match. I have had others that were smart but in different ways and others that were just average but ambitious. I don’t think I have ever had one that was truly dumb but those types don’t usually gravitate to my field anyway.
My boss graduated from Harvard Business School and was a partner at Mckinsey.
I can make popcorn in the office microwave without giving myself second degree burns.
Which one of us is smarter?
Really, everyone in my office is “smart”. But I think sometimes all that smarts can create a lot of problems with actually getting stuff done. It’s like there is a tendency to just focus on working on the really cool stuff, overanalyzing simple decisions to death and sort of expecting people to just “get” large volumes of proprierary material they would have no way of being exposed to prior to joining the company.
I guess I’ve been lucky- almost all the bosses I’ve had since adulthood have been smart, competent, and generally good people.
I am unquestionably smarter than my boss and most everyone else around me in this company. He has me beat on experience by at least a decade, ambition, and work ethic. I have no doubt that if I was as career-driven as he is, I’d have his job by now, but I frankly don’t want all that extra hassle and, well, I also have a life beyond my job. Also, I’m better looking, but that doesn’t seem to be a big deal in the construction world.
Mmmmm… the teleported Skald-brand treats are delicious today! 
I’m self-employed now, but my previous boss wasn’t very smart. He hired me for my experience, made me the manager and then systematically ignored pretty much every suggestion I ever made.
And it’s not just me, he had our pressman doing stuff that he advised against. He purchased machinery we didn’t need. He tried to run a medium capacity office copier like a high-volume production machine. He skimped on upkeep, overcharged clients and would push out crappy product. He would feign ignorance and try to spin mistakes he made into our subcontractor’s fault. He ran the business into the ground and destroyed retirement for him and his wife in the process.
He was’t a bad person, but it was like watching an episode of Kitchen Nightmares when the owner refuses to see there is a problem. Gah, years later thinking about that really makes me sad and angry.
For the first time in my career I can say that my boss is probably as smart as I am. We think differently, but he is much better than I at strategizing, and he has learned a great deal from his experiences. He’s not that much older than I, but he’s wiser. He dosen’t have that certain grasp of the abstract that would allow him to score as high on an IQ test, but he’s up there. We are an excellent team because my main focus is legal and ethical compliance, and his main focus is functional production. Between us all the bases get covered.
My employees are not smarter than I. They don’t even come close, but then that’s true of most people. (Stop, it’s an actual, quantifiable fact, let’s not get into it, OK?) They are all more credentialed than I, and two are older and more experienced. But they haven’t learned much from their experience, or they don’t have the abstract ability to infer and apply what they’ve learned. In short they don’t see past the surface of things. They also don’t have that sense of personal responsibility that is required to make the jump into management.
So I find myself talking things through with my boss whenever something isn’t working, and thinking things through for my employees, which is the difference.
I picked, my boss is smarter than me. (Shouldn’t that be “than I?”)
Anyway, he’s been here longer and knows just about everything there is to know. I’ve been drinking from the fire hose for only a year now. It’s getting better.
Yep. Smart is a variable that is different from and not (necessarily) closely coordinated with Management, let alone Leadership skills.
In my role as head of Strategy, while I would feel weird assessing my smarts relative to my direct reports, I do understand that my job is to lay out a clear path - to “stay ahead” of the day-to-day business and see where we need to build out the next planks in our business, which they (my directs and our operations leads) can use to prioritize their activities.
Since I became an insurance actuary, all of my bosses have been credentialed actuaries, which minimizes intelligence differences.
In my previous careers as a financial analyst and computer programmer, I was sometimes (not always) forced to work for bosses who were cognitively challenged, which was very frustrating. At least two were such doofuses that I wondered whether they were lying about having a college degree.
I’m more intellectual than my boss and arguably better educated. But he is better than me at a variety of tasks. It is rather hard to rate actual intelligence, but I guess on the whole it’s possible I’m a little smarter. But he is definitely more capable.
I have no real subordinates these days, just peers ( there are folks that rank below me and under different circumstances would work under me, but there are currently none in my actual section ). Some I think are smarter than me, some aren’t.
I voted for both “my boss is smarter than me” and “we’re about equals” because it’s hard for me to tell about our intelligence level in general (as opposed to the mental skills we use in our jobs). I do know that her memory is much better than mine and she has way more experience at our work, so she can solve problems and make value judgments much quicker than I can.
My boss was much smarter than me… at people skills, which you need to be a manager. I have never ever ever wanted to be a manager.
Yeah my boss isn’t into that. He has a self-proclaimed “shoot from the hip” style that basically amounts to bothering me all hours day or night whenever he comes up with an idea. That’s not “management”. That’s just pulling shit out of your ass faster than I can put my team to work on it.
Sometimes I don’t think these people are “smart” so much as they are obsessive compulsive dorks that did well in school because they didn’t do anything else.
I voted that my boss and I were roughly equal in “smarts.” But he is significantly more accomplished than I, because he worked harder in school than I did, and continues to do so in his professional capacity.