Leading Well When You Are Not the Expert
As you rise higher, you start to handle projects and decisions where you are not the expert or have the most context. Learn to use questions to understand priority, rationale, and next steps.
When you become a manager of a manager, you are no longer in the day-to-day of your teams. You may also begin to manage people who are in other functions and have critical expertise that you don’t. This means that quite frequently, you find yourself with less knowledge and understanding than the person or team who is looking for feedback, guidance, or a decision from you. And you no longer have the luxury of time and bandwidth to say “Let me research that and get back to you.”
What’s the alternative?
Executives and managers use the Socratic method to expose gaps or inconsistencies and to make a decision together. Rather than coming up with an answer in a black box, the leader’s job is to check that the critical thinking process used is sound and to provide any missing context you have given your altitude and position that might affect the outcome of the project or decision.
The probing questions follow along these lines:
What are you trying to achieve? Why is it important to achieve this? These questions probe whether the team has the right goal and priorities in mind when building the plan and evaluating trade-offs. If the goal or prioritization is not right, then anything that follows from it (e.g. the plan) will not be right.
What is your proposed plan and why? What options did you consider? What were the pros and cons? These questions provide a deeper view into what the team has already considered and allow the leader to add additional context or considerations. The leader may also provide feedback on whether the team is weighing trade-offs appropriately.
Who has seen this? What feedback have you gotten? Once there is a plan that is agreed upon, we get into critical execution details. A leader is often probing on alignment and buy-in between teams and can provide feedback on others whose work will be impacted or who may provide additional necessary input for tradeoffs.