I remember the day I got the approval.
The approval was to hire a new role and add a skill set to our team that we didn’t have. I had recommended because I could see the need for it, but as I worked with our HR director to research the position and understand what it would take to hire someone who was genuinely good at it, I started to feel a little intimidated.
The salary was higher than anything I had ever offered someone who would report directly to me. More importantly, it was clear that we would be hiring someone with expertise I didn’t have myself.
Up until that point, much of my leadership experience had come from moving through the ranks myself. I had led people whose jobs I understood because, in many cases, I had done those jobs before. There was a certain comfort that came with that. I could look at the work, understand how it was produced, and have a pretty informed opinion about whether it was good.
This was different. We needed someone who knew things I didn’t know, and I wasn’t going to be able to sit beside them and explain how to do their job better. If they brought me a technical problem, there was a good chance they already knew more about it than I ever would.
If I’m being truthful, that made me wonder whether I was qualified to lead them.
I wish I could say there was a particular book, podcast, or piece of advice that suddenly made me comfortable with it, but there wasn’t. I had listened to plenty of leadership content over the years and had heard stories about great leaders surrounded by highly capable people. I had experienced some of that myself, but much of my management experience had involved employees who needed more active direction.
In this case, I really just had to experience something different. We hired the person, and for a while I was building the plane while I was flying it.
About a year into working together, I realized something I hadn’t expected. I was probably doing a better job leading this employee than I had done leading some of the people whose jobs I understood much better.
Part of that was certainly the person we hired. They were talented, motivated, and held themselves to a very high standard. They didn’t need me standing over their shoulder telling them how to do the work, and I quickly learned that trying to manage them that way wouldn’t have added much value anyway.
Over time, my role became much more about asking questions. Do you have everything you need to knock this out of the park? Are there gaps between the skills you have today and the skills you’ll need to be successful here? What am I not asking that I should be asking? I don’t know enough about this world to know everything that’s possible, so what do you think we should be doing if we’re serious about reaching this goal?
Those became some of the most enjoyable leadership conversations I’ve had in my career. I wasn’t pretending to be the expert, and they didn’t need me to be. We were clear about where we were trying to go, and my role was to make sure they had the resources, support, and freedom to help us get there.
I also learned how important it was to let them be the expert. We had hired this person specifically because they knew things our team didn’t know. Giving them room to use that expertise reinforced that we valued what they brought to the organization and that they had made the right decision in joining us.
You may find yourself in a similar position as your business grows. At some point, you may hire someone who understands an area of the business at a level you simply don’t. If you’ve spent your career building the company rather than developing that particular expertise, that’s probably exactly what should happen when you make a strong hire.
It can still feel uncomfortable. How do you evaluate work you couldn’t necessarily produce yourself? How do you know whether they’re making good decisions? How do you provide useful leadership when you don’t have the technical expertise to tell them exactly how to do the job?
What helped me was getting very clear about where we were trying to go together. What are we actually trying to accomplish? What does success look like for the business? What constraints do we need to work within? What would we need to see six months from now to know we’re making progress?
Once we agreed on those things, I didn’t need to prescribe every step along the way. I could provide context about the business, ask questions, remove barriers, and make sure they had what they needed. They could bring the expertise that we hired them to bring.
If you already have someone on your team whose expertise exceeds your own, and you’re not completely confident about how to lead them, there is a conversation you could have today. You might simply ask:
Do you feel like you have the tools and training you need not only to do your job well today, but to continue growing professionally?
Then listen carefully to the answer. If they say yes, ask them where they see the biggest opportunity to make a greater impact. What would they improve if they had the opportunity? What are they seeing that you may not be seeing? Where do they believe the business should invest more attention?
If the answer is no, that gives you somewhere else to go. Ask where they’d like to grow and what they think would help them become better at their job. They may already have a course bookmarked, be researching a certification, or be spending their own time learning about something they believe would make them more effective.
Helping them may be surprisingly simple. Maybe the course costs $150 and you pay for it. Maybe you give them a couple of hours during the workweek to complete it instead of expecting them to do it at night while they’re trying to spend time with their family. Maybe you connect them with someone who has deeper expertise and give them time to learn.
Your business gets an employee with a broader skill set, but they get something too. They see that you’re paying attention to where they want to grow and that you’re willing to invest in helping them get there.
I spent the early part of that hiring process wondering whether I was qualified to lead someone who knew more than I did. Looking back, I think the uncertainty actually helped me because it forced me to stop relying so heavily on my own expertise and pay closer attention to what that person needed from me.
I didn’t need to be able to do their job. I needed to understand where we were going, ask good questions, make sure they had what they needed, and give them room to do the work we hired them to do.
If you’re sitting across from an employee who knows more about their craft than you do, you may be in a better position to lead them than you think.
