Yes, you can be an expert AND a leader!

There are professions where you need deep expertise to perform a job. I am thinking of technical experts like actuaries, risk managers, IT and information security specialists, or corporate lawyers. These professionals typically have in common that they are highly educated and spend the first few years of their career with further learning and accumulating experience. Only after a certain point in their career do they become people managers, initially managing a small group of employees and then possibly moving up in the hierarchy of their company. 

I often hear that it is a contraction to be an expert AND a leader, and that it would be better to have managers who are fully trained in management and leadership, rather than training experts to become leaders. Although I am the first to say that this is not a contradiction and that it is even necessary to have experts leading other experts, such as a chief actuary or general counsel, I know that quite a few experts in leadership positions have difficulty balancing their highly sophisticated expertise with leadership skills, such as thinking in larger contexts, influencing others, or inspiring their teams.

In my view, most can be traced back to the fact that these experts got standard leadership courses once they started their management careers. Because experts comprehend things quickly, they find leadership theory quite simple. And because they find it simple, they think that leadership practice is simple too. Therefore, they do not pay enough attention to it. No wonder these leaders have poor feedback on leadership performance and unhappy teams.

In my experience, these leaders do not need that much to change, it is more a matter of having the right mindset. Ideally, they should receive customized training. For my leadership courses, I developed “The Leadership Algorithm“ that provides solutions to various challenges and ensures that technical experts learn to combine their technical expertise with great leadership to become inspiring, dedicated, and successful leaders.

Please learn more about it at www.corporatelifemastery.com/leadership or contact me directly www.corporatelifemastery.com/contact.