Getting promoted to a job that includes responsibility for areas outside your domain can be downright terrifying. Your employees may ask questions that you don’t know the answers to, and may not even fully understand.
"When you're a technical expert, you know your value to the organisation," says Wanda Wallace, president and chief executive of Leadership Forum and author of Reaching the Top. "But when you don't have the content expertise – or the 'best' content expertise, you struggle with: What is my value?"
Figuring out the answer to that question requires a change in mindset. "Your role is no longer to be an individual contributor," says Linda Hill, a professor at Harvard Business School and the co-author of Being the Boss. "Your job is to set the stage and, by definition, that means you will have people who are more experienced, more up-to-date and have more expertise working under you."
And while it may feel professionally disconcerting at first, it bodes well for your future. "The higher you go in an organisation, the more you're expected to make decisions on which you might not have direct experience or expertise," says Roger Schwarz, an organisational psychologist and the author of Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams. "It's a beginning of the shift in your career."
Here are some tips on how to make that transition as seamlessly as possible.
– Face your fears. It’s natural to feel worried or insecure about your ability to manage someone who has superior experience. According to Schwarz, the first step is to consider whether your fear is based in reality.
“If no one has said anything to you directly or indirectly, you need to look deeper and ask yourself: Where is this fear coming from?”
– Seek counsel. “Talking to peers, coaches, and mentors about your feelings and fears of inadequacy” will help you feel less alone and may also give you ideas on how to handle the situation, says Wallace.
– Get informed. “You don’t need to become a technical expert, but you do need to know enough about the details to know where the problems lie,” Wallace says.
– Confront any issues. If members of your team express concerns about your ability to lead, or you hear the office rumour mill churning with spite, you need to address the issue head on.
– Give – and take – feedback. “It’s rather foolish to think about giving feedback” on your direct reports’ area of expertise when you don’t have the technical chops to do so, says Wallace. “So keep your comments to areas where you have authority and legitimacy,” she says.
– Add value. Perhaps the best way to gain credibility and trust as a manager is to demonstrate “the value you add to the team”, says Wallace. It could be in “how you bring people together, how you use your network to get work done, how you communicate with stakeholders, or the broader perspective” you provide.
– Give employees room. As the leader, one of your most important responsibilities is to “create an environment for talent to be expressed”, says Hill. This requires you learn how to step back and enable things to happen. “Your role is not to be the smartest person in the room anymore. Your role is to make space,” she says.
Wallace agrees. “Keep your hand hovering over the team” – like a parent helping a toddler learn how to walk, she says. “Be there, but don’t hold her hand all the time.”
– Project confidence, but not too much. Executive presence is something you must cultivate. There’s no secret sauce: Be calm. Be respectful. Take yourself and others seriously. Know when detail is necessary and when it’s not.
– Copyright Harvard Business Review 2015
Rebecca Knight is a freelance journalist in Boston and a lecturer at Wesleyan University.
