David Ogilvy, regarded by many as the father of modern advertising, used to onboard new managers by gifting them a set of Russian wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another. He then told the recruits that if they hired those who were smarter than they were, they would become a company of giants, and if they hired people who were not as skilled and intelligent as them, they would become a company of the smallest.

Today, the notion that competent managers hire people who are better than them is as engrained in the canon of modern leadership cliches as the notion that “people are a company’s biggest asset,” or that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

This does not imply we should dismiss it. There are many logical and science-backed arguments in support of the idea that effective managers (and leaders) are not just able to hire people who are smarter than themselves, but also manage them effectively, building high-performing teams around them. Here are a few.

Expertise is distributed: In the knowledge economy, expertise is widely distributed. If you want to build a high-performing team or organization, you will need to source highly specialized technical talent with more knowledge in specific areas or fields than yourself. If you think you know more about everything than your team, you are either hiring poorly or deceiving yourself.

Incidentally, hiring people with more expertise than your own is also the best strategy managers have for increasing their expertise and knowledge. As Steve Jobs famously noted, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

Smarter employees learn faster: Managers are generally appointed for their prior experience and expertise, and at best also for their people skills. Their key job is to build a high-performing team, they do not need to be the smartest person in the room. In fact, the smarter the people they manage to attract, the faster those individuals will learn since intelligence is the best measure of someone’s learning ability.

Given that most jobs benefit from speedy learning, and people’s career prospects depend less on what they know, and more on what they learn, one of the smartest moves managers can make is to hire smart people, including people who are smarter than them.

Smart people are aware of their limitations: No matter how much you know, it is always beneficial to know what you don’t know. Indeed, being aware of your limitations is key to developing new skills, avoiding risks and mistakes, and becoming more competent. All this is more likely to happen if you hire people who are smart, competent, and have skills.

Conversely, if you hire people who lack expertise, skills, or competence, they will be more likely to overestimate their capabilities, which leads not just to avoidable mistakes and underperformance, but also demoralizing the smarter people in your team. To be sure, it is much easier to manage smart people than people who think they are smart when in fact they are not. Actual intelligence is always preferable to self-perceived intelligence, and competence beats confidence every time.

Intelligence predicts prosocial behaviors: The benefits to hiring smart people extend beyond their ability to deliver high performance on specific tasks or areas of expertise; higher levels of intelligence tend also enable better collaboration and organizational citizenship, not least since intelligence is positively correlated with openness to new experiences, which explains why smarter people tend to be less prejudiced, and more tolerant.

And yet, despite these reasons, it is all too common for managers not to hire smarter people. Managers may feel threatened by smart workers, especially when they are not as smart themselves, or when insecurities or imposter syndrome stand in the way of their intelligence.

Managers often prefer to hire on social skills or people skills, especially if that means they will have less trouble with employees. Although this doesn’t bode well for the future performance of their team—too much getting along stands in the way of getting ahead—it may go under the radar in organizations or cultures that are not performance-focused.

There is a general tendency for managers to want to hire people who are just like themselves, and to then designate them as their successors of “high-potential” employees. This is a common form of subliminal narcissism if not a sociably acceptable way to display one’s narcissism: “Look at mini-me, they are the most brilliant person in my team.”

Therefore, it takes not just intelligence, but true confidence to hire people who are better than you. Fundamentally, it takes actual leadership skills to be able to motivate them to set aside their personal agendas and selfish egos to collaborate effectively with others. This act of turning a group of people into a high-performing team is the fundamental function of leadership.

Needless to say: the better the people, the higher the potential for that team to achieve great things. However, no matter how smart individual people are, the critical outcome or goal is to enable a strong collective outcome, a unit or synergy that delivers things beyond the individual capabilities of the individuals involved—including the leader.

Importantly, if you are a junior manager or leader looking for basic pointers on how to manage people who are smarter than you, be sure to focus on these three key points.

Leverage their expertise, intelligence, experience, and skills: This means creating a climate of psychological safety, so people feel free to express their views and opinions, particularly when they are departures from most people’s views. Nothing hurts teams more than underutilized or wasted talent, so you want to ensure skills speak!

Manage their egos as needed: This means reminding them that, no matter how skilled and smart they are, it is all about effective collaboration and team performance. For this, you will need to navigate the tricky tension between ensuring your talented employees feel valued, but not as valued that they develop diva complex or a strong sense of entitlement (which basically kills team morale)

Remember to develop them: No matter how skilled or talented your employees are, it’s your job to make them better, to help them develop their potential, and acquire new skills. This will probably mean helping them go outside their comfort zone and avoid playing to their strengths, which will actually limit their long-term ability to add value to the organization, not to mention inhibit their career development.

In short, while it’s important to attract and hire people who are smarter than you, the ultimate test of your real talent as a manager or leader is to create the conditions for this talent to deliver value, and boost team performance. That is your unique contribution, no matter the types and kinds of skills you are managing in your team.