The Expert Leader

Mary is a sales manager responsible for leading a team to develop and maintain at key accounts. She has garnered the respect of her team and her leadership through her keen ability to resolve issues with the customers. When there’s a problem, she analyzes the situation, thinks through options, defends her position and takes pride in working through to a successful conclusion.

Mary is typical of leadership at the Expert Level. She is a strong problem-solver who had developed an ability to think independently, to analyze the situation and to take a stand when she knows she’s right. With a focus on the steps to be taken and the desired outcomes, she leads her team through implementations of the solutions. She works hard to develop, support and defend her team, making sure that she is always pushing them for further growth. She thrives on being seen as the expert who understands the business and the customers.

Expert Leaders build strong relationships within their organization and with their management, yet tend to put little energy into building relationships with other units. The Expert Leader’s focus on analysis and tactics frequently leads them to focusing more on the “rightness” of their position, rather than buy-in, from their own group or from other key stakeholders. They frequently overlook the impact of stakeholder’s views on the ultimate effectiveness of a solution. Driving to solve problems, the Expert Leader deals with each issue as a discrete problem, often losing the opportunity to step back and find a broader, innovative solution.

The Expert Leader is unlikely to seek feedback from her team or peers. This plays out in different ways, depending on the natural style of the individual. With an assertive style, she will frequently overlook or dismiss options that suggest she’s less than fully correct. With an accommodating style, he’ll frequently overload himself with work, correcting other’s work to his standards, and limiting his availability to give feedback and coaching. A key development challenge for the Expert Leader is finding a style that opens them up to giving and receiving feedback.

Within her organizational unit, an Expert Leader is likely to function more as a supervisor than a manager. Problem-solving and direction-setting discussions are typically held one-on-one, with group meetings relegated to information sharing. In fact, the direct reports of an Expert Leader are likely to function as a group, at best, and rarely as the team that might arise if the Expert Leader were more open to other opinions and options.

Developing the Expert Leader

1. Define the leadership ideal. The Expert Leader is working towards an ideal of being smart, efficient, capable, and looked to as the Expert. Challenge the Expert Leader to observe the style of leaders they admire, and to notice how they look to and motivate others to make more strategic changes.
   
2. Learn to seek feedback. The Expert Leader finds it faster and more efficient to advocate for their position. Seeking feedback requires the Expert Leader to find a balance between efficiency and effectiveness. Feedback can start with understanding the impact of their style through a 360 assessment. In addition, the Expert Leader can be challenged to notice when input from a broader group resulted in a better outcome. The Expert Leader is often unaware of how their biases, beliefs and standards may blind them to alternatives; place the Expert Leader into situations where their existing frameworks cannot be taken for granted.
   
3. Build team leadership skills. The Expert Leader can be coached to use meetings to generate and listen to ideas, to leverage the skills of the team members and to build group understanding and buy-in to a direction. The Expert Leader may need to retain ultimate decision-making authority; yet schooled in curiosity and inquiry, the Expert Leader can learn how to develop a team.

In the next posting, we’ll contrast the Expert Leader with the Achiever in how they view leadership, how they manage pivotal conversations, and their agility in leading teams.

A Model for Leadership Agility

At the International Coach Federation Conference in November 2008, I was introduced to a new leadership competency model. A model focused on enabling leadership in a rapidly changing world. I invite the reader of my blog to join with me on a journey through the book. By summarizing the work of the authors in these writings, I process the information for myself, and hopefully encourage you to look more deeply into this insightful book, and into your own development as a leader.

A competency is defined as a measurable characteristic of a person related to success at work. It can be a skill, an attribute, or an attitude. Competency models can span the range from what it takes to be a successful professional – Action-orientation, Interpersonal Communication, Integrity – to senior-level positions – Managing Vision, Strategic Thinking, Dealing with Paradox. Yet if, as columnist Eric Dezenhall of BusinessWeek suggests, crises are the rule, not the exception, for Obama, as the leader of the United States, what then faces the business leader in this world of globalization, economic crises, requirements for rapid change, uncertainty and new competition - a paradoxical place of diversity and connectedness. While traditional competency models remain valid and informative, the question is do they go far enough to address the agility needed to keep pace, or lead, in this complex world.

Joiner and Josephs posit a competency model for leaders exploring levels of agility in four key areas – context-setting, stakeholder, creativity, and self-leadership in their book Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change.

• Context-setting agility involves scanning the situation, evaluating the changes taking place and considering the best initiatives in light of your purpose.
• Stakeholder agility requires the ability to understand the perspectives and realities of those people and organizations that have a stake in, or will be impacted by your initiatives, and to consider how best to engage them.
• Creative agility involves learning from past experiences as well as seeking new and different ways of solving complex problems.
• Self-leadership agility requires discipline and skill in self-awareness of thoughts, feeling and behaviors, and the motivation to continue to develop and grow.

Joiner and Josephs define five levels in each in of these areas which when combined are named Expert, Achiever, Catalyst, Co-Creator and Synergist. At each of these levels, they define the typical set of behaviors that would be seen in how leadership is viewed, pivotal conversations, agility in leading teams, and organizational change leadership. Let’s look briefly at how these five levels might vary by looking a leader new into his or her role.

Expert: When the expert steps into a new role with energy, drive and leadership, they jump right in. Meetings are held everyone, reports and data are combed through, conclusions are drawn, new directions are set and communicated and the Expert leads the organization in solving the key problems.

Achiever: The achiever arrives with a clear understanding of her mandate. She spends a lot of time getting to know her team, being visible, and creating a consistent message of the direction of the organization. She brings her team together to outline the strategy, and works with them to evaluate whether the right structure and people are in place to reach the goals.

Catalyst: The catalyst looks beyond the mandate to how to achieve the objectives and create a sustainable high performance organization. He’s met with thought leaders throughout the organization and encouraged his team to do so as well. He’s engaged three levels and more in an interactive strategic planning process. When he finds resistance in the organization, he seeks creative solutions that support execution of the developing plans.

Co-Creator: The co-creator knows that she will need to achieve the desired business outcomes and develop a high performance organization, but she additionally sets her sights on how to be an industry leader in corporate responsibility. She outlines her short-, near-, and long-term vision for the organization; she engages people inside and outside the firm in questions of how to strengthen relationships, and she models and coaches her team on collaboration and broad accountability. The co-creator drives the ongoing message of how profitability and social responsibility go hand-in-hand.

Synergist: The synergist builds on all of his competencies in building collaborative teams, delivering results and driving organizational change. He creates a leadership team that can collective drive the vision with the organization, freeing the synergist to focus on building unique, varied, and ground-shifting partnerships, collaborations. The synergist asks the questions about how to deliver the results in the right way, with the right people and bring about positive change in the world at large.

Each level builds on the skills, experiences and competencies of the prior levels. Each requires more of the leader in terms of context-setting, stakeholder engagement, creativity and self-leadership. The question to ask is which level would you like to have as your leader, and at which level are you demonstrating leadership?

In subsequent postings, we’ll explore each of these five levels in more detail and look at how to develop the competencies in how leadership is viewed, pivotal conversations, agility in leading teams, and organizational change that move leaders up the levels.