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.
(Summer Vibes, Teddy the Corgi, Barcelona, Spain)
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 on 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 gives the leader the opportunity 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.
What do you need that you don’t have yet? What do you need from me? One of the main jobs of a leader is to use their power and position to help resolve problems the team cannot on their own. This is an important question to clearly understand what resources, information, or decisions the team still needs to unblock execution, and how the leader can help.
What are your milestones or checkpoints? When do we meet again? Finally, the leader should help the team commit to the next milestone and check-in. This places structure and sets expectations on what to expect next. It also ensures the team breaks down the project into smaller pieces rather than tackling multi-month endeavors.
By the end of the discussion, you’ll now have the critical context you need on the project to help unblock resources or support, and the team will have gotten input along the way. You may have even made some critical decisions after evaluating the options together.
As a leader, this socratic method of discussion ensures that your feedback and guidance is timely, and that you respect the context, work, and expertise of the team. There is a strong power imbalance implied in this method though, so it would not work well with peers — we’ll discuss how to best leverage peer expertise in a future post!