You Can’t Know It All: Why I Wrote the Book By Wanda Wallace

You Can’t Know It All: Why I Wrote the Book

By Wanda Wallace

I have coached many women who were seen as great, amazing contributors in the workplace – highly valued by clients, managers, peers – but who were not seen as the next leader of the group. On the one hand, these women were valued because of their knowledge, experience and expertise. But on the other hand, they struggled to accept an expedient compromise. They saw all the complexities in the details and wanted to make sure those details were accurately understood and captured. In effect, they saw their job as controlling quality and thereby limiting risk.

As it happens, the people who were taking on the next level leadership roles were not so wedded to (or perhaps adept at) the depth, complexity or detail. They were more interested in making a reasonable call and moving things forward. The conundrum for women was that what had made them so valuable and had built their careers was what was holding them back now.

If we think about the background of women who are in the corporate world today, they were probably great students all the way through university where detail, perfection and doing it yourself got rewarded. Early in their careers that extra attention to detail also got them noticed, and in those early years they were doing the work themselves. When they became team leaders, they were often valued as a leader because of their knowledge and experience.

As a result, women learned to rely on their knowledge to build their personal brand and their network. In effect, they could let their work speak for itself…Until that was no longer effective for taking the next step in their career, and they were not being promoted due to a lack of competence or expertise, but because they did not know how to transition.

As I began to articulate the transitions that must happen to keep advancing careerwise (or rather, to have increasing impact), I realized that women were not the only ones struggling with this transition. IT professionals were the first to make this clear to me. As IT became more and more important, technologists were being asked to step away from their specialist knowledge and interface with business leaders in a different way. They were facing the same challenges as I saw among women.

Then it became apparent that the same obstacle appeared for anyone who had built a career on depth of knowledge and were now being asked to transition to a broader, more ambiguous role. This included engineers, programmers, traders, sales experts, HR professionals, lawyers, marketers, communications people, operations teams… just about everyone.

What we have disregarded in the conversation about leadership in the last decade is the fact that knowledge is so essential. People do not want to be led by someone who has little to no knowledge of their work. People want leaders who can understand the challenges in depth and can help solve problems. At the same time, those leaders have to balance between being the expert among experts and not being an expert among experts – that is between leadership that is driven by expertise and leadership that spans across knowledge domains. It’s not one or the other, it’s a balancing act.

As a Managing Partner of Leadership Forum, where we help leaders and teams improve the quality of their conversations in every aspect of organizational life – from team debate to inclusivity, career goals, feedback cultures, and strategic insight – I had many opportunities to

watch men and women transition to more senior roles, where the team knew more than the leader. I recognized that my experience and knowledge base was invaluable for expert executors transitioning to roles with a greater span of responsibility. By putting all that I had encountered into a book, I recognized an opportunity to help people step outside of their comfort zone in order to advance their career in the age of deep expertise, where general management is dead. And that is how You Can’t Know It All: Leading in an Age of Deep Expertise came to be.

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The Source: Dr. Wanda T. Wallace, managing partner of Leadership Forum, coaches, facilitates, and speaks on improving leadership through better conversations. She hosts the weekly radio show and podcast “Out of the Comfort Zone” and is the author of You Can’t Know It All: Leading in the Age of Deep Expertise. Learn more at leadership-forum.com, wandawallace.com, outofthecomfortzone.com.

YOU CAN’T KNOW IT ALL: LEADING IN THE AGE OF DEEP EXPERTISE

Today’s organizations are packed full of experts in every area from marketing to risk to sales to IT. Many of these people are also leaders, heading teams or large departments. They are followed because they know more than the rest of their group. They are followed because of their credibility as experts.

The toughest transition in business comes when expert leaders are asked to move beyond their expertise and lead a less homogenous group. Suddenly, experts face a new set of problems. They struggle to gain basic competence in dozens of areas without having to become the expert in every aspect. In Wanda Wallace’s experience, this move—from expert leader to a broader kind of authority—requires a new mindset about how to lead.

Wallace explains what few people understand—how to add value as a leader when you’re dealing with an ever growing set of responsibilities over which you have little detailed knowledge. The work you do and the way you interact with people must also change. Managing now requires a light touch and a different approach to delegation. Above all, managing is about recognizing that while you may not do all the work of your team, you must enable the team to do the work. In this world, trust becomes essential.

In You Can’t Know It All, Wallace presents the coaching model she has developed to address the challenges of this transition. She offers strategies for individuals to navigate their new roles and learn to combine their expertise with their leadership responsibilities. She gives essential advice on the fundamental change in mind-set that this requires.

This invaluable handbook offers novice and experienced managers alike insights into their own careers, explains why their star performers may suddenly be floundering, and provides essential tools for guiding development.

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