The More You Know, the Less They Promote You

Expertise is one of the more socially rewarded forms of identity. If you have expertise and you learn to share it well, it earns your trust, it earns you authority, even career advancement, although temporarily. But the thing about Expertise is that it trains your mind to interpret the world through which you already know. And that's why a lot of the experts that I work with have not been invited to the senior leadership rooms. When you spend so many years developing a expertise in a specific field, you are physically rewiring your brain to see the world through that specific lens. Thinking from your expertise creates functional fixiveness. It's kind of like seeing every business problem as a nail because you are holding a hammer. Leadership requires better thinking about your knowledge in what you know. It means being able to step outside direct expertise so that you can see this system around it. In this video, I'm going to talk about five principles around why your expertise creates a ceiling and what you can do about it to rise. You're listening to Career Revisionist. The podcast where ambitious professionals pursue mastery, breakthrough in visible ceilings, and accelerate into leadership. And now to guide you on the journey. Dr. Grace Lee, neuroscientist, executive mentor, and your trusted voice in career leadership. Principle number one is the complexity addiction. Experts drive their self-worth from complexity, and it really comes from a preconditioned belief throughout education. When we were in education, our metric of success was a mark of intelligence, you know, how well we did in our exams. So the grade, the GPA, is really the metric on our intelligence. And you are intelligent when you really understand the nuances of your subject matter. So for example, my subject matter in college was neuroscience. And in neuroscience, we study all the different types of neurons. We study all the different types of systems in the brain and how they function together, the nuances of it. And the more I understood the nuances, the better the chances I were to do well on my dissertation or to do well in my exam. And it doesn't matter what subject matter you studied. The same thing is true. The metric on your intelligence and your success in that system is in understanding all the nuances. And that's why experts through that preconditioning, we are predisposed to value complexity. And we're predisposed to value precision through nuances and complexity. When you think from your expertise, you are more likely to answer a simple strategic question with a 10 to 15 minute technical dissertation. Because we're addicted to showing our work and it comes from the college education system, which tells you that when you are named a passing exam, you got to show your work. You got to show us what you know. And we derive pleasure and we derive rewards for telling people everything we know because it demonstrates our intelligence, our depth of knowledge and so on. And when we carry this into the workplace, there's nothing wrong with that, especially if your role depends on your technical expertise. And if that's really the purpose and the career direction that you see, there's nothing wrong with that. But at some point, you made a decision that you'd like to rise to strategic leadership, which involves fiscal responsibility, seeing the big picture of things and being in communication with senior leaders. Then this is where I shift in perspective is wise. Exactly the leaders don't value nuances, they value salience. And this is an important part of your shift in your approach, instead of thinking from your expertise, you're thinking of what's the most salient thing. So you're shifting from nuance to strategic simplicity. And it might seem it feel very counterintuitive in the beginning because you might be used to the urge to show all that you know. The more you show what you know, the greater the nuances you are and people will get lost in it. Every single week I run coaching programs, I have clients who work with me in my mentorship. And every week and every month, there's opportunities for my clients to ask me questions to get mentored from me. And really, I leave it open-ended. I start the call and I ask, "Who has a question? How would you like to get coach today?" And then someone speaks up. And it takes some 15, 20, sometimes even 30 minutes to give me all the background information, all the data, the background. And in the end, it could have been very simple in terms of, "Here's the challenge I have, here's the question I have for you." And I'm left to really sift through 20 to 30 minutes of data, technical data, to really understand what they're going to be asking. Now, I as a coach, I see this as my purpose and I embrace it. But you see, if you're in a business environment, and you are speaking this way to your senior leaders, they don't have a duty to do that for you. In fact, if you are giving them all the nuances of your knowledge, and they have to do any mental, additional mental work to understand what you're really trying to say, or the question you're really trying to ask, it's not going to happen. They can't afford the time and the mental bandwidth and the effort to do that. So this is why the first thing about thinking from your expertise, the first ceiling it creates is a ceiling of understanding, a ceiling of connection to the senior leaders that you're trying to create. And when they observe and they listen to someone doing this, getting deep into the weeds and the nuances of their knowledge, they don't see that as maturity or intelligence per se. They do see it as a liability. They do see it as scattered in thought, disorganization in thought. And I always say that if you're noticing that you have a communication problem, rambling, hesitating or beating around the bush, if you have communication problems like that, I always say, is not a speaking problem, is a thinking problem. So that's the first principle is the complexity addiction. Principle number two is the foveal tendency. Thinking from your expertise makes you more blind to opportunity. Why? Well, let's turn to biology. There is a pit in the retina of your eye, the back of your eye called the fovia. And the fovia is responsible for high resolution vision of one single thing. It's the analogy of expert vision. Right, you see the error in the code, you see the decimal point in the budget, you see the nuance, the exact pinpoint detail. And this is really important to understand because the fovia is not capable of peripheral vision, is not capable of seeing bigger picture environmental changes. That's the job of a different part of your eye. So when you are focused, highly focused on one thing pinpointed, it's called expert vision, and biology dictates that there's an area of your eye that's responsible for that. So when you think from your expertise, you are locked in foveal vision. You might see the details right in front of you with perfect clarity, but you're blind to the opportunity that is around you in your periphery. So it's kind of like winning the argument but losing the client relationship, or it could be perfecting the product, but then you miss the shift in consumer demand. Essentially, it's winning that fight, but losing the battle. Leadership is largely a peripheral function. It requires sacrificing the comforts and sometimes the familiarity with high resolution detail so that you can gain the leverage for broad situational awareness. And it really means widening your aperture. And if you are ready and committed to do that, so that you can have the impact you want to have in your current influential leadership that you desire to achieve, then click the link below this video and explore Master Accelerator. Master Accelerator is my signature mentorship where every single week I guide experts on how to level up their thinking, their speaking, and their leadership so that they can gain more influence and advance their career. And this is where we go deep into these processes because wouldn't you agree that if you are to expand your aperture, you have to know where to look and more importantly, you have to know what you're looking for. And so in this in the teaching every single month, I have live master classes where I'm going to teach you the process, well, what do you look for? How do you position yourself for opportunities? What constitutes an opportunity? And how do you move forward in momentum towards it? And not just that, but understanding your exact environment, the business that you're in, the ecosystem that is around it, and definitely the human dynamics that are complex, but how do you show up within it in a way that you can maintain your integrity? So if that's you, and career advancement is important to you and so is personal growth, then click the link below and I look forward to working with you on the inside. Principle number three is how versus why? Experts are obsessed with feasibility. In other words, it's like how can we do this? Leaders on the other hand are more focused on viability, which means should we do this? You see, when you think from your expertise, every time you encounter a new idea, a new direction, a new way of doing things, your immediate tendency is to look for constraints. Why? Because constraints block the how. And remember, to every hammer, to a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. All right, so this is really important to have this raw self-reflection in your pattern of interpretation, in your pattern of approaching things. And this is important because when you show up and every hand, every problem looks like a nail and you're looking for constraints, then there's think of it like two buckets. If you're in an organization and you're being assessed by leaders around you inevitably, you're being regarded for how you react and how you show up and the solutions you provide. Think of it as two buckets. There's one bucket called support and there was one bucket called leadership. If you are thinking obsessed about the how, the feasibility of things, looking for constraints and we can't do this, I'm not sure how to do that. This is not possible. Then leaders, senior leaders, we'll see that as support. Because if you're involved in the how, you're a support function in making it happen. You're implementing making it happen. So that's like a support bucket. Versus the other one is focusing on feasibility. Focusing on viability. Well, should we do this? If so, then tell me why. So this is leadership. It's strategic direction. It's understanding not the how, but the why. And when you focus on that, then you're not a support function, but you're a valuable asset. Because your insights are at a higher altitude of thinking. Not thinking about, I'm going to be the one to roll up my sleeves and implement this directly. Or it's not about you going in there solving the problem directly. Because that's a support role. But now it's kind of looking at, well, I'm now here guiding the direction. I'm decisive. I understand the viability of things. And as a result of that, I know who to empower and how to build systems of scale and create leverage so that that vision can still come to fruition. Now that's the two buckets. So the question you got to ask yourself is largely which bucket have you been operating in? Your mindset in terms of the way you show up, in terms of the way you communicate, in terms of the percentage of time you spend on a day to day. The activities and the responsibilities that you are spending your focus on from a day to day, where does it fit? Is it what ratio of support versus leadership is it in? If your professional goal is to be in leadership, well, leadership is less and less about implementing. And it's more and more about becoming an architect. So the next time you are sharing an idea or you're interacting with an idea, either yours or another person, it would be wise to resist the urge to explain how the idea works. But instead, to shift your internal operating system, to start to look at the economic leverage that the idea creates. Principle number four is the certainty safety net. Expertise oftentimes is a defense mechanism against uncertainty. One of the common patterns that I observe in my clients is that, well, number one, they have, of course, I work with people who desire to grow and advance their career into leadership. And a common pattern I see within that journey is the fear of speaking out when they're in front of their and rooms with senior leaders, because they have this internal pressure that they need to have all the right answers. So they don't say anything or they wait and they're more listeners in the conversation because of the fear of saying the wrong thing or saying something they believe is right. But when senior leaders hear it, then there's kind of feedback or criticism that it wasn't really so. So that fear, that anxiety, holds a lot of my clients back from really sharing their expertise. And as a result of that, they study very hard and they prepare themselves intellectually so that they never have to guess. Now, there's nothing wrong with committing yourself to study. But what I'm talking about is when you commit yourself to study from the discomfort of uncertainty and you're trying to mitigate it because you're uncomfortable with uncertainty. And if that's true and you come with that mindset while thinking from your expertise, well, that whole combination it really limits your inference range because now when you're thinking through your expertise in that way, you rely on deduction from known domains. It's kind of like saying, well, these are the known premises and therefore this is the conclusion. Like you're relying on those deductive types of reasoning and that's not the only form of inference of inference there is out there. So it's really narrowing the range of your reasoning. And this works well if you're relying on deductions and from a known premises. This works really well when problems are well defined. So for example, when there are known parameters in the problem, there are known premises, it has more complete set of data. You know very clearly what the metrics are and what the outcomes are supposed to look like. So when problems are well defined, deductive reasoning and a more narrowed inference is fine. But that's definitely not the case in a business environment and environments where there are complex human dynamics and especially in environments where there are political powers and when there are complexities in the marketplace. Instead of having well defined problems, a majority of the problems that you will encounter in leadership are going to be ill-defined, not well-defined. And as a result of that, a limit in your inference and the way you reason things out is going to be insufficient at handling ill-defined problems. Because in leadership, most of the problems are incomplete. They are conflicting sources of information and data. There could be lack of truth even and lack of transparency and definitely a wide domains of unknowns and unclear premises. And as a result of that, this degree of complexity and ambiguity, it requires a higher altitude of thinking and a wider pattern of inference and a wider understanding of cognitive processes and thoughts and reasoning. And if you're waiting until your expertise gives you near 100% certainty or even close to 50% certainty, then the opportunity is already gone. Thinking from your expertise really creates analysis paralysis where you're demanding more information, more data, more completeness before you can decide. If your way of operating doesn't affect anyone else, I mean, it's also OK if your scope of responsibilities is more narrow. And the reach on your influence is not really beyond you and your immediate team numbers. But if you desire to be in leadership, the things that you decide and how decisive you are and your internal operating system, it really does have an impact on those around you. And if you desire to be in a leadership position, the level of visibility you have as well is going to be quite influential. And the reach is going to be a lot wider. So as a result of that, you being indecisive and you needing more data and demanding more clarity before you can decide that analysis paralysis doesn't just affect you, but it has a cascade, a ripple effect, sometimes on the whole business. So instead of demanding more data or information to soothe your anxiety, it would be wise to shift to probabilistic thinking or strategic inference. You-- it would be wise if you become the person who is both willing and able to act and to be decisive, only when you have less than 50% of the data available to you. And this is important because if you think about it, experts feel very uncomfortable when they're wrong. But a strategic and an influential leader feels very much in their purpose when they are directionally correct. Principle number five, the value cap. When you think from your expertise, you commoditize yourself in job postings and when we talk about careers and roles, most people look at years of experience. They look at credentials, like which college did you go to, which degrees did you have, how many degrees did you have. If it's in the academic world, they look at well, how many papers did you publish? And what kind of journals did you publish those papers in? And are-- what is the impact factor of those journals that you published in? If you are applying into a position and they ask you the first common interview question, tell me a little bit more about yourself. Most common response is to give a summary of your resume, which is right back at there. The degrees and the education you had, the years of experience, all of the checklists of responsibilities you've held and so on and so on. But here's the thing. Someone can say, well, I've had five years of experience. Competitor comes on, oh, I've had 26. Someone goes, well, I went back and I got my MBA. Another person can say, well, me too. I did that too. Someone can say, well, I wrote the code here and I combined that with this degree. And then I also was able to achieve X, Y, Z for the company. Someone can say, well, me too. And I also did this. And it's like this constant battle of one-uping. One-up, I want up you, you want up me, one-up, one-up. And that's a fast race to the bottom. That's commoditization. Expertise commoditizes because when you are an expert and your identity is from an expert, you're more likely to sell your hours and your output. Think about your resume. What is all of that? Think about the job description. What is all of the hours, years of experience, and output, all the things you did. What did you do? Play by play. What did you do? Tell me. And the whole, the whole gurus about resumes and job applicants, what did they teach you in an interview? They teach you something called the star method. What's the star method? Tell them what the situation is, tell them all the tasks, all the activities that you did, and then what are the results? What's that? It's commoditization. You're saying what everybody else says, you're doing what a lot of people can do as well. And then to be more competitive, you do more. You get more credentials, more hours, and more output. And that's the whole mindset of experts. If you think of and articulate your contribution in terms of activities or hours, then you're forcing the discussion towards the cost of hiring you. And moreover, it can be replaced by either a cheaper expert or AI. Think about it, AI. Can do it cheaper, faster, without sleeping, without getting sick. Worse yet, if that is the direction of your mindset, seeing things, contribution in terms of activities, hours, output, things like that, if that's your natural operating system, then you're noticing, and it creates anxiety that will replacement from AI, made obsolete, rendered obsolete. Then the danger here, the longer term bigger picture danger is that it's going to create the way you see things, and the perspective you have of the world. And that scarcity mindset is paralyzing, it's sabotaging, and it really creates an anxiety that's difficult to manage. A visionary influential leader does not sell their hours or their output. They sell visions and outcomes. If you will learn to think of and articulate your contribution as asset value, then you're an investment. But you can only do that if you're building assets, which are something worth of value. So many professionals that I work with, highly educated, multiple college degrees, more than 10 years of experience, deep levels of expertise, and they're intelligent by every measure of that word. So many of these clients that I've worked with, from all around the world, in more than 30 different industries, they have high income skills, but they're under leveraged in their value. They're under leveraged because they're working hard on their output and their knowledge, but they're not building assets. And when you don't have assets working for you, then the only thing that you're left with is your output, is what they teach you in school, is how they articulate in job descriptions, companies from the top down. And this is where it's important that you learn to think like a visionary influential leader, because it starts from there. Develop the identity of a visionary influential leader. Understand how they think. Understand, understand, seek to understand what assets are and start to build those. And if you desire more help in that, click the link below this video and start the training, start the journey to develop that mindset and develop those skills. The hardest part of career growth is letting go of your current level of mastery. I mean, you've worked hard to become the person who knows. And now, your calling is to become the person who leads. Your expertise is not the problem, thinking from it is. The next level of your career is not going to be earned by how much you know. It is going to be earned by proving that you can think beyond what you already know. [MUSIC]