Why Expertise Can Make You a Less Effective Leader

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Being the most knowledgeable and experienced person on your team is always a good thing, right?

Sydney Finkelstein says that expertise can steer you wrong in two important ways. It can stop you from being curious about new developments. And it can make you overconfident about your ability to solve problems.

Finkelstein is a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and an expert in leadership and talent development.In this episode, he offers leaders a supplement to expertise:  becoming more humble and open-minded. And he has research-backed advice to help you get there.

This episode originally aired on HBR IdeaCast in April 2019. Here it is.

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.

People work for years – decades – to become experts in their fields. There’s a sense that once you reach that level you’re set. You’re at the top of your game and can command most work situations with ease. But our guest today says there’s also big downsides to expertise.

Sydney Finkelstein has studied many managers who are the best at what they do – CEO’s, generals, chefs, coaches – and he’s found that some fall into what he calls the “expertise trap.”

Because they know everything, or almost everything, about their businesses or fields, they become incurious about different perspectives on them, or overconfident in other areas. Their knowledge and experience actually hold them back from continued professional success.

Luckily there are ways to avoid this trap, and Sydney’s here to discuss both the problem and those solutions with us. He’s a professor at the Tuck’s School Business at Dartmouth College and he’s the author of the HBR article, “Don’t Be Blinded by Your Expertise.” Sydney, thank you so much for coming in.

SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: Great to be with you Alison.

ALISON BEARD: So, when you talk about an expert, what exactly do you mean? What level?

SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: Well, there are experts in many walks of life. My focus is mostly around leaders in organizations of every type. And so, it’s someone who has a track record, who has mastered a body of knowledge, if you will, has been recognized for a degree of success and doesn’t actually have to be only very senior executives. It could be someone who is the best coder, the best market researcher. It could happen any level and most of us could think of people like that.

ALISON BEARD: And we think of that kind of expertise as a huge positive in the workplace. So, what are some of the key ways that it can be bad when it comes to making the right choices?

SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: So, like a lot of things in life, it’s not that it’s all one way, expertise is good. Experience has value. But it could turn the wrong way and in my research, there were two primary ways in which this could happen.

One is when you start to learn the wrong lessons from your experience, from your expertise. And so, you think you understand something and then you start applying it maybe in a little bit different area and it doesn’t quite apply.

The second type of thing that kind of creates this expertise trap is when you’re really good at something, you really know something, there’s a natural tendency and incentive really, to keep getting better at it. Because you’re getting rewarded for it. You’re being recognized as the expert. And at some point in time you get a diminishing returns thing going on and your improvements and knowledge, if you will, are going to be incremental.

And the real risk here is that while you spend all your time trying to get better at one thing, it turns out something else becomes much more important and you’ve lost the position because of that.

ALISON BEARD: Is it really a problem of going on autopilot to some degree? You have figured out the most efficient, effective way to get things done so you no longer question the process? At the same time, you’re highly productive, so how do you balance wanting to be as effective and efficient as you can be while also remaining open to new ways of doing things?

SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: Yeah. You know, I think a lot of managers, a lot of executives, ask themselves that question and part of it is their window, their lead time. If you’re later in your career and you think you can ride out that expertise, I can see a lot of people saying, “I’m going to do that.”

But for most people, especially with the pace of change and artificial intelligence and all kinds of other things going on, the necessity to keep almost reinventing yourself has never been higher. So, yes you can have a short-term or continue to have short-term wins, by being the expert, but you better hope that that expertise is going to continue to be the key element in the success of your business, of your team, of your organization.

And it’s really hard because if you think about it, it’s the thing that made your name, everyone knows who you are. They know why you’re good. And you need to give that up at some point, at least to some degree and that’s a tough transition for people.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And so, how do I recognize this problem in myself? If I’m a leader, I’m very good at what I do. I’m trying to project confidence. I’m trying to teach people. How do I know when I’ve got too far and crossed the line?

SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: Well, there’s no replacement for self-awareness. It’s a tough thing to do because it means you’re looking at yourself and evaluating yourself, but you want to get feedback from other people. I’m a big fan in the idea of 360-feedback, but not just that because that’s an old idea, but what you do as the follow up. So, go out of your way to look for new sources of information.

I think another basic thing you can do is look at your business, your, let’s say you’re a team leader, look at how it’s going. Look at what’s going on around you and ask yourself, “what else could happen?” Many times we talk about, especially today, digital transformation of all types. And everyone says, yes, its coming and we’re being disrupted and all the rest, but no one can kind of predict exactly when it’s going to happen.

But what if you actually said, let’s imagine that, in fact, what I’m really good at is not going to be so valuable. What our strategy is that’s based on our capabilities that are usually around a body of knowledge, a body of expertise that have now shared because of culture across a lot of different people. What if that actually starts to decline in importance, it depreciates? What would that world look like and what should we do about that?

When you do that little exercise which I now, I’ve tried with executives, it takes away a very common kind of excuse which is, well, how do you really know? Well, you have to be working continuously about that because nobody tells you when the clock strikes 12 and what you’ve been good at is no longer going to be that important. It happens gradually, gradually, and then it’s happened. And so you just got to be ready for it.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Are there any other specific things you can do to push yourself toward that more curious perspective?

SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: I think every kind of strategic move that we do as a manager and executive – actually any action almost, anything we do in life if you want to really generalize, there are underlying assumptions behind that. And so, even the little exercise of identify the three, let’s say, core assumptions behind whatever it is you’re planning to do, or you want to do, why are you really doing this?

Write them down. Don’t just say them or talk about them. When you write something down it becomes much more real and then ask the question, “well what would happen if these assumptions were wrong?”

I think we know from a lot of research and a lot of trends that people have been looking at, and surveys, that there are two or three skillsets that are really important now and continue to be important. They’re creativity, which by definition requires you to be curious and be willing to get off of that expertise and challenge yourself.

Its critical thinking. And then because the world is getting more complex, your ability to kind of connect the dots, almost like a pattern recognition process. And I have seen many people that are strong in finance, or marketing, or ops, or in whatever their expertise is, they tend to define problems in terms of that expertise.

And that’s almost the last thing you want to do. It’s almost like you know the answer before you start and then you kind of back into it to kind of connect the dots in a way that you’re comfortable with. And so, there’re a lot of things that we know and that we can do as leaders to try to kind of crack through this expertise trap.

ALISON BEARD: So, you’ve studied so many executives. This piece of the expertise trap, the idea that you get so knowledgeable and expert in your own business that you don’t see what’s coming. Who have you seen get it really wrong and fall into that trap? And who have you seen manage to never get stuck?

SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: Never is a big word. So, the people and the companies that have struggled, well we could take the whole retail, almost the whole retail sector where retail is all, has traditionally been all about merchandizing, and understanding your customer, and sales management and things like this.

And in a digital world there’s just so many other things that we kind of know from the world of Amazon that we’re in today, or the world of Alibaba that we’re in today, we understand that that’s a different world. There’re a lot of examples in business history as well. And almost every one of them, it’s companies looking for incremental improvement. Always believing that getting a little bit better at something, at that expertise, that core capability of yourself, of your team, of your CEO, of your company is the right answer. In fact, a much more significant transformation is going on.

Who’s getting it right? You know, I’m kind of surprised at what’s been going on in the automobile industry because everyone from BMW to Lexus to GM and Ford, are making gigantic investments and trying to make this transition from a reliance on the combustion engine and a particular technology which was central and we always, they always looked for incremental improvements to electric cars, electric cars and autonomous vehicles.

And it’s early, somewhat early in terms of knowing exactly what’s going to happen, but this is a really good, I suppose example of almost an entire industry or sector has not waiting for the whole place to blow up. Tesla, with all the problems at Tesla, has really, it scared the heck out of a lot of CEO’s of a lot of companies. And while no one can ever guarantee that making this shift from one body of expertise to another is guaranteed to work, we do know that if you don’t do that it’s not going to work.

ALISON BEARD: What about some of the specific leaders you’ve studied? Have you seen anyone do a really good job of avoiding the expertise trap?

SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: Yeah, so there’s several CEO’s that have gone out of the way to try to avoid this. And it’s kind of funny because what they do sounds almost trivial or simple, but it highlights how first you got to do, you got to do something. You got to try, but secondly, sometimes the little things actually pay off.

And so, for example, Aron Ain who is the CEO of Kronos, the software company. He’s always walking around kind of holding impromptu focus groups with groups of employees up and down the organization. And he genuinely wants to hear. He wants to understand. He wants to know what people are thinking and that’s almost like being a teacher and a learner at the same time.

So, he’s trying to do that and then you have people that pick up all kinds of hobbies. David Solomon from Goldman Sachs, he sometimes DJ’s at parties in Manhattan which is an unusual thing to be doing, but it just puts you in front of different people and triggers different parts of your brain.

Then there’s the kitchen cabinet approach where you bring people together that have nothing, or very little to do with your business. The CEO of Scripps Health is a good example of that, Chris Van Gorder. And he’s got his kind of group of friends that are he expects, he wants them, to provide them with honest feedback, tough feedback. Something that could help him really learn.

These are all kind of unusual, some more than the other examples, but this last one that Van Gorder does at Scripps, I can’t believe that any manager, CEO or not, can’t do a thing like that. Just put together a group. You don’t need 10 people. How about, even one could be helpful, but two or three people, and maybe from different industries and there might be people you went to school with, or you met in some program, or who knows where? They could be neighbors, and ask them: Here’s what I’m doing. Here’s what I’m thinking about. Rip it up. Tell me what’s wrong,” because it’s so hard for people within the organization, your team members, it’s a little scary to go and say that to your boss, even when they ask you to do that.

ALISON BEARD: So, we spent a lot of time talking about that second piece of the expertise trap that you talked about. The idea that you don’t push yourself in your own field. I’d like to talk about the overconfidence bit of it. The idea that because you’re an expert in one situation, you can then apply it elsewhere.

There are lots of times when that can happen very easily, especially when it comes to management skills like how to lead through a crisis, or roll out an effective marketing campaign, or negotiate a deal. So, how do you tell when you’re knowledge and experience is going to be useful in an unfamiliar situation, and when it won’t be?

SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: Yeah, well that’s tough, but what I would do, what I would advise is first of all start with the question, in what ways might my experience, my background, my expertise actually hurt me in making this type of decision, whatever the scenario happens to be. Don’t start with the assumption – It’s like switching the burden of proof. You’re guilty until proven innocent. Which very few people like to do that.

I think that’s a really good place to start and then ask yourself, where did it come from this experience? Why are you so confident? And one of the things I found is very often people become very confident even if they’ve only done something once and it went reasonably well. It is rather remarkable how human beings have an endless capacity to over generalize from tiny sample sizes. You do something once, it went well. Yet the same problem arrives on your desk, you feel OK. You feel yeah, I know how to do it.

But what do you, what’s the underlying assumption? That what you’re dealing with today is exactly the same problem that you dealt with the yesterday. And that’s a dangerous thing. So, some of the things we talked about already I think can be helpful with respect to bringing in different points of view and diversity, and kind of expand your thinking. But start with this really basic, almost unfriendly question to yourself. I mean switch that burden of proof: In what ways are you, can you be screwing up because of your experience?

ALISON BEARD: At the same time, when you’re a leader you want to be projecting confidence and you want to be decisive. So, how do you limit the perception of you as someone who needs to consult every person in the room before you make a call?

SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: Yeah. You know, there’s a couple of things to say. Number one, things that are good for you, like confidence, projecting an image of making people feel comfortable, that there’s somebody really in charge. Those are really good, but taken to an extreme, actually end up getting you in trouble.

I mean again we could say exactly the same thing for expertise. I’m not going to say it’s a bad thing to be an expert at something. It’s great to have deep knowledge about something. But we can go too far and overestimate the quality or the relevance of that experience. So, many things when it comes to leadership are balances. It’s not an either/or. You kind of need both.

And then the second thing I’d say is well what would convey to the people around you that there’s an adult in charge and she’s really thinking this through, and she’s confident? Will it be that you just kind of plow ahead and show no vulnerability, show no questioning, convey that you have all the answers to all the problems? Or, is it someone who’s going to actually say, “I want to know what might be a concern, an issue because we need to deal with it.” Which would provide more confidence to the people on your team? And I think it’s the more thoughtful, the more engaging leadership approach than the one that says, “I’ve got it figured out, don’t worry.”

ALISON BEARD: What do you think of the practice of appointing the people who are the very best at what they do to be managers?

SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: Well, unless they aspire to be a manager, they want to learn that skillset, right away I could see that it could lead to a lot of difficulties. And the other thing is that a lot of people that are pointed as a manager of their group, they’re not given much training at all in leadership, or management.

But then you have to decide, how can you promote somebody like that? How can you give them bigger responsibility? How can you allow them to make more money? And so sometimes companies have tracks that are more technical where you become more senior, engineer or scientist and your job is not so much managing other people as you have a bigger portfolio, or bigger projects, or more important projects to work on. And that’s something that you do see.

I think it’s knowing your talent really well and making an assessment, a joint assessment, with the younger manager. Is this someone who has the potential, and the interest, and the aspirations to become a leader? And you might not know that right away, but you want to be evaluating and thinking and having that conversation. If the answer is yes, then I think you have to go through the kind of challenging transition that we’ve been talking about from individual contributor to manager.

ALISON BEARD: And then you need to develop expertise in leading.

SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: Then you have to develop expertise. That’s right. And maybe the most important thing about expertise when it comes to, when it comes to leadership is that you have to constantly learn new things. And so, yes, it’s funny, we can talk about expertise and kind of boil it down to that and you can say, “well, you need to be an expert at learning new things.” Well, OK. I’d be OK with that.

ALISON BEARD: Are there certain jobs or industries where you think people are more susceptible to the expertise trap?

SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: Yeah, I do. I think what you might call high intellect industries, you see this a lot. So that would be, there’d be places where a lot of the managers are scientists, or dare I say even professors, and other people that somehow think they know more than everybody else.

Which is really a bad thing to do because it’s just, it’s such a narrow-minded thing as we’ve been talking about. So, you see it sometimes in IT. You see it in pharma and biotech, in science-based industries. And it’s a tricky thing because these types of industries that are deep, deep knowledge, they’re dealing with very, very difficult problems and it turns out that they really do believe that there’s a right answer.

And many things in life, it’s hard to say there’s a right answer and there’s a wrong answer. There’s a lot of nuance to it. But when you’re trying to solve an algorithm, you’re trying to produce, create a technologically-based product. You want to, you’re trying to do a drug discovery that has to solve, or ameliorate, a serious medical problem. Well, there probably is a right, more of a right answer than some of this nuance.

And therefore, there’s a belief that expertise will win. If you want to really move up to significant leadership positions, yeah you got to have the expertise, but you also have to realize that expertise doesn’t necessarily win. Having the best product, the best technology doesn’t necessarily win. Customers have to care about that. You have to be able to communicate that, convey that, build the story, create the ecosystem, all the kind of fundamental building blocks that great managers, great leaders understand. The science-based industries dominated by expertise, I think they have a tougher time with it.

You’ll have scientists that will never give up because it’s that important. They’re never going to stop. They think that their expertise, their capability, their scientific skillset, they think that that is going to win. And they’re trained that way and maybe we want that for those people as long as there are partners in the team, or in the top of these companies that have, let’s say an analogous skillset, or a complimentary skillset that says we’ve got to be realistic about this. And perfection, you know, striving for perfection sounds really good, but most people realize that when you keep trying to be perfect at something you end up not being able to do anything.

ALISON BEARD: Well Sydney, thanks so much for being here.

SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN: Great to talk to you Alison.

HANNAH BATES: That was Sydney Finkelstein in conversation with Alison Beard on HBR IdeaCast. He’s a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and an expert in leadership and talent development.

We’ll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about leadership from the Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re there, be sure to leave us a review. And when you’re ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books, and videos with the world’s top business and management experts, you’ll find it all at HBR.org.

This episode was produced by Mary Dooe, Ramsey Khabbaz, Anne Saini and me, Hannah Bates. Ian Fox is our editor. Music by Coma Media. Special thanks to Maureen Hoch, Erica Truxler, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you—our listener. See you next week.