You Can't Know It All

Leading in the Age of Deep Expertise

Wanda T. Wallace

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780062835987
• eBook ISBN: 9780062835994
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

Today’s organizations are packed full of experts in every area from marketing to risk to sales to IT. Many of these people are also leaders, heading teams or large departments. They are followed because they know more than the rest of their group. They are followed because of their credibility as experts.

The toughest transition in business comes when expert leaders are asked to move beyond their expertise and lead a less homogenous group. Suddenly, experts face a new set of problems. They struggle to gain basic competence in dozens of areas without having to become the expert in every aspect. In Wanda Wallace’s experience, this move—from expert leader to a broader kind of authority—requires a new mindset about how to lead.

Wallace explains what few people understand—how to add value as a leader when you’re dealing with an ever growing set of responsibilities over which you have little detailed knowledge. The work you do and the way you interact with people must also change. Managing now requires a light touch and a different approach to delegation. Above all, managing is about recognizing that while you may not do all the work of your team, you must enable the team to do the work. In this world, trust becomes essential.

In You Can’t Know It All, Wallace presents the coaching model she has developed to address the challenges of this transition. She offers strategies for individuals to navigate their new roles and learn to combine their expertise with their leadership responsibilities. She gives essential advice on the fundamental change in mind-set that this requires.

This invaluable handbook offers novice and experienced managers alike insights into their own careers, explains why their star performers may suddenly be floundering, and provides essential tools for guiding development.

Chapter 1
The Expert Leader at His or Her Best

Meet Lionel, the chief financial officer (CFO) of a corporation with 120,000 employees worldwide.

Although the company’s finance function is immensely complex, he has run it smoothly for years, presiding over more than six hundred handpicked, well-trained subordinates, each of whom brings deep expertise to the table. One day, while thinking about a planned corporate acquisition, he has a sense that something isn’t quite complete.

When this thought comes to him he is no longer at work in London. He is back home in Surrey, taking a walk with his dogs in the long summer evening. The acquisition deal has moved from agreement in principle to negotiations about integration—details as large and small as performance measurement and employees’ parking allocations. He has worked it over with his colleagues, including his company’s chief human resources officer. But he feels there is something not quite clear—inconsistent, fuzzy—about the target company’s presentation of its risk calculations. After he raised questions in a meeting today, a member of his team assured him that the risk assessments had been double-checked. The chief risk officer confirmed that the calculations were accurate. But he still feels something is wrong.

Lionel is an expert among experts—he is one of the world’s smartest executives in his field, with an incredible retention of detail. He knows the previous-quarter numbers for every business unit. If something in a financial statement puzzles him, he can be certain that the confusion stems from a problem in the source material, not from any gaps in his memory or mastery. He is notorious for drilling deeply in his meetings with business leaders.

After he gets back to the house and takes off his Wellingtons, his wife notices his expression and asks if anything is wrong. “Just a hunch,” he says.

The next day he tosses a folder onto the desk of the team member who had reassured him the day before. “Triple-check these risk calculations,” he says. The team scrambles and reports to him that indeed everything seems correct, but he then goes around the table asking everyone present, “Do you believe these numbers? Are you one hundred percent sure this specific number on page fifteen is exact? How did you arrive at this calculation? Would you stake your life on its accuracy?”

It’s awkward. It’s uncomfortable.

He takes the folder to the chief human resources officer, and after a good forty-five minutes, a technical financial calculation reveals that the target company’s pension plan includes a potentially devastating risk exposure that neither he nor the chief human resources officer had seen until then. No one else had noticed it, either—not even the target company’s CFO (if everyone is to be believed).

Lionel’s team members are awed and humbled. With a little assistance from the team, Lionel prepares a presentation for the CEO recommending that the company alter the terms of the deal or—failing that—pull the plug.

The CEO and board are grateful that Lionel has once again saved the company unpleasant surprises and a bunch of money. Analysts also praise him. They know they can count on his projections and his precision, and the stock price reflects the analysts’ trust.

All of these people recognize that Lionel is a true hero, that he did in this case what no one else could have done. He brings to bear the most positive, constructive, valuable aspects of expertise-based leadership.

The Expertise-Based Mind-Set

For Lionel, it’s all in a day’s work. The best expert leaders, like him, routinely help companies achieve excellence. In its ideal form, expertise-based leadership, which I’ll refer to as E-leadership, is a potent combination of thorough knowledge in a given field and a clear conception of how that knowledge can and should be applied to improve team and company performance.

The proliferation of high-ranking experts like Lionel in the corporate landscape is a relatively recent phenomenon, the result of growth in the knowledge economy, which leads companies to expand their operations in highly technical fields. Back in the day, mastering finance in a public company required nothing more than a training in accounting and a few years of business experience; by the 1990s it required considerable specialization. Robert Eccles of Harvard Business School points out that in 1958, the CFO of United Technology needed to know enough to prepare a 16-page annual report; in 2008, the annual report ran to 98 pages. Today it’s over 180 pages.1

What exactly do the best expert leaders bring to their jobs?

To answer this, it’s important to take a step back and look at what all leaders need to do. All leaders need to figure out how they add value, how they get the right work done, and how they interact with people. Those are the three basic dimensions of leadership. This is a framework I will come back to again and again throughout the book.

What sets the superb E-leader apart is his or her mind-set about what each of these dimensions means—in other words, the mental model about what great leaders do. Expert leaders add value to the company and the team through their knowledge, wisdom, and sense of responsibility for protecting the company. Their work is detailed, accurate, and focused on solving deep problems. They are often involved in the long-term strategic planning and direction of the company. Their interactions across the organization are based on the credibility of their expertise and the information they possess.

Most leadership positions involve a mixture of expert-based and non-expert-based roles and activities. There are very few management positions that are either one or the other. So when I discuss the elements of expert leadership, I will focus on the expertise-based aspects of leadership jobs. I’m simply trying to highlight the differences between expertise-based and non-expertise-based leadership.

So let’s look at what goes into superb expert leadership. The best way to do that is to examine the expectations that come with the role—from above, from peers, from subordinates, and from outside the organization. Through the lens of expectations, I will consider each of the three dimensions of excellent E-leadership in turn.

How You Add Value

Lionel is revered for his mastery of detail. He is very strategic and engaged when financial numbers are involved. His colleagues and his board acknowledge that he abounds with wisdom of a certain kind—what I would call the wisdom of depth.

Lionel has a perfect grasp of what specific, tangible actions can be taken to solve problems. This knowledge is so thorough that it confers an ability to sense what’s happening throughout his area of expertise. His hunch that something was wrong in the acquisition plans, and later his sense of what to do about the problem, is an example.

The wisdom of depth sums up how E-leaders add value, but to further understand its nuances and ramifications, let’s look at the elements of leadership choices that go into it: adding value tangibly, controlling quality and risk, contributing specific knowledge, and doing it yourself.

Adding Value Tangibly

Superiors, peers, subordinates, and outside observers of the company expect the E-leader’s decisions to be within a well-defined scope and to be based on a thorough assimilation of the details, extensive content knowledge and experience, and strict application of logic.

An E-leader’s tangible contributions often include an ability to cut through the bureaucracy and get to the heart of an issue that solves a customer problem, a talent that can be extremely valuable to the company. People at an airline struggling with a systemic engine problem do not want to talk to a general manager; they want to talk to the engineer who designed that particular engine. The E-leader can make that happen.

An E-leader can point to the specific value he adds to the company and to the team every day. He goes home at night feeling relatively comfortable with the contribution he made to the company that day.

Controlling Quality and Risk

This dimension reflects the leader’s beliefs about his or her role and obligations to the company.

By and large, the main thing expected from many E-leaders is to execute in a way that protects the company, its clients, or its customers.

I know I’m going to get myself into trouble making a blanket statement like that. There are of course many E-leaders whose work is devoted less to protection than to exploration and exploitation of opportunities: R&D heads, market specialists, sales leaders, and so on. But the majority of the E-leaders I have worked with play an essentially defensive role in execution. Let me directly quote an executive much like Lionel: “My job,” he told me, “is to protect the firm.”

At the time, that comment brought me up short, but after thinking about it I realized it’s a great insight. CEOs want to feel secure that while they’re going about selling the strategy, the company is protected from shocks and mistakes. They rely on E-leaders to make things happen and in so doing make sure the company is safe.

The corporate counsel is expected to keep the firm out of legal trouble. The CFO is expected to help the company avoid financial and regulatory pitfalls. The head of risk is expected to protect the company by knowing about all exposures.

Typically, with a responsibility to protect comes a need for control. Many of the most dominant E-leaders have a penchant for control. The best are not dictators or micromanagers, but they often feel most comfortable when they are in control of quality and know exactly what is going on in their organizations. Withhold information from an E-leader and you are asking for trouble.

To give you a sense ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Expert Leader at His or Her Best
• Chapter 2: Sonia’s Four Challenges
• Chapter 3: The Spanning Leader
• Chapter 4: Taking Stock of Yourself as Leader
• Chapter 5: How You Add Value
• Chapter 6: How You Get (the Right) Work Done
• Chapter 7: How You Interact with People
• Chapter 8: Gender and Spanning Leadership
• Chapter 9: The Spanning Leader in a Classic Expert Role
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Suggested Reading
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher