Field Note #7: When expertise becomes dependence

Lately I’ve been working with some technical leaders and their teams. There’s something I’ve noticed, to varying degrees, across all the teams. The leader has very specific, highly valuable and genuinely scarce expertise. They have built their career on it. But now they’ve risen to a level of seniority that demands they move beyond the hands-on resolution of technical issues. For some, that was a significant challenge that they worked hard to achieve. Others are still grappling with it. In both cases, that effort falters when an issue arises that requires them to step back into the role of technical expert.

It’s a natural response when a problem arises, especially when urgency is required. Find the person most likely to solve it quickly and successfully and deploy them. But doing that risks creating a new problem: limiting growth of both the individual and the organisation.

The organisation genuinely needs the expertise. It may be knowledge that has taken years to build, judgement that comes from having seen things others haven't, or simply a depth of understanding that others don't yet have. When the stakes are high, of course you bring that person in.

But the organisation also needs the leader to operate differently. At this level, their job is increasingly about creating the conditions for good technical decisions, rather than being the person who makes every difficult technical decision themselves.

At some point, reliance on the expertise becomes reliance on the person.

A difficult issue arises, and someone, almost automatically, says, “We should get them involved.”

A decision feels too important to get wrong. Someone wants the backup of the expert view.

Or something sits just beyond everyone else's experience, and it’s just easier to talk to the person who’s seen it before.

These decisions are perfectly reasonable. But repeated often enough, they create the sense that the expert is a protected species.

Not because anyone has deliberately decided to protect them, but because the cost of not having their expertise available feels too high.

Realising this almost forces the leadership team to ask itself what the organisation need from the expert. Does it need them to solve the problem? Or does it need their judgement?

These are quite different forms of expertise, but organisations don't always distinguish between them.

I think this distinction becomes more important as the organisation grows. Because if the expertise only really exists in one person, what happens as the organisation gets bigger?

How do other people learn to work with that expertise? When do they need to bring the expert in? And when can they make the call themselves?

Can a technical leader still have the deepest expertise without being the person everyone needs in the room? And perhaps most importantly, can the organisation make good decisions when the person with the deepest technical expertise isn't there?

It's often diagnosed as a need for more delegation, but I’m not sure that’s right.  The leader isn't necessarily failing to let go. Sometimes the organisation is pulling them back in.

If the expertise is genuinely scarce, relying on that person isn't necessarily the problem. The question is what happens to the organisation when we keep doing it.

Does the expertise become something the organisation knows how to access and use? Or does the organisation simply become more dependent on the person who holds it?

There's no simple answer.

The question is what happens between those moments.

How does an organisation need less of its expert without needing less of their expertise?