AA248 - Expertise Overreach: Why Being Right ONCE Makes Leaders Think They're Right About EVERYTHING

Your boss's biggest career win might be setting them up for their biggest failure. 🚨

Listen or watch as hosts Brian Orlando and Om Patel tackle a phenomenon that's rampant in tech but rarely named: Expertise Overreach: when someone's success in one narrow domain inflates their confidence across every domain, with devastating consequences for teams, roadmaps, and the entire organization.

In this episode, we're diving deep into the murky pool of psychology, neuroscience, and organizational dynamics behind why overconfident leaders derail teams (and how you can protect yourself).

🔑 Key Topics Include:
1. Why Being "Really" Right Once Can Be Dangerous
2. How Power Literally Changes Your Brain (a quick recap)
3. What Happens Inside the Yes-Men Factory
4. How Tech's Hero Worship Problem Makes It All Worse
5. Tips for Protecting Your Team and Your Sanity

This episode helps with practical strategies for dealing with overconfident "leaders," so please 👉 share this with a colleague who you know might need to hear it!

#ProductManagement #Leadership #AgileCoaching

Moore & Healy 2008 - The Trouble with Overconfidence (Psychological Review), Power Changes How the Brain Responds to Others 2014 (Journal of Experimental Psychology), Westfall & Bednar 2005 - Pluralistic Ignorance in Corporate Boards (Administrative Science Quarterly), Arguing Agile Episode #243: How Corporate Turns Good People Bad, Steve Jobs (hire smart people to tell us what to do), Amazon's Disagree and Commit principle

LINKS
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@arguingagile
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596

INTRO MUSIC
Toronto Is My Beat
By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)
CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

Transcript

0:01

ever worked with hey ohm, have you someone who was good at one thing and then they had that success go to their head so they thought that because they were good at that one thing, they were good at everything because I once worked with someone who, they found a little success in product management in one specific product like several years ago like five plus years ago and because of that one success uh, I watched as they ended up fighting with a team of data scientists about, like, machine learning strategy and, way, that person was right that one time yes, so, maybe they see patterns that other people don't I thought about that and I also thought about, well, maybe they have a really, really good product sense that transfers to every domain I mean, it's not, it's not true, but I thought maybe, yeah it's, know look at it this becomes a trap for most people because being right about I think it actually mobile UX in like 2015 doesn't make you right about AI strategy in 2026 they're just completely different domains yeah, you're saying that success can be actually dangerous dangerous, thought I'd get it yes and, uh, I in real early in the podcast this time, but I'm saying success and you're trying to do that you're having without any kind of self -awareness that's what creates, like, monsters in corporate America and at the point where we're talking about monsters in corporate America that's the point where you need to step into my office oh, Arguing Agile if this is your first time, welcome I'm your host, product manager Brian Orlando this is my co -host, enterprise business agility coach, and the sorcerer of sticky notes, Mr. Ompatel more than 80 % of people are not subscribed to the podcast, so if you can like and subscribe to the podcast, it helps us reach new heights welcome back to and it'll help your winter go by faster or summer, depending on where you are and it gives you better gas mileage, that's what I especially in an EV, um, but hey we're shooting for a thousand subscribers in 2026, so every like helps us get there, and if you find this conversation valuable share it with a friend, about expertise overreach so, interesting, interesting topic I looked around in the space, ohm, and I didn't find a lot of people talking about expertise overreach I, I've listened to today we're talking some other podcasts that have, different product management folks and entrepreneurs and people that invest in businesses that they'll give you advice about literally everything under the sun and, necessarily helping you kind of dig through it, so today, we episode you'll be able to spot the warning signs of expertise overreach before it derails your roadmap and you'll be able to protect your team from you'll be armed with the language to push back when someone's confidence has by the end of this outpaced their skill let's put it that way and perhaps they're being economical end, hopefully with the truth but let's go forward yeah, that's, so, um what if I told you that your biggest career win might be setting you up for your biggest failure, and uh so, what we're gonna talk about now is why early success can become a leadership liability so there was a study uh Moore and Healy 2008 called The Trouble with Overconfidence from the, Psychological Review it identifies three forms of overconfidence uh, overestimation overplacement and overprecision so those are three mainly academic distinctions um, overestimation is an absolute measure so, oh, I know our company is capable of hitting $500 ,000 in the next month when you can only hit, you know $100,000, overplacement is relative to people whereas like, over estimation is relative to an absolute yeah, yeah, so over placement is, well, you know, oh, we'll be in the top 1 % of companies where, you know, no you won't, sure come on, come on man, and then, over precision is just flat out over confidence, it's plain little over confidence, so those three categories and the research shows that success actually increases the risk taking and the resistance to feedback interesting, yeah I'm hoping that we can describe the the distinctions between the three over items right, a little bit better because I think some people might get a little bit lost there well, I'm going to have to refer you to the study because I could spend the rest of today trying to go through examples exactly, so look up the study, we'll link it in the comments below the arguments you're gonna hear with this uh, category number one why being right once is actually dangerous they're gonna say, oh no, Brian, these people have proven themselves in the organization yeah, they have a track record of one also, I'm so happy that I got to get this one in on a podcast because I haven't, I haven't said this in probably 50 podcasts um, past performance predicts future success yes, yes, indeed I quit. Oh boy, yeah. That's, oh, those, those are such great arguments of the strong leaders need confidence in their decisions. You, you gotta just make a confident decision and if you're wrong, at least we made a decision. seen this play out yeah, look, we've in the corporate space it doesn't always end well in fact, most times it doesn't end well when people make these sorts of, uh, confident predictions often not based or grounded in any sort of reality right here uh like confidence without any kind of calibration like i think every leader i've been coupled with in product management where in order to challenge anything i have to come up with a dump truck full of estimates and stats and metrics and queries and whatever and the executive just comes to the meeting and shoots their mouth off and I've gotta go disprove everything they said, not, like we're not on equal footing, and that's only other thing that's like product management in a nutshell boy, oh boy I think this might be a separate topic for a podcast too this sort of thing, but Confidence Without Calibration it's just arrogance with a better resume I mean, it is but, there'll be plenty of people that will tell you, I don't, I don't need evidence I've, uh, I'm, I'm the domain expert this is, this goes into a podcast we talked about planning today, about the the generalist versus specialist is back fighting on the market which is a super, like, boring thing to talk through we did a podcast a long time ago about this category and it's boring, and I don't want to talk about it again, but, uh it's this, it's exactly this thing is, I was good at one thing, one time a bunch of years ago and I think that transfers to every category of my life ever people that perhaps so today, you have were successful back in the day with something and now they're saying, I'm the AI guru I'm the AI expert there's a lot of that in the space of people jumping ship to be AI, you know, relabeling their titles and selling AI classes there's a lot of that going around agreed so, if you want to buy my AI class, just send me $650 and uh, I don't know why that's the magic number, I said that last podcast too, it was $650 yeah, story from my career with this one I told this story on another podcast before I was part of a very large like platform initiative of different financial platforms into one kind of to integrate a bunch clearing house type of, type of, like catalog type of platform where you can go and say, oh, I need the, you know, I need the the billing system for this customer and I need the payment system for this customer and I need, categories of a dozen different financials and pulled them all into one platform with like flattened data and fields and stuff like that, because every database is different, every NoSQL solution is different, to segue us into a we worked on, I was on that project for about 18 months and we worked on it for we worked on it for about 12 months, and then the, the executives came in people that own the budget basically came in and they just wiped out the whole executive they just washed out the whole executive level you know, all like the highest level tier uh, the VPs and what not, they were in charge of that project, they just wiped them all out and they brought in their new guy and there was a little overlap to where they didn't make it look like they were washing out leadership, but that's exactly what was happening and a new guy came in and I remember the, the, the big I mean, there was a big song and dance about like oh, we're bringing this new guy in, he's got a ton of success, he'll drive this project to execution, it'd be great I was what has he done before, and they said, he he built a bunch of like power bi dashboards or something like that for some other product like we're not building a power bi dashboard right we're integrating like data models from like disconnected financial systems into one like dozen separate catalog that's not building a powered bi dashboard yeah you know for for one customer by the way we're we're building a system for hundreds of thousands of people to, to grab, I was, this is completely different, and everyone's who, who are you, get out of here kid, he crashed and burned I mean, very fast, yeah, well again, this is, that heap of people that crash and burn in this scenario much higher than people that succeed well, that was, I mean, that was their culture though you know, they would get some rising superstar that had a little tiny bit of success and then they'd catapult him up to the highest echelons of power in that organization, and that was what they would do, you know, it was a very like, it the brightest star, the brightest star, like burns the fastest type of culture typically what happens though in these scenarios when you have somebody who let's just say, is perceived to be, you master in their domain this is a price of admission you give them a seat on the board or, you know, give them a high level position in the company, senior level and that's how they will agree to come in, right watch themselves burn out, yeah, exactly, well, yeah I mean, look, I've only seen one story that's contrary to this, where they did exactly this, they brought somebody in and they gave him a very high position, he was the he was the, the VP of global architecture, right, so he's in charge of everything the company did, this is a huge company, multinational, but to his credit, he did nothing quickly, he spent three months going around and meeting everybody, this is worldwide, and understanding what they do, without saying, well, you should do it this way, you should do it that way, and he then went, spent time by himself, designing something, where he was getting input from others, where needed, and then he and uh, and uh, and uh, and uh, and uh, and and uh, a lot of work, and then every time they change their version, you've got to change your system, right no, not according to the model that he came up with, so kudos to him for taking the time, he didn't crash and burn um, so that's like that's the rare example I can share with you that's it, one person, out of both of our careers, one person, yeah, yeah, yeah, right over 50 years combined oh boy, so but if you're a viewer or a listener, and you see somebody's confidence expanding past their actual expertise i have some questions for you to i mean they're mainly for you to ask yourself they're not really for you to ask the other person although if you can figure a way to ask the other person these and kind of check them if you're their friend or whatever like definitely let us know in the comments if you figure this out but i have three questions number one what specific domain did their original success come from, so my example the guy was doing Power BI dashboards we were working on a global financial system which is more of a strategic initiative completely, yeah, and then number two how different is the current decision from that domain which again, I just answered the question, it's not even related, right and then, uh, number three, what evidence not opinions, what evidence supports their views in this new area so he came in hard, he hit the ground hard with a bunch of strong opinions on how teams should be organized and that kind of stuff and and which is funny to me because I was more like a program manager in that organization and with him when he started and I'm real heart to heart like, he had a lot of strong opinions and they're not really basing anything because you just joined you don't know anything about this team what we're doing, all that kind of stuff and uh, boy, he did not care often these people will just say i'm going by intuition i've done this before but not exactly this they don't say that right they haven't done exactly this they've done something all about being right once and then transferring that to everywhere else so, this category was so we oh boy, if you're listening or watching what do you think? have you seen someone's early success turn into overconfidence and were they successful or not successful? Like, let us know in the comments and also stick around because the next to talk about is is a slight rehash of another podcast, but it's about how power literally changes your brain, wasn't that long ago, that podcast too, nope so this isn't a metaphor neuroscience shows that gaining power actually reduces activity in parts of your brain responsible for understanding other people, aka empathy your boss might be physically incapable of seeing your perspective that's this section, and we did a whole podcast on this one we did, 243? yeah, 243 how corporate turns good people bad oh, thank you, cause I was like, I cannot find this at all, so there's a study uh, from 2014 power changes how the brain responds to others, the journal of experimental psychology, it demonstrated reduced mirror neuron activity in people primed with power, that's another study pulled from the other podcast of the, uh of the pieces of evidence that we did not use in other podcasts so i'm giving it now uh but also in the 235 is that the podcast 243 243 yeah wow you're close wow i got all the numbers troubled I encourage everyone to listen to that podcast because we went way in depth every single section maybe almost every single section, every single section but one maybe, we cited a different research paper when we were talking about the points, but this one there's only terrible against points in this category which, like of, like, the poor arguments against on this one are gonna be, oh, you know in order to even get into a leadership position at home, you gotta have empathy to a certain point, or you gotta have success to it good leaders rise to the top because they understand people they're people people sure, dude yeah, ok and listen, power absolutely hijacks your amygdala the part of the brain that basically says, don't step over other people's heads to get ahead, and those sorts of things yeah, we don't have to rehash that here, 243, check that out arguingagile243 that, I'm gonna cut us straight to the most relevant points which is the, cost of being wrong basically it drops off when you have power, because even if you're wrong you still have that authority and it's not gonna go away whereas other people, if they're wrong, we saying, low SES, what was it, socioeconomic status, is that what it was? those low SES people, like if they, challenge the status quo, and they end up being wrong they get put out on the street and lol yeah there's not a lot of reasons when you have power for you to maintain empathy, you don't need it so you don't do it it, if you want the details of the research, check out the podcast but that was basically the that basically is essence of it so i'm gonna cut straight to the takeaways in this category so if you're in a position of power you need to do something i called it called it in this podcast i called it external calibration systems we call it something different in the previous podcast but i needed a little bit different spin because it's a whole different podcast building mandatory perspective checks with people that will tell you the truth so how do i know who's gonna tell me the truth hopefully you've curated that group before you get to this position of authority right so you came up with them you know that you can trust them or maybe you maybe they're they mentored you or sponsored you or whatever and you can go back to them hopefully you have that group of people trusted advisors and then create structural check-ins with the people who are going to be most affected by your decisions when you make them and we talked about this in the other podcast you can set up random coffees or random get-togethers or one-on -ones, that kind of thing on a regular basis, so you so you, so you are keeping a steady cadence and you got your finger on the pulse, that's what we suggested in the other podcast and again, I don't want to rehash too much of it here I just wanted to point those things out have you, uh, oh, have you seen this, uh happen in a lot of places that you work leaders randomly checking in to make sure their empathy stays, uh, current absolutely not I have not I just thought I'd check to see if anything's yeah, that was a, that was a good check, but sadly, I've come up with nothing sadly, sadly, and ok, so this was a short category, but let us know if you have worked for someone who seemed physically capable, like emotionally, who did not have emotional damage, and seemed capable of understanding your perspective, I think if you have worked for someone like this, who really does, go out of their way to understand your perspective they will stick out in your mind and if they do let us know in the comments absolutely love to hear from you alright the debate today is how organizations accidentally create yes men factories and you'll be able to watch us talk about that right now painfully oh boy here's a dirty yet very well known secret organizations don't just tolerate next logical step in expertise overreach they actively build systems that make it worse over time, everyone who challenges the leader uh, is encouraged to leave or gets pushed out, with a team of yes men who agree with everything the leader says oh then you're left boy, ah, I don't know you may have seen that, uh, in organizations or perhaps in some countries, politics, I don't know, yeah, it just, it's so common to see where everyone agrees on most things that a company is doing and that's usually disguised under the fact that they, or not fact, but under the impression that they are aligned, right, they agree but they're aligned, they know exactly what they're going for. but dissent is not tolerated this goes back to another podcast I want to do about Amazon's disagreeing yes get out of my office exactly, that one right that's right I have a I have a citation it is a Westfall and Bednar 2005 study or paper one or the other pluralistic ignorance in corporate boards the, in the administrative science quarterly it demonstrates how social dynamics suppress dissent even when individuals privately disagree I feel like I want to download that paper, Om, and do a whole separate podcast just on that paper it's definitely a good one, so, yeah, we'll do there may be some editing here where we stopped and like went deep on the paper here and for a 37 page paper, it's really dense so it has some findings in the paper one of which is, unlike groupthink where social cohesion leads members to genuinely convince themselves that the strategy is good pluralistic ignorance involves members misperceiving each other's beliefs group think more cohesion equals worse decisions with pluralistic ignorance more cohesion equals better decisions because it helps people discover shared concerns that's, I see what they're trying to say they're saying with groupthink everyone's going to just align themselves so more cohesion means worse decisions because you don't have the diversity of thought, right? right pluralistic ignorance means the opposite of groupthink it means everybody has their own opinions yeah, yeah, yeah, but they're, but they're but they're being quiet and not expressing their opinions then it would be the same as group thing yeah, well, I mean, the outcome would be the same, but they're taking a different path to get there to get to their bad decisions they're saying nothing one's going along with it because they want to fit in as part of the group the other's going along with it because they don't want to upset people, or they don't want to stick out it's still bad, it's just bad from a different direction right, all roads lead to bad folks, all roads lead to bad when it comes to pluralistic ignorance I mean, anything with ignorance in the keyword is gotta it's gotta be great, right? exactly, yeah the interesting, it says interestingly, the finding suggests that increasing demographic diversity on boards, gender functional background education, whatever the factors are, may have an unintended side effect of exacerbating pluralistic ignorance and strategic persistence in response to poor performance when the boards are all the same, in terms of everyone looks alike or talks alike same education background, everyone's from rich parents or whatever um, there's no one there to challenge anything, so everyone rides that rollercoaster down at the same speed, oh boy that was, that was a fun little side tangent that was, yeah, but, but, I think that's worthy of exploring for another podcast maybe, yeah, maybe, maybe we'll put that paper off to the side for next, you know, podcast boy, we we just we just introduced the category here of the yes man factory we talked about the study about pluralistic ignorance, and then we went off on a tangent for ten minutes but ohm, remember the Steve Jobs, like we hire smart people to tell us what to do yeah, and then Steve Jobs goes around yelling at everyone to do stuff and yeah, our culture values diversity of thought and perspectives, yeah everyone's welcome to say things these are the companies we're at the town hall, nobody says a thing, um, don't bring me problems ok, only bring me solutions, oh that's right yeah, yeah, that's right don't bring me problems because i don't have any answers so bring me solutions pluralistic ignorance so everyone probably disagrees but then but then they assume that everyone else agrees with the manager or leader in charge so they don't say anything and everyone's doing that yeah, yeah, I think part of this is cultural too, right, are they even encouraging that, or are they just saying that yeah, she wants to hear the bad news don't be afraid this is every shop I've ever been at where saying anything that goes against the party line is like, that labels you as not a team player and that's the end of your that's the end of your tenure, you know you're, you're at your highest position you'll ever be at in that organization and uh, just keep your resume updated the this has a but this has like corrosive effect if you've ever been in an organization where after two, three years suddenly like everyone that was pushing back just is either gone, gone from the organization or transferred to different positions or that's this, that's this category if you've seen, there's a real effect, it's just pluralistic ignorance at play in the organization and that's why this rats from a sinking ship that you've observed we're naming it that's what this is absolutely, absolutely, I can't wait to do the other podcast now with that paper and deep dive there we should probably continue today though I discussion recently with my wife about was having a this I said, there's tech about people moving around in tech and, I in tech that move around that, they don't, they don't, they have no principles, they have no morals, and they stand for nothing they're just, they're moving to whatever job pays them at the time and I was there's a lot of people in tech that are like that cause she doesn't work in tech, I was come enjoy the world of tech for a while because these people are a dime a dozen in tech that believe in nothing and that, that's this, I mean, like two or three years you get one of these folks in a leadership position, two they're gonna drive all the people that would actually push back against their position out, and then you'll have, and then they'll be insulated with yes men I've seen this a half a dozen times, yeah agreed, way often, yeah I think pretty much everybody watching and listening can relate to that and kind of, you know align with this behavior happening in companies they've worked for let us know in the comments if you've worked for a company where they actually encourage um, dissent against leadership I mean, I'd love to hear really it's not, it's not a for and against kind of you want all the evidence out on the table for you to make, make the best decision because if you're in a leadership position you know, you already know that you make the best decision that you can make in the time that you have to make it with the best evidence that you have at your disposal at that time so why wouldn't you be seeking out the best all the best evidence that you can to make the best decision unless your ego is so frail that you can't have any kind of you know, negative pushback I mean, that's you got, you got problems at that point speaking of problems let's, let's, let's throw out some takeaways and then get out of this category, cause I'm getting angry over here, so some signs that your organization has become a yes man factory, and that you need to go keep that resume updated unless you have no morals and you don't care and you're just cashing that paycheck, then in that case I'll see you in the next category, like and subscribe yeah, you'll probably get promoted in that case number one, notice who has left in the past year, and ask yourself, hey did they ask a bunch of hard questions were they always speaking up, you know to leadership, are they gone now these are questions you should ask you can definitely, uh, get a sense of this while they're still there, you know, see who speaks up in meetings uh, you, you can watch the meeting dynamics like when a certain person speaks who may or may not be in charge does anybody disagree or ask questions, you know, or ask not disagreeing questions but does anyone ask, kind of, counterpoint you know, hey, have you thought about x, y, z and does the person take that seriously or say we can take that offline you know, in other words shut up, yeah, right, yeah and then you ask yourself hey, when's the last time that, that leadership changed their mind, based on evidence, or pushback, or something else like that because if, I think, three will tell you a lot if the answer's that doesn't happen, takeaways, folks, again, keep that as updated second those are your so what do you think? has your organization become a yes man factory? if it has, and, and you're not working there anymore, let us know in the comments I was gonna say, don't let us know if you, if you're still there, yeah go on the, make an anonymous profile, yeah, right, it cannot end well, so, and if you found this useful, the next section that we're gonna talk about uh, is on why tech specifically amplifies these problems that we've talked about today, like which I kind of hinted at, like tech amplifies all these folks that they don't believe in anything, you know, they jump ship every 18 months, that kind of thing so let's jump into that, tech has a few odd hero worship complexes, one of which is that our founder is a genius mythology, you know, and also the 10x engineer or the hero developer that's up in all hours of the night that can, you know, get us across the finish line or whatever I mean, they're all lies you know, I mean, we like to believe we like to believe stories, you know they're hero stories there's some hope out there somewhere in those stories it seems like tech has built an entire ecosystem that rewards and amplifies expertise overreach and mythologizes it that's a bit of what we're about to talk about so, you I've seen it a lot in my 20 years in tech and there's a few things that you will hear that will let you know that, that the people running your company believe in this they'll say, oh, the tech, this, is a meritocracy you hear that from the AI people a lot, actually yeah, when they're on podcasts and stuff it's a meritocracy, we reward merit and results, not politics you know, a lot of people look like and talk like each other telling me that they reward merit and uh, and uh, oh, visionary founders, they, they should have strong opinions, they should be pushing you and, and oh, oh, the best leaders push you out of your comfort zone so they should be asking uncomfortable things of you know the other terrible advice that we haven't talked about, because it's terrible is technical brilliance that oh, these founders they're technically brilliant, and that transfers to other business domains oh my goodness, this one really grinds my gourd, I don't know what the, the cliche is yeah, so for all the companies that went under that were led by techos, right, they could not really transfer anything to good business judgment, like this is, talks, flies in the face of that, no, technical brilliance does not transfer to business judgment, or good business judgment, I should say, um, on the whole, of course there are exceptions, but on the whole, the exceptions you'll find aren't just these, um, solo geniuses, they probably surround themselves with people that are very good at business, and trust them, right? yeah, this is an interesting one for me I mean, maybe, there's one that I wanna attack straight away like, Achilles style that I just wanna, like, have a one -on-one duel with is the 10X Engineer is we need to mythologize that person and like hold them up in the company because I work with a lot of 10x engineers and also uh, just because you're excellent in implementing some kind of technology or code or whatever does not mean that you have the people skills to move up in an organization especially if you're, like if the people running the organization are not putting a lot of training and learning and mentoring and that kind of thing into you to help you reach that next level of, of empathy and uh, leadership skill and the things you need to advance to lead people just because you're a great engineer you get promoted and now you're running teams of engineers with skills that you are completely underdeveloped because working alone by yourself at night in the dark did not prepare you for dealing with a bunch of people problems you're still a 1x engineer yeah, exactly you're just a promoted 1x engineer I I see what you did there you may have always been a 1x engineer that's right again, that's the thing about mythology you, like, us thousands of years later have to wonder if any of that was true or is that just stories that got built up, started with a particular company they had to like run out and make a sale when, uh, they needed to pay payroll like that, that was how tight they were at that budget by the time I left that company they were making, when I, when I you know, a hundred million dollar recurring revenue every year, they were pretty good, they were pretty well off, but the people that got mythologized at that company, as like oh, amazing, and and got promotions and stuff they did not go out of their way to say like it was a team effort, and it took everybody working as a team, cause it was truly a team effort, and everybody together working together, built that company it was one person that claimed all that success for themselves, they scooped it, they hoovered it all up yeah and happened to synergize it that's right, I use synergize as a word and synergize it to get their promotion and left everyone in the dust and that's the tale as old as time that I've seen in tech a million times over a million times over, exactly so, you know, a lot of people from the outside looking in go they're doing really well fantastic right this person specifically, look at them, they're an innovator, go get her yeah, yeah, right, yeah, they did it all themselves mm -hmm and you would think that any kind of leader in an organization they should know that nobody, no one hero does any of that stuff by themselves, right unless the, unless the leader is basically the one, you know, propagating this right, yeah, unless they're, unless they're like the, the levels guy that has like, he, he has like 20 websites or whatever it is, and he does it all solo, right, just truly all solo no, boy, the reason that story aggravates me is because anybody who challenges the mythology will just get run out of their organization and then over time, the organization like brings these people up, it's also like exploitation cycle, the company will bring people up to a certain level skill them up to a certain level they can't afford to hire experienced people so they train newer folks from get them early in their career, burn them get rid of them get new people in cycle repeats yes I wish I had a label for companies like that well the action, organizational filtering I guess is a real thing, so a label would be good for companies like that I think the previous category, the pluralistic ignorance is probably part of what's at play there because that pluralistic ignorance, the previous category where we talked about pluralistic ignorance, that probably is a feedback loop, a negative feedback loop here right, to keep that trend going in this category about tech being a particularly bad place for this phenomenon of uh, pluralistic ignorance, so for anyone listening to this, do you think about tech being a specifically bad industry? for this, so we talked a lot or is there other industries that we're not aware of that are pretty bad maybe, I'm just not aware because I haven't been in other industries all that much, but you know, you, anybody listening you can let us know in the comments, and if you found this useful then the next discussion we're going to have is going to be how to protect yourself and your team uh, against kind of what we've talked about today we've diagnosed a problem but, we all still have to go to work tomorrow, so what you can actually do when you're dealing with this expertise overreach so, you can't fire your boss, probably probably not um, and you can't change the culture overnight ok, arguably can't change the culture start somewhere, but yes overnight, overnight, overnight two separate statements, yeah, yeah, but you can try to protect your team and your sanity so we're gonna try to give you a playbook for dealing with these, quote, leaders whose confidence has outpaced their competence oh, I love it yes, from our experience, some practical strategies developed over, uh, our time navigating organizational politics and protecting teams from bad decisions um, gonna tell you how to help yourself and your teams but first how do I know that I need help? glad you asked that I got, I have some, I have some steel man points here, some steel man, we haven't had them in a while some red flags that gotta pick your battles you don't, you don't want to commit career suicide you gotta pick your battles, oh yeah, the last guy who spoke up too much, he's not here anymore ohm, leadership has all the information and context that you don't have so, just trust them, just hey, ohm, listen you trust them and then the worst one is you can't coach them, managing up is a skill, in brackets that you don't have, it's managing up is a skill ohm, you gotta, you just gotta be better at managing up, that's, that's the problem, you're not, you're not good, I anything that victim blames, it says ohm I know you just got yelled at and berated yeah, in front of everybody, you didn't manage up hard enough, that's right, anything that blames a victim, I, those are my favorite steel man points, cause that just lets me know how much you need a new job, that, that, it's just an easy one, um, what can we do, it's you can name the pattern precisely when you see it like, I'm a big fan of like, naming things hey, it seems like you're making the decision, um, you don't have you're not presenting any evidence you're just telling us to do a thing without you making a cardinal sin of product management is just telling us what to do and not saying why we're doing it did we do a podcast on evidence -based versus intuition so i mean so this is another one of those things where you could politely push back and say i really admire your intuition however do you have any signals that point towards this direction right might we spend some time getting those and if you're really getting shut out that speaks volumes right there i mean that the document the patterns of blame shifting, manipulation you know, for, for eventual escalations of proper channels, if that's even possible, but when you ask the question that you just asked, you need to be documenting that decision, the reasons behind it, so we chose not to go down this avenue because of whatever now maybe people might be listening to this and say like well, Brian, documenting the evidence is not gonna do you any any good, like HR is just gonna take your documentation as evidence, as you're the troublemaker here, and yeah, that might be true, but, but least you're retaining your, your, your objective viewpoints it gives you some sort of sense of control of the situation where you actually have none in all reality, right as long as you're doing this with some sort of basis rather than just, you know, abject um, personal level things or maybe just simply coming out without any evidence, then you're no better than them right you have to have that, and that's where the documentation you talk about comes into play, because it's possible, unlikely, but possible, that you could present this, this, um, documentary evidence to somebody, could be somebody in leadership, could be somebody adjacent to that, leader, or whatever it might be, but at least, if you have it, you have a shot, that's all I'm saying, if you don't have it, you don't even have a parachute and you're deep in the water so that, I mean, the main reason that I say you want to name the pattern is because you're trying to distinguish between domain expertise uh, and cross domain over generalizations because that's, that's like the story I told earlier in the podcast about the guy that came from a Power BI platform or whatever, like, all he had was generalizations you know, generalizations about how to build teams generalizations about how to break work down and really none of what he had was uh, comparable to what we were doing, I mean, dude was like underwater from day one and um instead of a lot of people when they're drowning, they have different ways of dealing with that his way was just a thrash as much as possible, which is the worst possible thing he could have done you I also think that some, you know, if leadership is astute, they can kind of recognize this as a setup for failure you're just putting somebody in the water and they don't even know how to swim all they can do is thrash biases is if you're nice thing about the in an organization where people are looking out for biases you can design you can design these evidence checks experimentation that requirements for kind of thing, you can design them and I've talked on previous podcasts about the way I design my checks for evidence where I design the experiment to be the opposite of what I personally believe to be true, no hypothesis, yes just to be checking things you know, I mean, just to be like, helping force the experiment to truly be checking things, not just like, you know rubber stamp things, yeah, so if you can build these in to what you're testing I mean again, it assumes a lot, it assumes you're prototyping, it assumes a lot um, if you're not doing these things, like, these things, I really don't know like, how to help you, but if you are doing these things, and you have this expertise overreach you're not doing in your leadership or in your tech leads I would hope that you're using these checks to help convince others that looking for evidence is the right way to do it then over time you build coalitions with other people that see the problem clearly the way that you do that way in an organization and everyone seems to be taking the crazy pills, you're probably not alone, but can you assemble can you assemble the if you're feeling Avengers before each individual one of you are gone right, yeah, that's a question yeah, agreed, absolutely so just a quick tip here would be if you, if you're seeking evidence-based behavior from others start with yourself, start portraying that sort of behavior yourself and build in experimentation into everything you do we have some other suggestions here you know, you can ask, uh, what specific evidence supports this decision you, you talked about that earlier, do you have specific evidence that supports this that's question number one, I mean question number two is you can propose the small experiments that I was talking about you know, hey, I see you have a very firm stance on this, or you have a a solid expectation about this outcome would you be open to us running experiment next sprint to confirm, deny, whatever right, little, little, little things like that and-risking so you get shut down here, I mean, you're de again this is the documentation I was talking about I would write the item up anyway and just close it as, you know, as designed or close it as, you know, not not tested or whatever to say you know, we decided not to do this after the discussion with this person, that kind of thing just a little bit, it's not like overly, it's not over documentation just a little bit, it's lightweight it can be lightweight, yeah, a little bit and then the third thing is, you know you want to document, you want to build consensus, even building allies as you document these things is building consensus and that's kind of the heart of product management, is building consensus along the way maybe not, some of you might disagree with, well, Brian, it sounds like you're uh kind of stacking the deck over here I don't know if I am, I'm just, like, again are we, are we calling balls and strikes here, or what are we doing, like are we saying, like, hey, we have a specific way that we go about these things we test, we see a signal, and then we decide to pivot or not, depending on that signal, but if we're just doing what one person says listen, why go through all this if we're just gonna do what one person says anyway, yeah, right, we can save ourselves a bunch, we can go home early, that's what I'm saying yeah, the Pied Piper will win, speaking of going home early, what strategies have worked for you, when dealing with overconfident quote leadership, let us know in the comments and if you found this episode and any of the things that we talked about in this episode useful you know, like and subscribe so you can, see all of our future conversations and, and, podcasts we would love to hear from you we kind of were all over the place today I think there's a, that, the one study that we talked about, the pluralistic ignorance study we probably could take that one off for a completely different podcast just based, and it wouldn't be a part two, it would just be related, yeah, I think it would yeah, um, but uh, we talked about the three things we said we were going to talk about, spotting expertise overreach, talked about the, spotting the warning signs of expertise overreach we talked about protecting your team from overconfident leaders, and we talked about how to push back with the right language, or as right as you can language, and that's it, I mean, that's this podcast, so if there's other things, uh we, missed in here, I'm I'm sure we could have kept on this one for another hour, sure but listen there's a time and a place for everything yes, there is indeed, and this is not the time to spend that hour oh, starting right now, here we go part two, never mind, nope just kidding, we'll see you on the next next one,