THE IMPORTANCE OF KNOWING YOU DON’T HAVE TO KNOW EVERYTHING

Chances are that if you have been or are likely to be promoted from being part of a team, to leading the team in your first leadership experience, then that promotion may well be based on your technical competence and length of service. For instance, how good you are at your job and how long you’ve been doing it for, particularly if you have the longest length of service of any team member.??

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That certainly used to be the way that people were typically promoted from team member to team leader and fortunately, for the sake of everyone, that is increasingly changing. In some industries it was culturally appropriate to promote the longest serving team member and failure to do so would create such animosity from said longest serving member (and from fellow team members), that promoting anyone but them just wasn’t worth the collateral damage (a great example of a “short-term gain” followed by a “long-term pain”).??

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This is because the role of team leadership is primarily one of managing and leading people rather than of technical competence. When technical experts who are not proactive people leaders are promoted to leadership positions, it can be very tough not only for the team members, but also for team leader themselves. Recently I worked with two businesses that have shifted people back into their teams from leadership positions, and both people are hugely relieved to no longer have the responsibility for the team on their shoulders.?

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So, if you are one of the new breed of people who have been promoted because of your ability to lead rather than your length of service or your technical ability, then you will have to be prepared to be comfortable with the fact that some team members may be more knowledgeable and experienced in some areas than you- get used to this! The higher up the leadership-ladder you climb, and the broader your scope of direct reports and areas of responsibility, the greater the likelihood that you will be leading people who know a lot more about their particular field of work than you ever will.??

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This is part of the leadership journey, and it’s another example of becoming increasingly comfortable with feeling uncomfortable, because it will be a challenge for you having stepped up from a very specific area of competence to leading a team whose expertise may exceed your own. This may be a challenge to your ego and your “need to know it all”.??

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Nowhere in your job description will there be the requirement for you to ‘know it all’, and you will no doubt grow in your knowledge of other people’s areas of expertise. But, once again, your job is to lead people and make decisions that come from asking the right people the right questions so that the decisions that you make are well-informed.?

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To illustrate this, I was delivering a two-day Safety Leadership Program at KiwiRail, New Zealand’s only rail company. The two greatest challenges for me in delivering this program, and effectively leading people to safer leadership practices, was that I knew almost nothing about rail (having never worked with the business before), and probably less about safety than the course participants whose lives depended on it. Not only that, but the number of years that some of these guys had been involved in leadership was almost as many years as I had been alive for.??

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Regardless, I was very clear on my role which was to challenge and shift people to lead their teams towards greater levels of safety.?

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Because of my limited knowledge in terms of rail and safety, I began by dividing the course participants into four teams, with each team headed up by the longest serving rail employee, some of whom had been working in rail for over 40 years fulltime! I asked them to map out KiwiRail’s safety journey from the 1970s through to the 1980s and 1990s, into the new millennia, to the present day, and then even predict the safety future of KiwiRail in 20 years’ time.??

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This began incredibly animated conversations about safety where the ‘old-timers’ told the younger members of the group some of the unbelievably unsafe and dangerous practices that existed in the 1970s and 1980s such as drinking at the pub with managers on a Friday lunchtime, and then carrying back flagons of alcohol to drink whilst driving the locomotive for the rest of the afternoon. The young guys were absolutely incredulous and dumbfounded at how poor safety was 30 to 40 years ago, and how dramatically far the safety journey had progressed in that time. So having mapped out this phenomenal journey of progress up to the present day, it wasn’t difficult for these groups to then ‘blue sky’ what the ongoing safety journey might look like in 15 or 20 years’ time.??

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As you can imagine, the conversations were highly energised, and rather than having the older guys in the room bored, and even cynical regarding attending ‘yet another safety workshop’, instead for the first hour I essentially said nothing, and just facilitated conversations. Without them being aware of it, it was the older guys that were preaching about safety in a credible fashion that I could not have achieved in the first instance.?

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I was very clear on what my role was, and I played off the experience in the room to achieve productive conversations, so that when I finally began to talk about safety leadership it was on top of the platform that these longer serving team members had unknowingly created for me.?

Remember you don’t have to ‘know it all’ to lead effectively.?