Most management writing assumes you're the smartest person in the room. The advice makes sense from there — be clear, set direction, push for excellence. Easy when you're ahead of everyone.
But at some point in your career — if you're lucky — you end up managing people who are better than you at the actual work. And everything you thought you knew about management stops applying.
I've been in this position. It's uncomfortable in ways that are hard to admit. The instinct is to assert competence in every meeting, fill the silence with opinions, reference your experience. Basically, to perform expertise you don't have.
It doesn't work. Smart people notice. And once they notice, they stop bringing you the real problems.
The thing that actually works — and this took me longer to learn than it should have — is to make your ignorance useful. Ask the questions that only someone slightly outside the work would ask. Push for clarity not because you don't understand, but because clarity is valuable regardless.
Manage the conditions, not the work. Get obstacles out of the way. Make it easy for them to do what they do without the friction that organisations create. That's a real contribution, even when it's invisible.
And be honest when you're wrong. Smart people respect this more than you think. What they can't respect is someone pretending.
Managing people who are smarter than you isn't a problem to solve. It's a skill to develop. The first step is admitting that's the situation you're in.