Expertise

Is your expertise limiting your leadership?

I was speaking with Shiri Yardeni this week (go read her posts for fresh perspectives), and at one point we discussed how our career paths led to different approaches to solving problems. In one of Shiri’s posts she explains that she is the one that is asking “the stupid questions” as part of her methodology. I was an insider most of my career, not an advisor, and had intimate knowledge of the inner workings and capabilities.

This conversation got me thinking about detailed knowledge (as well as little knowledge) as a double-edged sword.

In the past, one of the reasons that humans were winning in chess against the computer (not me, of course), was that a human being does not need to consider moves that do not make sense while a computer needs to consider everything.
What if our “understanding”, and swift elimination of what we deem nonsensical options, is actually removing valid solutions? What if our details-supported-opinions stop our team members from participating in the discussion?

The best leaders that I met tread this path carefully. Knowing too many details may obscure the view of our goals, and will impact SMEs’ contribution, while completely forgetting about the details will remove an important foundation of decision making.

Let’s focus our energy on building a knowledgeable team that we can trust, this will give us the capacity to lead with good decisions.