I’ve never understood why more leaders don’t use the expertise sitting right in front of them. My solution to almost any problem is to find the smartest person I can who has some expertise in the problem I am trying to solve and borrow their brilliance. So, when a colleague at my university published a law review article directly relevant to an administrative problem I was responsible for handling for the university, I did what seemed obvious: I read it, carefully, and emailed her to ask if she had time to talk.
After that conversation, my colleague became genuinely engaged in fixing the relevant issues on campus, contributing her knowledge to work she could just as easily have stood apart from and criticized. I’ve led enough experts to know that’s not the default.
What I’ve come to realize is that accessing someone’s expertise isn’t just good problem-solving. For the brilliant, highly autonomous, challenging people that knowledge organizations depend on—faculty, senior engineers, lawyers, designers, researchers—it’s a fundamental act of leadership. Maybe the most important one.
These experts are the highest-stakes people in any knowledge organization. Led well, they produce disproportionate value; led badly, they become the most expensive problem in the organization. They become disengaged or corrosive. Or they simply leave.
Source: Inside Higher Ed — Read the full article on the original site ↗