Strong Suits
Why leadership isn't about knowing everything
There’s a thing that sometimes happens when you’re talking to someone - a friend, a colleague, a random person at a party - and they venture into a conversational territory that is familiar to them but unknown to you. An example of this from my own life is anything to do with cars and driving. I have a licence but have only ever driven for a brief period after I passed my test back when I was seventeen - this mostly consisted of driving my drunken friends back from parties and praying they wouldn’t vomit all over my dad’s car. As a grown up, neither I nor anyone in my household owns a car, and, because I generally dislike driving, my partner will drive whenever we need to hire one to go somewhere.
So on the occasion that someone starts up some vehicle related chat - the route they took to drive from London to Edinburgh say, or their approach to selecting a new car - I can very quickly feel that not only do I have nothing to add but I don’t really understand the basic frameworks within which the conversation is taking place. I know nothing of A roads and M roads - in my view the most sensible way to get to Edinburgh is to jump on the train at Kings Cross and arrive in the city centre four and a half hours later, offering you the opportunity to both have a little nap en route and take in the delightful views of Berwick upon Tweed just before you cross the border. I know genuinely nothing about how much cars cost, how long they might reasonably last or the practicalities of hybrid vs electric vs diesel. So I find myself not only unable to offer an opinion but unable to really contribute to the conversation at all, as I don’t have enough knowledge to ask an intelligent question.
Now, imagine you’re in your first ever executive level leadership job. There are many different career paths you could have taken - let’s say you’ve come from running marketing and fundraising teams, so you’re used to leading people, hitting targets, working with other departments and raising money. In your first week in your new role, you have a one to one with the Head of Finance. She starts talking to you about some challenges she’s encountered with this year’s audit. Then a question about whether a particular purchase should sit on the P&L or the asset register. She shares her view that the way depreciation is calculated has never made a lot of sense to her and perhaps now is the moment to review. She looks at you expectantly, waiting for your response.
Often, when you step into a leadership role for the first time, you are coming from a position of being the organisational expert in something. In the example above, you would likely have had more experience in marketing and/or fundraising than the people you were managing, and in running the team, you would be drawing on not only your leadership and management skills but also your expertise. Your team could come to you with practical problems and you might have suggestions based on the campaigns or strategies you’ve previously deployed. With an organisational leadership position comes a new challenge - you’ll be responsible for a much broader range of people and departments, some of which you might have little to no experience of.
When you first encounter this phenomenon, it has the potential to make you feel like an absolute fraud. You can hear your brain shouting at you: ‘You’re meant to be in charge! Say something intelligent!’ But when you haven’t got experience to draw on, and when the very basis of the question might leave you baffled, this is an almost impossible task. It’s important to remember, though, that this is the experience of every leader everywhere. We cannot be experts in every department that we manage - instead, we will likely come with one or two strong suits, where we’ve had real, hands on experience that we can draw on, and a whole ton of areas where we have little to no knowledge of the fine detail. People come to leadership via so many different routes - fundraising, marketing, operations, finance, producing to name but a few - so each leader will be different in terms of what their strong suits are.
And whatever they are or aren’t, the good news is this - being a leader does not require you to know more about a particular department or area of the organisation than the department head who’s in charge of it. It requires you to know enough in order to support that person in making good decisions about priorities and approaches, and to understand how it fits into the overall vision and direction for the organisation. If it’s a strong suit, great - you’ve already got what you need. If not, you need to draw on a different skillset - asking intelligent questions.
To use our financial example above - you might first want to ask your Head of Finance what she needs from you in each instance. Perhaps she’s just letting you know there are a few hiccups with the audit - asking what the implications are will give you much more useful information than a lengthy description of the issues themselves. A question about P&L vs asset register sounds like something she’s looking to get out of her own head and bounce around with someone else - get her to explain the pros and cons of both and she’ll probably come up with her own answer in the course of describing these to you. And if she’s got big ideas about depreciation (I guess somebody has to) that you might need more time to digest, get her to write you one page on what she thinks doesn’t work about the current system and what her alternative might be, so you can make sure you have enough time to get your head round it before discussing.
Ironically, it might be that you encounter more of a challenge in the areas where you do have the technical knowledge and detail. Part of being a leader is giving up the status of the expert - it’s no longer your job to be the person that knows the most about something, and regular deep diving into the nitty gritty takes you away from the thing that only leaders can do - direction and decisions. Your job is to decide where you’re going and then keep the ship on course - let other people do the actual rowing, otherwise you’ll quickly find that, without anyone to keep their eyes on the horizon, everyone’s managed to get lost.