When the Leader Is Not the Expert

Guest Author: Minnu Paul, Director of Enrollment Operations & Global Education

Higher education organizations are being asked to change at a remarkable pace. New

technologies are changing how we work, financial and demographic pressures are

forcing institutions to reconsider long-standing practices, and student expectations

continue to evolve. At the same time, most institutions cannot stop operating while they

redesign themselves. The work of today has to continue while the work of tomorrow is

being built.

This creates an interesting challenge for leaders. As the complexity of the work

increases, it becomes less likely that the person leading it will also be the person who

knows the most about every part of it.

For much of my career, I had a fairly consistent approach to management. When I

inherited a new process, system, policy, or problem, I learned it. I tried to understand

how all the pieces worked together, figured out how I wanted the work to be done, broke

it into something repeatable, and then trained someone else to do it. Delegation

generally came after understanding.

That approach served me well for a long time.

More recently, however, I found myself leading work where that sequence was no

longer possible. The scope was larger, the timeline was shorter, and the expertise

required was distributed across multiple people. In some areas, the people I was

leading understood the details of the work much better than I did.

It forced me to reconsider what my role was when I could no longer lead primarily

through expertise.

From Understanding the Work to Understanding What the Work Needs

During a large implementation, we organized small teams of three or four people around

specific areas of the project. We called them nuclear teams. They were expected to

take ownership of their area, understand the problem, work through the details, and

move the implementation forward.

There was significant time pressure, and none of their regular responsibilities

disappeared while this was happening.

Initially, I thought my primary responsibility was to give the teams enough direction and

then allow them to execute. What I began to realize was that effective delegation

required considerably more discernment than that.

The teams needed autonomy, but autonomy did not mean absence.

There were moments when they needed me to step back because they understood the

problem better than I did. There were other moments when they needed more direction,

sometimes at a surprisingly granular level. Sometimes they needed help making a

decision. At other times, they did not need an answer at all; they needed someone

outside the details to help them determine what mattered most.

I started thinking about the work like building a house.

When you are building a house, there is a sequence. The foundation has to come

before the bedrooms, and the bedrooms have to come before we begin worrying about

curtains. This is obvious when we are talking about a house. It becomes considerably

less obvious when several deadlines are approaching, multiple problems are competing

for attention, and everyone is responsible for ten other things.

The people closest to the work necessarily spend much of their time in the details.

Someone still has to maintain enough distance to see the whole house.

I began to understand that part of my responsibility was not to know every detail of the

work, but to know enough about the whole to help the team distinguish the foundation

from the curtains.

Delegation Changed the Work

Something else happened that I did not fully anticipate.

As the teams began working together, they started identifying each other's strengths.

Within groups of three or four people, they quickly learned who was particularly good at

organizing information, who understood a technical component, who noticed

inconsistencies, and who could take a complicated issue and make sense of it.

They began redistributing work among themselves accordingly.

I did not design those relationships. The work created an opportunity for them to

discover what each person could contribute.

That changed the way I thought about delegation. I had traditionally viewed delegation

as something that happened after I had figured out the work: understand it, structure it,

teach it, and then transfer responsibility.

This experience showed me another possibility. Sometimes people develop through the

process of figuring out the work themselves. My responsibility is then to create enough

structure for that learning to occur without removing the ownership that makes it

possible.

This also made the distinction between direction and micromanagement much less

simple than I had previously understood it.

There are times when broad direction is appropriate. There are also times when

someone needs considerably more specificity. The amount of direction may change as

the work evolves, as someone's experience grows, or as pressure increases.

The question I now find more useful is not simply, Am I getting too involved?

It is: Is my involvement helping someone develop the ability to do the work, or am

I replacing their ability to do it?

What Pressure Does to Good People

The other part of this experience was watching capable people operate under sustained

pressure.

There were moments when someone became stuck on something relatively small or

overlooked something that seemed obvious from the outside. I recognized it because I

have done exactly the same thing.

There have been times when I was managing several complicated problems and one of

my own managers asked me a remarkably simple question: Have you thought about

this?

I had not.

Not because I did not know better, but because I was holding ten other pieces of

information in my head at the same time.

Experiencing that myself changed the way I interpreted it when I saw it in others.

It is easy to tell someone,"You're overthinking this," or "You're making this too

complicated." Those statements may even contain some truth. But I have become

increasingly skeptical about whether they are useful. They tell someone what we think

about their thinking without helping us understand why they arrived there.

A more useful question may be: What information were they holding when they made

that decision?

Dane Jensen's work on pressure helped give language to some of what I was

observing. Pressure affects attention, memory, judgment, and our ability to access

capabilities that may normally come easily to us. The answer is not necessarily to

remove pressure. Some pressure is unavoidable, and sometimes necessary. The

challenge is understanding what pressure is doing to us and to the people around us.

That distinction became particularly important during implementation. I found myself

paying much more attention to the teams: how they were talking to each other, where

anxiety was increasing, where momentum was slowing, and where people seemed to

be spending too much time trying to make one piece perfect.

The question became not whether pressure was present, but whether the pressure

was still helping the work move or beginning to interfere with the team's ability to

think.

Learning When Good Enough Is Actually Good Enough

This was particularly challenging for me because I understand perfectionism quite well.

When someone cares about the quality of their work, it is very easy to continue

improving one piece because you can see everything that is still wrong with it. But when

an organization is managing multiple priorities simultaneously, perfection in one area

can come at the expense of progress everywhere else.

I began talking with the teams much more explicitly about what a minimum viable

product looked like.

Not everything needed to be finished at the same level at the same time.

Some things needed to be right because everything else depended on them. Those

were foundation decisions.

Some things needed to be functional enough to move forward and could be improved

later.

Some things simply needed to wait.

I have started thinking about this as progressive perfection. The objective is still

excellent work. The difference is recognizing that excellence develops in stages. The

first version of something does not always need to carry the expectations of the final

version.

That distinction is particularly important when people feel personally responsible for the

quality of what they produce. Sometimes leadership means giving people permission to

move on—not because the work does not matter, but because the rest of the work

matters too.

The Questions I Am Learning to Ask

This experience has changed some of the questions I ask when I am leading work that I

do not personally own at the subject-matter level.

I find myself asking:

• What do I actually need to understand about this work to lead it responsibly?

• What does the team know that I should not try to recreate for myself?

• What decisions belong with the subject-matter experts, and which ones require a broader organizational perspective?

• Does the team need autonomy right now, or do they need more direction?

• If they need more direction, how granular does it need to be?

• What is foundational, and what can be improved later?

• Is the pressure creating useful urgency or beginning to reduce the team's ability to think clearly?

• Am I helping people prioritize, or am I taking ownership of the work back from them?

• What information needs to come back to me so I can continue seeing the larger picture?

I do not think there is a fixed answer to most of these questions. The answer can

change by project, by person, and sometimes by the week.

That may be the point.

Connecting Practice and Scholarship

As I reflected on this experience, I realized that several areas of scholarship help

explain what I was learning through practice.

Research on shared leadership challenges the assumption that leadership must

always reside primarily in one formal leader. Pearce and Conger describe leadership as

something that can be distributed among members of a group, particularly when

expertise and influence are spread across the team. That helped me better understand

what I was seeing when the nuclear teams began organizing work around their own

strengths.

Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety and team learning also provides

an important lens. Complex work requires people to ask questions, acknowledge

uncertainty, surface mistakes, and challenge assumptions. Those behaviors become

more difficult when people believe that not knowing something will be interpreted as

incompetence.

Research on cognitive load adds another dimension. Human attention and working

memory are limited. When people are processing multiple complex demands

simultaneously, the fact that they temporarily miss something obvious does not

necessarily tell us much about their capability. Sometimes what they need is not

correction, but help restoring perspective.

Finally, research on situational and adaptive approaches to leadership has long

challenged the idea that one leadership behavior works in every circumstance. The

amount of direction, support, autonomy, and involvement required depends partly on the

work, the environment, and the people doing it.

The scholarship did not give me these ideas. It gave me language for experiences I had

already lived and helped me understand why some of the approaches I was

experimenting with seemed to work.

The Responsibility Changes

Earlier in my career, I often demonstrated leadership by becoming deeply competent in

the work and then helping others become competent in it.

I still believe there is tremendous value in leaders understanding the work they oversee.

But I am beginning to see that, as the scope of leadership expands, expertise alone

becomes an increasingly insufficient way to lead.

There will simply be too much to know.

The responsibility does not disappear. It changes.

Perhaps the work becomes learning how to maintain enough understanding of the

whole to ask better questions, recognize what matters, provide direction when it is

needed, and create enough space for people with deeper expertise to do work that may

ultimately be better than what we could have designed ourselves.

If that is true, then one of the more difficult transitions in leadership may be learning that

our value does not always come from knowing the most.

Sometimes it comes from knowing what the people who know more than us need in

order to do their best work.