?Why Your Professional Expertise Could Be Hurting Your Team (And How to Fix It)

Work Isn’t Just What You Do — It’s Who You Become

You think your job is just a job? Think again.

Your work doesn’t just influence what you do. It seeps into your thinking, behavior, and how you see the world, often more than personal relationships. Day by day, your work conditions and communication style shape how you think. It’s changing you, and you don’t even notice.

Work molds your identity.

Ever seen someone conditioned by their job? Like the teacher who explains even the simplest thing with unnecessary detail? Or the lawyer who analyzes every conversation like a contract? Maybe the accountant who plans family vacations with color-coded Excel sheets (guilty here). These aren’t isolated quirks. They’re side effects of what psychologists call Déformation professionnelle.

Your job becomes your lens. It gives you a sense of control, a roadmap for navigating life. You wear it like a badge.

The problem? It distorts your worldview without you realizing it.

You start thinking that your professional mindset is how the world works. You get comfortable, and soon, you stop questioning it. The more you rely on your professional habits, the less you challenge them.

You’ve mastered the hammer, so now every problem looks like a nail.

That’s where the trouble starts.

Are We All Confident Idiots?

Everyone believes they’re an above-average driver, lover, or job performer. Statistically? That’s impossible.

As our professional conditioning tightens, we overestimate our abilities in everything else.

We’ve all seen it — someone dominates a discussion, confidently offering solutions to problems they barely understand. And worse, they don’t even realize it. This is the Dunning-Kruger Effect at work: the less we know, the more we think we know.

It’s not just ignorance — it’s confident ignorance.

Just because we’re familiar with the hammer, we think we’re masters of the screwdriver, jigsaw, and everything else in the toolbox. Think of the engineer who suddenly believes they can run a marketing campaign, or the CEO who thinks they know more about software architecture than the developers. Sound familiar? Confidence soars, but actual skill? Not so much.

In teams, this is where the damage happens.

Loud, overconfident voices drown out the real experts — the ones who actually understand the terrain. Decisions driven by ego, not knowledge, lead to missteps, and performance takes a nosedive.

But it’s not just “them.” It’s “us.”

It’s on all of us to reflect on our professional conditioning and, second, how it leads to overconfidence.

Both are unconscious, deeply human biases. Don’t be too hard on yourself — or someone else. Instead, directly address them.

How to Avoid the Expertise Trap

Breaking free from this trap takes serious self-reflection, a willingness to learn from past failures, and a lot of humility.

But you don’t have to do it alone.

Embrace your team.

There’s a way to work together, avoid the expertise trap, and come up with solutions that:

• Naturally surface fresh ideas,
• Encourage diverse perspectives and open up the discussion,
• Judge ideas on merit, not dominance,
• Promote equal voice through anonymous contributions, and
• Drive decisions by data, not egos.

You’ll need some help from the right tools, Nyord for instance, because in traditional person-to-person meetings, the “hammer” tends to come back to hit you.

Summing up: In a world where knowledge changes fast, the real experts are those who know when to challenge their own thinking. It’s time to stop letting biases run the show and start empowering every voice.