Why you can’t be both a leader and an expert

This article is written by Jenn Lofgren CPHR, MCC, ICD.D for Incito Executive & Leadership Development .

Leadership – this is where your success as an expert has taken you. But while you thrived as an expert, you now find your expertise is actually hindering you in your leadership role.

Why is that?

As an expert, you had the answers, or at least the resources and techniques to find them. As a leader, your role is now to support your team in finding the answers themselves. This mindset transition is often overlooked, resulting in a lack of clarity about your role, sometimes for years. What, then, are your typical responsibilities as a leader? Leaders:

• Strategically think and develop future solutions.
• Empower their teams and maximize their potential.
• Let their teams fail.
• Are proactive, not reactive.
• Provide critical and curious feedback to their teams.
• Become experts at asking questions, not giving answers.

A leader is meant to bring their team to another level. An expert is part of the solution that the leader is creating.

Expert mindset hindering your leadership?

When my executive-level clients straddle this line between their old identity as “expert” and their new one as “leader,” it’s clear that when they refuse to let go of their expert mindset, they experience:

• Burnout: They feel that they have to do everything all the time and have all the answers.
• Conflicts with team members: They always give their expertise, often with closed ears.
• Inadequacy: They’re uncertain how to be successful as a leader.

The Peter principle tells us this happens because people are promoted due to their past successes, but can only succeed so far as their inadequacies allow them to. Without understanding their gaps in mindset and training, a leader will ultimately fail.

Moving from expert to leader

Don’t worry – it’s not all doom and gloom for leaders. Below are a few proactive steps you can take to ease your transition from an expert to a leader mindset.

1. Frame your role.

Get clear on what your role actually is. Write your own job description outlining what you’re supposed to be doing now. For example:

• Grow and develop your team.
• Use critical thinking to identify future opportunities and challenges.
• Build relationships across your organization for the betterment and support of your team.
• Help your team remove roadblocks, without doing it for them.

Ask questions and identify gaps in the ideas your team provides. Getting clear on your role today makes your team more effective for tomorrow. Ultimately, your role is not about problem-solving – that’s your team’s job. Your role is coaching, mentoring, developing, strategic thinking, supporting your team (not vice versa) and creating for the future.

2. Become more self-aware.

Begin noting when you want to jump in and be the “expert” with your team. This means understanding when you want to provide a solution rather than ask a question. If you’re not sure where to begin, ask your team and peers where they see you jumping in as an expert. A great question my clients use is, “Where do you see me voicing my opinion rather than asking questions?” Note the consistencies in their answers and make a conscious effort to pay attention to these times.

3. Develop leader technique strategies.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Leaders are not born. They are developed and supported in this role. Strategies for building a successful leader mindset include:

• Training with a coach to understand how to effectively support and develop your team.
• Creating reminders for yourself and reviewing them before you sit down with your team.
• Recognizing that it’s okay for your team to fail in certain instances, then exploring what they’ve learned during your debrief of the “failure”.
• Developing a list of go-to questions to keep yourself in a curious place and to gain a better understanding of your team’s point of view. For example: “Can you walk me through your thinking?” “How did you come to this decision?” “What led you to choose X over Y?”

I often liken the expert/leader mindset transition to that of writer/editor. A writer brings their expertise in creative thinking, grammar, spelling, etc. An editor brings curiosity to the writer’s work, looking for flow issues, gaps in content, missing information, why things are written a certain way and so forth. The editor elevates the writer’s work not by saying “this is how it should be written,” but by asking questions. Raise your team’s work by asking questions.

Setting yourself up for leadership success

The mistake we often make is promoting people because of their expertise, without considering that we’re actually putting them through a career change. It’s incorrect to assume that just because someone succeeds in their role as an expert (often a reactionary role), that they’ll also succeed as a leader (a proactive role).

Developing a successful leader mindset is really a lesson of letting go, becoming vulnerable, and transitioning from solution finder to curious questioner. If you are a leader and seeking ideas for what may be holding you back, start by exploring whether your expertise is actually the culprit. Become the leader you want to be, and let your team be the experts.

The original version of this article is found in The Inspired Leader . Compiled from more than a decade of coaching sessions with hundreds of leaders across diverse industries, The Inspired Leader serves as a comprehensive resource for both emerging and seasoned leaders alike.