Managing Leadership^®

I was having a conversation with a market analyst. He specialized in providing assessments of competitors, their capabilities and intentions. He had grown weary of constantly explaining and justifying his conclusions to those of us in strategy and operations, viewing us as essentially lay-people with limited preparation and capacity for comprehending the complex and precise intricacies of his field’s methodology.

“You know,” he said, “when one of us comes in and presents an evaluation of a competitor, you all could save yourselves a lot of time and trouble by simply accepting it uncritically as fact, and then just turning your attention to what you’re going to do with it. After all, we are the experts - not you - and we shouldn’t have to explain ourselves to you all the time.”

So there it is: If gurus and experts can’t enthral you with the showmanship they wrap their proposals in, they try to intimidate you with the credentials they wrap themselves in - and your lack of them. But whether they are wearing floppy shoes or wing-tips, experts who display such an attitude are revealing that they have feet of clay.

As a manager - and particularly, a generalist - the key thing for you to remember about experts is not that they possess abilities you lack, but rather that they specialize in areas that you don’t have time for. That is, they work for you, whether on staff or as consultants, and whether they are your juniors, or even organizationally your peers or seniors.

You see, in today’s world, the traditional relationship has changed between those with knowledge and those with power. It remains largely the case that knowledge equals power, but it is less commonly the case that the person with the former possesses the latter. Rather, the person with responsibility and authority controls the experts, employs them to produce or present the work they do, and disciplines the resulting information to organizational ends.

Recall that in today’s organizations, the specialist outlook is essentially centrifugal. It is your very lack of it that enables you to make truly effective use of it, integrating it with the products of other specialties and other managerial inputs, and disciplining it to the needs of the organization.

The fact that you as a generalist lack specialist knowledge does not represent a disadvantage, a shortcoming, or an inability to come to grips with information. Rather, it indicates precisely the reverse. You don’t produce that information, but you commission it, and it is you who are uniquely able to understand its place in the greater scheme of things, and to make meaningful use of it.

Experts and intellectuals share an impulse to preach, a tendency toward dogmatism, and even an impatience with those who question them. They also share an inevitably related inclination to either entice or intimidate you into compliance.

But remember that it is you who employ their work, not the reverse. And if you find yourself unable to do so, the fault is more likely to be in their work than in you. After all, if they are unable to justify their assessments, there is a strong possibility that they aren’t justified.

He or she may be the expert, but you are the manager, and it is you who are in charge. Times have changed. It is best that both you and your expert advisors understand that.

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This post is a part of a series. You can learn about and link to the other articles here: Intellectuals

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Today’s tip: If you have found the discussion here over the past two days of interest, you will want to visit this contemporary angle on it, an excellent assessment of the mutually distorting dynamics between consultants and clients, posted by Jamie Notter at his eponymous site.

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