The Job Isn't to Know More

For most of my career I have had people reporting to me who knew their area better than I did. A subject matter expert who could go deeper on their piece of the work than I ever could. That is not something I have tried to avoid. If anything, it is what I want. I would rather surround myself with people who are more knowledgeable than me in their areas than try to be the smartest person in the room on everything, because being the smartest person on everything does not scale, and it was never really the job.

As the leader of an organization, it is not my responsibility to be the expert in everything. It is my job to figure out how to get the best work out of the experts I have. Those turn out to be very different skills, and moving from one to the other is harder than it sounds, because so much of what makes you good enough to lead in the first place was about being the one with the answers.

I will be honest that it can be uncomfortable. Someone will come to me with a technical question, or a problem in a system or a process they work in every day, and part of me thinks, why are you asking me? You know this better than I do. There is an instinct to have the answer, to prove I still add value, and when the answer is genuinely theirs to give and not mine, that instinct has nowhere useful to go.

What I have had to learn is that the value I add in those moments is not in the details. It was never going to be in the details. They have the details. My job is something else.

The thing I can do, that is genuinely hard to do from inside the problem, is frame it. Take the situation, or the decision, or the issue they are wrestling with, and lay it out in a way that gives them the room to think it through and to be heard. Ask the question that opens the problem up rather than one that closes it down. And often the most useful thing I do is help them see that they are the most knowledgeable person to make this call, and that they should have the confidence to make it.

Because a lot of the time, when an expert brings me a question, they are not actually missing the answer. They have it, or they are most of the way there. What they are looking for is the space to work it out, or a sounding board, or the confidence that comes with being trusted to decide. If I jump in with my own less-informed take, I take that away from them. If I frame it well and then get out of the way, they usually land somewhere better than I could have taken them, and they own the outcome because it was theirs.

Leading people who know more than you was never about staying ahead of them. It is about creating the conditions where their knowledge turns into good decisions, and where they walk away knowing the decision was theirs to make. I would still take a team full of people who can run circles around me in their areas, every time. And I still catch myself reaching for the answer when it was never mine to give. Getting out of the way is a thing I practice, not a thing I have finished learning.