After a couple of decades leading both large teams and small startups, I’ve learned more than a few universal truths about organizations. One of the most important: Your company is only as sharp as your dullest employee. Think about it; We hire and then develop folks hoping that they’ll think on their feet, come up with great ideas and make great decisions that help us accomplish brilliant things. But what are the processes and tools that can actually raise a company’s collective IQ in ways that impact business results? Here are some strategies I have learned over the years.

1. Share high-level company info company-wide

I share our board presentations with every Mindflash employee. This gives everyone insight into our key metrics, the management team’s priorities, what's happening outside their department—all information that can get lost even in a small startup like ours. It’s also the most efficient way to ensure that the thousands of decisions every employee makes each day are made with the best interests of the organization in mind. If you want to take the principle a step further, use a simple dashboard app (we use Geckoboard) to give people real-time feedback on the company’s vital signs.

2. Develop market-intelligence dashboards for every team

Keeping everyone current on key company info is necessary, but not sufficient, for truly higher company intelligence. Your people need to be reading, hearing and talking about competitor moves and industry trends. With the explosion of content and filtering tools, that’s easier than ever to accomplish efficiently. I’d recommend that managers create and share their list of the most relevant competitors, industry groups and trends and distribute it to every new hire in the form of Google alerts, recommended blogs, e-newsletters, conference archives, Webinars and LinkedIn groups, etc.  And then ask employees to identify and contribute new suggestions at each team meeting.

If you doubt that that time spent is worthwhile, I can share that I recently ran into a former competitor of mine in the travel industry who admitted (with some chagrin) that he’d recently learned how much my Expedia marketing team had learned from his many public strategy speeches posted to the Web. Gotta love that Internet.

3. Encourage peer-to-peer education and make it easy

Every organization has its own subject matter experts who have the passion and expertise to spread critical knowledge. The key is identifying them and making sure they know that you welcome their sharing their knowledge with others. I’ve found that people are a lot more eager to learn from peers than they are from someone in a centralized corporate training organization that they’ve never met. At my company, we use our own Web software, Mindflash.com, to host and deliver peer-to-peer courses. And let me tell you, the competition to get 100 percent on all quiz questions gets pretty fierce. I proudly post my completion certificates above my desk.

4. Turn your customers into teachers

In my experience, employees who communicate personally with customers are predictably the ones drumming up the best (aka highest IQ) ideas and making the best day-to-day decisions. We put a feedback e-mail address/phone number on our e-mail to all customers; that address/number pings all of our VPs simultaneously; we call it the Bat Phone. Everyone in the company is CC'd on every incoming user inquiry, and we encourage everyone to answer user questions in our GetSatisfaction public customer service portal (ZenDesk is another option). We also use GoToMeeting to allow every employee to listen in on our usability research sessions.

5. Don’t hire good people; hire great people

Lastly, when you’re adding to your now high-IQ team, remember that grafting top talent into your organization is an obvious tactic to raise your collective intelligence. In my experience, you get a quantum, not incremental, increase in intellectual horsepower and productivity when you hire an A versus B+ player. And once they’re on board, A-level employees will demand that you continue to hire As and not Bs—so it’s a virtuous circle. The challenge, of course, is identifying and closing on those elusive creatures. A CEO friend of mine, Auren Hoffman of RapLeaf, has done some great thinking on this topic. He defines A Players as those who are relentlessly resourceful; who constantly tinker to find a better way; who don’t tolerate mediocrity. Hoffman also proposes a structured interview process to increase the likelihood that you can spot these folks—for example, asking them to teach you something in the interview to test their ability to communicate complex concepts in a simple way.

To learn more, here’s Hoffman’s recent PowerPoint and live video presentation on this topic.

In the end, every successful organization can build a solid foundation by hiring great people, but that’s just the start of the cycle of feeding those people the right information and kicking off a process of continuous learning that awaits the next new hires, and so on. The tools are there and the methods are pretty simple. All it takes is some hard work—another key attribute of A Players and the high-IQ companies they work for.

Donna Wells is the CEO of Mindflash, a Web platform for companies to easily share knowledge and train employees. She was previously CMO of Mint.com, the online personal finance service, where she was responsible for driving the company’s growth to 2 million users from its launch in 2007 to its acquisition by Intuit in 2009 for $170 million. Donna has also led large marketing organizations for industry leaders including Intuit, Charles Schwab and Expedia, where she was SVP of marketing for the U.S. She started her career at American Express, where she launched the Gold Rewards and Platinum Corporate Card products for small businesses.