We’ve been conditioned to believe expertise is the ticket to leadership. Earn credibility through answers and solutions, and you’ll be rewarded with authority. But what happens when expertise isn’t what’s needed most? Or even when it becomes the very obstacle to navigating through a rapidly changing world?
No one can be an expert in everything. We all start in one function, and eventually we’re asked to lead functions we’ve never performed. As Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel describe in The Leadership Pipeline, every step up requires us to redefine our value contribution. Your impact shifts from depth of expertise to breadth of perspective: connecting dots across functions, surfacing obstacles, and making the trade-offs that keep the whole system moving forward.
When Expertise Becomes a Limiter
I worked with an engineer who lived through this tension. Widely respected for his technical expertise and years of experience, colleagues trusted his judgment. He was the one people turned to when tough engineering challenges surfaced.
Yet the very expertise that made him indispensable was narrowing his strategic impact. He treated every situation as a problem to solve, jumping quickly to fixes inside his domain. But that narrowed the available options, and often locked the team into ‘unsolvable’ questions before they’d considered the bigger picture.
The shift in his leadership impact began when this specialized engineer realized that strategic leadership doesn’t just require depth. It leans into breadth. It requires stepping back from proven solutions to explore possibilities, even ones that may seem unrealistic or unreachable. It wasn’t about abandoning his expertise. It was about pairing it with a broader perspective, shaping direction before diving into solutions.
Three Practices to Lead Beyond Expertise
1. Shift from right answers to better questions
Expertise trains leaders to provide solutions. Strategic leadership requires framing possibilities. The expert instinct is to drill down, the strategic instinct is to widen. Replace the instinct to provide answers with a repertoire of powerful questions. Develop a repertoire of discovery questions, pull in diverse perspectives, and coach the thinking:
- What assumptions are we making? What must be true for this to be the winning strategy?
- What about the status quo needs to be disrupted? What assumptions must we rethink?
- What are other possibilities that we haven’t considered yet?
This shifts your role from problem-solver to thinking catalyst, often surfacing insights your team may already hold but haven’t yet articulated.
2. Zoom out to see the cohesive whole
As a strategic leader, your role is to design your function to serve the future of the business, not just optimizing what is. Sometimes the biggest opportunities emerge between silos, where no single leader has ownership. Regularly stepping back to see broader patterns, connections and interdependencies is an essential cognitive shift.
Practice: In your next leadership meeting, step back from the immediate actions and milestone updates. Use systems thinking to consider the downstream or upstream effects across functions and time horizons. Ask:
- How does this decision/initiative contribute to, or potentially conflict with, our strategic direction?
- Where are we sub-optimizing the whole to optimize the parts?
- What’s working well in isolation but creating friction at the interfaces?
As an example, a sales leader might propose investing heavily in inside sales automation tools to reduce cost-per-lead. His experience has taught him that sales automation tools can be smart for efficiency. But zoomed out, he might see that the company’s strategy was to move upmarket to enterprise clients, where relationship-based selling mattered more than volume. Efficiency in isolation, would have come at the cost of the bigger play.
3. Lead with a discovery mindset
Resist the pressure to show up with complete solutions. Instead, contribute your distinct perspective and insights to collective sense-making. What do you see from your vantage point that others might not? And what might they see from their vantage point that you might not? You're trying to create space for an exploratory dialogue where breakthrough insights can emerge.
Your role is to contribute thoughtfully to the thinking, not to be the one with all the answers. The goal isn’t consensus, it’s collective clarity. Clarity that will emerge, not be solved. It might not arrive in a single conversation. Instead of, “did we resolve this,” the question becomes: did the dialogue move shared understanding forward? What’s clearer than when we started?
Practice: Contribute to conversations with observations, not conclusions. Try this language:
- “The pattern I’m noticing is …”
- “This is the kind of decision where clarity will emerge through conversation. There is no right answer. And to the extent there is, we’ll only be able to recognize it with hindsight.”
When others present, instead of evaluating whether they have the ‘right answer,’ listen for the perspectives they bring and what new insight might emerge between. This transforms executive sessions from presentations of predetermined solutions into collaborative intelligence-building. Where insights and possibilities emerge that no one could reach alone.
Lead Beyond Knowing
Moving from an expert mindset to an enterprise mindset is a critical transition for strategic leadership. A necessary transition, but rarely a comfortable one. Especially if your confidence and credibility has come from “knowing.” Not knowing can feel deeply vulnerable.
Yet increasingly, it’s not just that you can’t know everything. It’s that no one can. Expertise alone won’t carry you when the terrain itself refuses to behave predictably. The shift is toward something less familiar: discovering, diagnosing, pattern-sensing, and enabling collective intelligence.
Your leadership value comes from your ability to synthesize, recognize patterns and create shared meaning and insight to guide strategic decisions. The next level of leadership isn’t about knowing more, but making it possible for more insight and clarity to emerge through different perspectives.
