Team Building and Leadership Expertise is a challenge to define and understand. It seems that everyone is a thought leader and that all the noise and ideas are equal and useful.

I am guilty of pushing lots of noise out into the organization, team and leadership development field.

While I try to ensure that what I share is evidence based, current, and does as little harm as possible to the people who listen, the accountability and authority of a consultant, advisor, or expert are necessary for those that are on the receiving end of the advice to know.

Consulting executives on the areas of my expertise (organization design and team development) we spend time up front discussing with the executive team and those that I support what their, my, and our shared authority and accountability is.

Often I use the cross-functional-role work of Elliott Jaques to begin the discussion:

In the advisory relationship, the person giving the advice (the advisor or expert) has the accountability and authority to:

  • take the initiative in approaching the advisee and presenting ideas or information that may be useful
  • take the time to explain to the advisee where and why the ideas may be useful
  • be kept informed about the activities and problems of the advisee

There are clear limitations to an advisor’s accountability and authority as follows:

  • If the advisee does not accept the expert’s advice, then the matter must rest there as far as the advisor is concerned. The expert will proceed no further.
  • The advisor must not report the advisee’s reaction to his/her advice to any other person. It is for the advisees’ managers to judge how effectively subordinates are using advisory resources.

I just read ‘The Death of Expertise’ by Tom Nichols, and Nichols does an excellent job of explaining misconceptions about experts within any domain. The bold areas are Nichols work the italics below are my thoughts.

Experts are not puppeteers. They cannot control when leaders take their advice.
  • The leader that that expert is advising has the authority and accountability to take what is needed and act on their own. The expert is not the decider. All the expert can do is offer their expertise and observe how the other person takes and uses that to make a decision.
Experts cannot control how leaders implement their advice.
  • Experts are self-aware of their knowledge and how they see and interpret what is shared. The person who is benefitting from the expert’s advice will filter and understand the information in their way. The expert cannot ensure that the information is understood and used in the detail that was intended. That is part of the problem with expertise that much of what is known and understood cannot be explained. When a person acts on an experts advice, they are doing so in their frame of reference. 
No single expert guides a policy from conception through execution.
  • While the expert and the executive team may agree upon a course of action. When the implementation happens, it happens through people, many time the implementors are delegated pieces and were not part of the initial discussions. This means that the original intention and what the end state looks like and how it is implemented is rather different. 
Experts cannot control how much of their advice leaders will take.
  • Experts offer advice and leaders decide what to listen to. Often only pieces that confirm a bias are heard, and the parts that are uncomfortable or ambiguous are ignored. People listen to what they want to hear and when the incomplete use of the leader’s advice yield poor results, the expert is often blamed.
Experts can only offer alternatives. They cannot make choices about values. They can describe problems, but they cannot tell people what they should do about these problems, even when there is agreement on the nature of those challenges.
  • Experts provide expertise based upon their area of knowledge, and they are to leave it at that. Deciding a value based decision is the accountability and authority of the person making the decision.

Understanding what boundaries of the expert’s input and what you have to listen too will help. Many disagreements within organizations and teams stem from unclear roles, the role of the expert is to offer advice and to let you decide how best to act upon that information. Ultimately, the person who has to make the decision and be held to account for that decision has more pressure and will need to take the experts advice and use their knowledge, and cognition to decide.

Experts offer alternatives They cannot make choices about values