Are You a Technical Expert Feeling Stuck? Discover the Expertship Framework for Career Growth & Resilience.

"Technical experts are the backbone of organisations, but their full potential remains untapped without the right support." – Alistair Gordon

In this episode, I sit down with Alistair Gordon, an expert in training and coaching technical subject matter experts (SMEs) worldwide. We discuss the unique challenges SMEs face when transitioning into leadership roles and how traditional leadership programs often fall short in addressing their needs. Alistair introduces the concept of "expertship"as a transformative framework to help SMEs break out of their technical bubbles and thrive in broader organizational roles.

This conversation dives deep into strategies for enhancing the value SMEs bring to organizations, including practical tools for developing enterprise skills like emotional intelligence, stakeholder engagement, and strategic thinking. Whether you're an SME looking to grow or a leader aiming to support your technical experts, this episode is packed with actionable insights.

Resources:
The Master Expert Book is 50 chapters of easy to digest, easy to implement processes and behaviours that elevate SMEs from mere Experts to guru Master Experts. Essential reading for technical subject matter experts who want to advance their career, have more fulfilling professional lives, and make a difference to their organisation.

Website:  https://www.expertunity.global/
LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/alistair-gordon-5a69349/

Chapters

• 0:16 Introduction to the Podcast
• 1:42 Practical Tips for Everyday Challenges

Transcript

[0:00] Music.

[0:06] Welcome to It's an Inside Job, the podcast where we equip you with actual skills to build resilience, enhance communication, foster well-being,

[0:14] and lead and coach with impact. I'm your host, Jason Liem, and every Monday we bring you expert insights and real-world stories to help you thrive and succeed. And with that said, let's slip into the stream.

[0:27] Music.

[0:35] Hey folks welcome back to the show i'm glad you could join me for another long form monday now have you ever wondered why highly competent technical experts sometimes struggle with transitioning to leadership roles those management roles or why traditional leadership training often fall short in equipping these professionals for success? And how can organizations better support the growth of their subject matter experts while unlocking their full potentials? Well, in this episode, we're going to try to crack that code, and it's a difficult code to crack. So today, we're diving deep into these critical questions with Alistair Gordon.

[1:14] Now, Alistair is one of the world's foremost experts on experts. He has coached and trained thousands of technical subject matter experts, or SMEs, from every specialist domain imaginable across the globe. Passionate about transforming how technical experts see themselves and their roles, Alistair's on a mission to help SMEs break out of their technical bubble and to understand and uncover and realize their potential. Alistair believes that technical experts have so much more value to add, and yet they are the experts at getting in their own way. So in this episode, we uncover a lot of insights and key learnings. So we're going to be talking about the hidden challenges of transitioning to leadership, why technical experts often feel stuck or misunderstood in their career growth, and how organizations can be better at supporting this evolution.

[2:06] Another one is the power of emotional intelligence, how reframing soft skills as essential enterprise skills can unlock new possibilities for technical experts, SMEs. And a third point is revolutionizing leadership development. Why expertship programs deliver real sustainable change compared to traditional leadership training.

[2:26] So let's slip into that.

[2:27] Music.

[2:43] Welcome everyone back to It's an Inside Job. We are reaching all the way down to Australia today. That's correct, right? Where in Australia do we find you, Alistair? I'm in Sydney, Jason. Sydney, beautiful city. Alistair, perhaps we could begin by you briefly introducing who you are and what you do. Yes, thank you. And thank you for the invite, Jason. So I run a education business, really. It started off as a leadership development organisation, of which there's, you know, many millions around the globe. But our biggest focus now is on what we call expertship rather than leadership. And it really focuses, the business focuses on helping subject matter experts around the world really fulfil their potential and probably get out of their own way a little bit, which maybe we'll be talking about. There's about 40 million of these people around the world, all sorts of technical experts, IT, engineering, health, science, whatever. And so our focus is really to, and we've been working with sort of 4,000 or 5,000 in the last few years to understand their challenges and help them break through what we call the technical barrier.

[3:59] How did you find yourself in this intersection between sort of technical expertise and leadership? What brought you to this crossroads? Well, there was a CIO who attended one of our leadership programs, Jason, and he probably a bit unwillingly, if he was being honest. And at the end of the program, he said to me he had a floor full of IT specialists who absolutely were critical in operating a company. They kept the lights on, did all the innovation, solved all the technical problems, kept people safe, et cetera.

[4:38] And they needed some of what was in this leadership program. And did I have anything for them? And that was literally the genesis of a business that's now been going for seven years. And, you know, we're delivering programs around the world to the subject matter experts. So he's still a good friend, and he was my first customer. So just to clarify, because a large portion of the audience of this podcast may not be sort of English as their first language. So when we talk about SMEs, subject matter experts, can you just sort of maybe a little more deeply define what that is, sort of operationally define that, just to set the foundation here for our conversation? Yeah, by all means. And so if you take a typical organization, medium or larger organization, there's probably, you know, maybe 500 or 1,000 or 5,000 employees. About 20% of those employees are what we call experts. That is to say they have deep specialist knowledge about one particular sort of function. So the most obvious group that everybody think of are IT specialists, notwithstanding that, you know, there are lots of different types of IT specialists, you know, software engineers, coders.

[5:57] You know, network engineers, et cetera. And those experts, they could be engineers, they could be finance specialists, marketing specialists. They don't have anyone reporting to them. They're not people leaders. They're not running teams, or some of them might be running teams, but they're employed for their deep technical specialist knowledge.

[6:22] And I might add, You know, corporate lawyers, for example, are a really good example of where you have very senior people inside large organizations who are a lawyer and they look after their custodians of the legal frameworks inside that business. They're not people leaders, but they are the go-to expert for particular knowledge. And they almost play the role of internal consultants inside most organizations. But they're a little bit difficult for the normal development systems to manage because they don't fit comfortably on an organisational chart. They're not a people leader and yet they're absolutely critical to the function of the organisation. So they're vital and their work is mission critical but they're a little bit forgotten, if I'm honest, by a lot of the leaders in the organisations. From my experience, and again, this is anecdotal, for me, a lot of them are the nuts and bolts that can hold the technical, the expertise, or whatever the foundational part of that company is together. They're not so much as a support function, but they are what keeps the connective

[7:34] tissue of what makes that business thrive. So I'm curious, you've called it a technical bubble.

[7:41] What is the reason many of these, if we could just use, instead of saying subject matter expert, SMEs, if we could just use that acronym, what is the reason a lot of these SMEs get stuck in this technical bubble from your vast experience? Yeah, I think it's absolutely the perfect question because, and it's a question they'd like to know the answer to as well, I must say.

[8:08] So, you know, when you go down that technical road, whether it's in IT or finance or marketing, really your technical expertise is your ticket to the game.

[8:18] So in order to be employed and be a valuable employee and gradually get more pay and get more responsibility, you have to develop super technical prowess in whatever area you're working in. And so and technical experts like developing that expertise that's their their chic if you like they really enjoy um being really really good at something um they they love playing with things and breaking things and putting them back together again it's sort of part of their personality so they focus on building their technical expertise and and our data suggests that really the first sort of five years of their technical journey they're getting basically competent and in the next 10 years they're they're building that technical expertise and then adding lots of technical experiences on top and they sort of 12 to 15 years into their career they are as you say absolutely guru level technical expertise they're the go-to person and what have you but that's when they sort of get stuck in their technical bubble and hit the technical ceiling because they haven't taken any time or been encouraged to build what we call enterprise skills that go on top of those technical skills. So they're very good at solving their narrow technical problem.

[9:41] But then when they're asked to do things that are more strategic or broadly valuable to their organization, they struggle because they don't have the interpersonal skills, the change skills, collaboration skills, business acumen skills that a lot of other people at their level 15 years in would have. And so they get pigeonholed, if you like, or they get stuck in their little tech, well, you're the IT guy or you're the finance guy and off they go. And at that point, it's really problematic for them because they get very frustrated.

[10:13] We've done quite a lot of research, Jason, around whether or not they feel they could add more value to their organisations and like 87% say absolutely, like we definitely could. And when we ask them, okay, so what's getting in the way?

[10:29] Their answer, maybe your listeners could have a guess for a second as to what their answer might be, but their answer is management. Management is getting in the way of me being able to add value.

[10:41] And that's really the first, that's our starting point with this cohort is to say, is this, is it really management or is it a bit of both? Is it a bit of management, a bit of you? And then we begin to start having that conversation with them. So I think they're encouraged to be as technical as they can and whenever their development plan comes up for discussion, it's what technical courses are you going to go on. You know, there's no focus on how they're going to become a much more rounded corporate employee so they can use their technical expertise to the maximum benefit for their organization. Yeah, because I guess also what I've, again, this is anecdotal from my experience working in organizations, is that these technical experts, they climb through the ranks And then all of a sudden they said, someone from leadership says, we would like you to lead this team. We would like you to lead this. So there is that promotion, but it's still on that technical line. But as you said, it's more of these sort of, what you call them, enterprise skills with the communication, the collaboration, the cooperation type of things. You know, they have high, high competence, as what you said, in their skills technically. But sometimes their psychosocial emotional intelligence skills, if we can just sort of put it under that umbrella, has not been developed.

[12:02] And that's where they get stuck.

[12:07] What is your experience with that? Because what I hear is that a lot of them get sort of, they reach a ceiling per se, and then they stay there in that niche. But then there's others that kind of break through that ceiling, but they lack the other skill sets needed to collaborate, cooperate, and communicate at a different level than other than the technical expertise.

[12:29] Yeah, I mean, I think you're 100% right. Your own total experience is absolutely

[12:34] backed up by our data. So, I mean, the most important thing to say here is this is a good news story. Like, it's an absolute opportunity for them to do it. And if I had a single punchline, you know, for all of the managers who are listening to your podcast, it would be other than go out and find out who these people are because they're running your company and you don't realize they are. And if they all left, you wouldn't have a company. I mean, that's the reality. But um the good news story is they are all intensely smart so once they understand that actually adding these enterprise skills as we call them or you know um uh you know social skills as you're describing them once they add those skills to their kit bag um they become twice or three times as effective and productive and adding value and they can absolutely do it We've, you know, there's no question. It's a mental thing. They don't actually believe those skills necessarily.

[13:38] Advance their technical career but they do as you've described and so as soon as they can master those additional skills and add them to their technical skills suddenly everybody wants to engage them they they get invited to more bigger projects strategic projects they can add value they're asking all the right questions of the business people um and suddenly they're adding way more value and having way more fun jason than they were when they were stuck in their technical bubble but a lot of them you know a lot of them a lot of technical people say i don't want to be emotional in my job i can't afford to be emotional you know i'm an evidence data driven person i can't you know i have to make decisions based on logic not on personality or liking people and they they have this miss misunderstanding of how these enterprise skills can actually, supercharge the influence and value that they can have to their organizations. And once they realize that's the case, they can develop these skills really quickly and they attack them with military precision.

[14:47] I think that's a very salient point you're making because it is a limiting belief where they say, well, I don't want emotions in it. I'm very logical, rational, analytical, and that's what it is. Very true. But I mean, we are human beings and the whole point of emotions is is to it's a sort of a chemical signature a chemical message from physiology psychology we don't always have to ride with it but or allow the emotions to rule us but the the idea to to tune into our emotions and figure out what that message is because you know the physiology doesn't have syntax or grammar it has chemical messengers in the form of modulators and transmitters and hormones and so emotions are very important part so i think i think their perspective.

[15:35] It's correct. We don't want to just say emotional, but maybe it's to reframe or to give a new title to that type of training because it's like emotional intelligence. What does that mean, right? And so sometimes it's to broaden the scope because pre-interview, you talked about how sometimes these technical experts that are really good at their job and would probably shine in management leadership, how there are sometimes they feel that, okay, there's something, they're trying to fix me, I'm broken. And they just want to slap some emotional courses onto me to make me a more rounded human being. Right. And I can understand. I was like, how can people feel crippled by that? To be honest, yeah, I think we were guilty of that early on, I think, when we started promoting the courses.

[16:27] You know, we were we were sort of saying, look, you need to be good at this. You need to be good at this. You need to be good at this. And we weren't doing the typical Y frame, Jason, saying, you know, why do you be? So, I mean, to bring it back to something, you know, very practical, when we think about the challenges of a typical subject matter expert, and, you know, those of you listening to your listeners on this podcast might think of people they know in their own organisation. Here's how you can spot one, right? They are intensely busy, right? They have a huge workload. they're working on multiple projects at the same time and they're probably their technical capability is vital to the success of all of those projects they have very demanding stakeholders and they have separate stakeholders for each of these projects and those stakeholders imagine they have 100 of jason's time and actually they only have 30 of jason's time so very demanding stakeholders they are quite individual contributors so they lack support they don't have anyone they believe they can delegate things to um and and as a consequence of all of that they become the person that you go to to fix things you know this is broken that's broken and only jason knows how to fix it um and so they become their own worst enemies in in lots of ways um now once once we when we ask people well how would you fix that problem you know because they're not.

[17:50] They're getting some fulfillment, but they're really busy and they're very stressed and they feel the responsibility of their role because they are the only person who can fix things.

[17:59] When we ask them how to solve it, they say, well, I wish my stakeholders would understand me better. And to your point about reframing, we start by saying, well, how well do you know your stakeholders?

[18:11] Do you know what motivates them? Do you know what they worry about? Do you know what their key performance indicators are? Do you know what success looks like on these projects?

[18:21] You know, how emotionally intelligent are they? You know, are they detailed people? Are they big picture? How well do you know your stakeholders and what they want from you and how best to approach them and address them? And of course, the answer, generally speaking, is not very well at all. You know, that hasn't been something that they've focused on. They're very, very task focused rather than relationship focused so our starting point is to say you know if you want your stakeholders to understand you better i think your starting point needs to be you need to understand them well and of course that requires you know all of those um emotional intelligences that you were talking about it means asking non-technical questions to people treating them like a human you know um etc um and you know because they've been so busy you know they get unbelievably expedient like they just do get stuff done all the time and they never stop to build relationships and ask how people are or you know how are you experiencing me as an expert and so on but once once this begins to happen you know then they can really begin to take back control basically of their own jobs and start figuring out you know what what are the most important things they could do for their organization and where are they wasting time and And how do they get rid of those tasks or delegate them to someone and so on?

[19:47] Because there's probably a lot of leaders listening to this podcast or listening to our conversation right now. And they have some sort of leadership role and they have technical direct reports that report up to them. And they're thinking, you know, this guy or this gal, I want to promote them. But they've been technically an expert at something for an SME for the last 15, 20 years. And this is their sort of habitual mindset.

[20:16] If you were to advise them as the coach, if they had you as a personal coach, these leaders, not the SMEs, but these leaders who want to promote the technical experts, what would you say the top three things they would need to learn or they would need to teach their SMEs in order to make that leap up to sort of that level where we're talking about on enterprise skills as you've articulated? Yeah, so I think this is a really great question. So the first thing is that those leaders will probably, if they're typical, perceive the subject matter experts as problem children, because they'll see them as blockers. They'll see them as people who are always negative, who are always telling them why things can't be done, people who don't appear to be connected to the strategy of the business, people who don't appear to be interested in the economic outcomes. And so they probably have, whether they realise it or not, they either have a direct bias, which is, by the way, my experience is most of them have a direct bias, or they have an unconscious bias and that plays out. And, of course, technical experts are their own worst enemy. I asked my software developer the other day, oh, I had this great idea.

[21:40] Um, and he, he spent 20 minutes telling me all the reasons it couldn't, it was really difficult to do. And at the end of the 20 minutes, I said to him, do you think, do you think it's a good idea? He said, oh yes, yes, it's a fantastic idea. I just wanted to make sure you knew how difficult it was going to be for me to do it and how brilliant I need to do in order to build this for you. And it was just this microcosm of relation of, of interactions that go on all the way around. So so what leaders first need to do is to consider that the normal things that they associate with high potential talent in their organizations they have to reset when it comes to subject matter experts subject matter experts are not perceived as being by the talent teams as ambitious because they don't want to be people leaders in fact the last thing they want to be by and large is people is they only go into the people leadership line, if you like, as you were describing earlier, because that's the only way they think they can get paid more money or have more kudos or get more seniority. So most organisations actually need to think about fixing, you know, enabling experts to move forward and get better enumerated, even if they don't have people. So the first thing is the reframe. The second thing is I think it would be really cool for the managers to really understand what would happen if these experts weren't available to their company.

[23:08] And a good way for senior leaders to do that is to go and talk to the talent acquisition teams and ask them which are the most difficult positions to recruit for. And I guarantee you they'll be technical experts. You know if you lose a couple of key technical experts most heads of technical departments will, really struggle to to replace that expertise there's a lot of tacit knowledge that walks out of the organization when someone goes on to the other side so i think a lot of leaders don't understand the valuable role that experts play um and and then i'd love them to have a think about asking these experts if you are running the company um you know what what would you be doing differently the challenge for that third question jason is that most technical experts aren't ready to answer it. And this is where, you know, they get into trouble. They only see things through the technical lens in which they're expert in. So a lot of our work around expertship is to get them to think and read much more broadly around what the organization is doing, its marketplace, its competitors or its alternatives if they're in government, and be able to talk the language of the business so that they can engage the business properly. And then they'll be able to figure out what their particular technical specialism can do for the business.

[24:34] There's a lot you said there that are quite astute and a lot of salient points. So I just need to rewind and unpack. So just to rewind, one of the larger topics I hear you're talking about is that maybe a lot of technical experts don't want to go into the managerial field, but that there should be maybe a technical line of promotion. Maybe they don't have people under them, but for higher salaries or bonuses that they should create this. One of the companies that I used to work with is a Finnish company, YIT. And I remember they had a very, very clear and distinct perspective. Two-line paths, those who wanted to choose technical, and then they could go there. And they had that sort of, those levels and those pay levels, salary levels up as they could increase. But from your experience, do you find a lot of companies kind of, there's a sort of a dead stop or a period at the end for technical experts where there's no progression? I would say that company you worked with is the exception rather than the rule. If you take out tech. So big tech, understand that.

[25:52] Probably it's, you know, the sort of Steve Jobs syndrome where, you know, you have these really, really brilliant people and they don't have any, in fact, they're going around challenging everybody all the time. But what they're doing is really innovating, stretching, you know.

[26:06] Reframing product, you know, value and even what we want to buy, You know, so I think big tech understand that some of the smartest, better software developers and what have you used to keep just paying them more to keep them and provide them with lots of other sort of non-financial benefits. You know, with a couple of big tech companies that do that really, really well. So in big tech companies, that seems to be less of a problem. But if you talk about most typical manufacturing companies or government, in government in Australia, you know, you're not allowed to be paid more unless you have people working for you. And so to your point, quite a few technical experts decide to go across into the people leadership role in order for remuneration reasons. But, of course, they've not been running teams. They've not been on the leadership programs. they've not been, developing their stakeholder engagement skills or their emotional intelligence skills or business acumen skills. So when they move across from being a pure technical person into a team leader, they really struggle in my experience because we haven't set them up for success. That's not their fault. That's the organization's talent process.

[27:27] I don't know whether this is the case in the countries that you work in, Jason. But over here, quite a few people use a thing called the nine-box grid. And without getting technical, it's a tool that the talent teams use to figure out who the high-potential employees are. And the end result of using this tool is that if you arrive in a place where you get invested in, you get sent on courses and so on and so forth, And the nine-box screw is pretty simple, if your listeners can visualize it. Up the vertical axis, there's sort of performance. So there's sort of low, medium, and high, if you can imagine that axis. And across the horizontal axis, there's low, medium, and high potential. So it's performance versus potential. And you can imagine nine boxes being split up that way. And if you're in the top right three, it's called the green pool. Some people may have heard of the green pool. And so if you've got, if you're a high performer and you've got lots of potential to perform even better, you end up in this high potential pool and you get sent on all sorts of courses.

[28:46] All of these little boxes have names. and the top left-hand box, which is high performance, no potential, is called subject matter experts. That's where that box is. So the talent teams are saying these people are very high performers but they have no potential. I show quite a lot of subject matter experts this nine-bob-square. It makes them very grumpy, Jason, I've got to tell you.

[29:12] And the problem is, and this goes back to your question around how managers should think about things and how they could help S&As, is that the definition of potential is wrong because the talent teams are using the definition potential to lead more people in the future. And so of course technical experts don't don't fit into that category and they don't aspire to that if organizations and many organizations we've worked with have done this if they change the definition of potential to potential is the ability to add lots more value all of a sudden lots of people from that technical expert box zoom into you know the green pool and it's transformative for that organisation because suddenly they're unleashing the sort of, you know, untapped power of all these technical experts. By adding enterprise skills on top of the technical skills, these people just take off. It's so exciting. It's so exciting to watch them do it. And all it requires is a bit of reframing on behalf of the leadership in the way they think about who are our most critical people in this business.

[30:24] Another way they might want to think about it is who will come up with the innovations that will keep our business growing or our government department delivering even better services to the community who who will that be i'm sorry it won't be people leaders it'll be the technical experts who drive innovation um and and once i start pointing that out to executive teams like what were the last four really good things you came up with who came up with them oh they're We're all technical experts. It really begins to transform the way that people think about it. It's a big issue. The company you referenced at the beginning of the question, good on them. They'd be in the top 5% or 6% doing that. I think 95% of organizations don't.

[31:12] In part one of my conversation with Alistair Gordon, we explored the unique challenges faced by technical experts when transitioning into the leadership roles. Many highly skilled individuals in technical fields, well, they struggle because they lack sometimes the emotional intelligence or the broader psychosocial skills that are necessary for success in managerial positions. Now, Alistair pointed out that calling these soft skills doesn't do them justice. Technical experts need a wider range of enterprise skills, including collaboration, adaptability, and business acumen to truly thrive in leadership roles. One of the key takeaways was the importance of reframing how organizations perceive technical.

[31:55] Now, these individuals often feel overwhelmed by stakeholder demands and operational pressures. And unfortunately, well, they're sometimes seen as problem children instead of being valued for their significant contributions. Now, Alistair and I discussed how leaders can engage technical experts more effectively by asking questions like, what would you do differently if you were running the organization?

[32:18] Now, this approach not only broadens their thinking, but also helps them feel valued, heard, and encouraging them to step into higher-level roles with confidence. We also discussed the challenge many subject matter experts, SMEs, face in breaking out of their technical bubble. Now, this happens when their focus on technical work prevents them from developing interpersonal and business-oriented skills, leaving them frustrated and sometimes feeling undervalued. Alistair emphasized that once technical experts see the benefits of combining enterprise skills with their expertise, well, that means they can unlock a whole new level of effectiveness and productivity.

[32:57] It's a powerful reminder that SMEs are often the backbone of an organization, or what I think is the connective tissue. And investing in their growth creates ripple effects throughout the business, throughout the organization. For SMEs listening to this episode, well, Alistair offered actual insights on developing self-awareness and prioritizing skill building beyond your technical domain. And for the leaders out there who lead SMEs, well, Alistair, well, he highlighted the critical importance of recognizing, engaging and supporting the growth of technical experts to help them transition more successfully into broader roles. You know, I think this part of the conversation really set the stage for what's coming in part two. We're going to dive deeper into the strategies and solutions

[33:41] that empower both technical experts and their leaders to achieve meaningful growth and impact. So let's slip back into the stream in part two with my brilliant conversation with Alistair Gordon.

[33:56] And what I have found is that it comes back to the trailhead of our conversation where a lot of sort of traditional leadership training really doesn't work for these technical people because it's too soft.

[34:09] I don't know if that's the right words, but it's not wired for their – they get lost in translation in these type of trainings. Totally. What a great way of describing it. That's exactly how I would describe it. Yeah. So my background is within clinical psychology and the cognitive science, and I have this deep interest in neuroscience. And so what I have done over the years to address this, and that's why I really wanted to have you, I just wanted to talk to an expert such as yourself on the show, because what I've done, I've taken my different types of training.

[34:41] Whether it's emotional intelligence or empathy or whatever it is, or communication. But what I've broken it down to, I've broken it down, I've taken an unorthodox approach, and I've broken it down to how the brain works. I broke it down so they understand it. So I talk about the sort of the nuts and bolts of the brain, the different parts of the brain. And all of a sudden, this translation, even though it's not, you know, nuts and bolts per se, but it's biological nuts and bolts. All of a sudden these these these guys and these gals that are being in the technical rabbit hole for 15 20 years they light up because i'm kind of talking about the nuts and bolts of the brain or the nuts and bolts of the physiology and how that connects to people and i tell you it really lights up the room and it really allows them to migrate more towards these sort of psychosocial emotional skills but that's what i have found again this is just anecdotal and what i have found that works And this just lights them up.

[35:42] Yeah, and I think, you know, we're probably, you know, both being very passionate about the fact that we do what we do because we want to help people. And when we see them flourish and blossom and so on, it's very exciting. And I can imagine the approach that you're taking being very interesting because technical experts are interested in science. They're interested in how things work. And you also will be doing what we see all the time is you're helping them unpack what's been getting in the way of them being as successful as they would like to be. Now probably our approach is a little bit more applied rather than sort of neuroscience. So in our programs we've banned the L word, leadership. We don't talk about leadership at all because they don't want to be leaders and they don't want to go on a leadership course and that's not what they want to do. So 20% end up being people leaders, but that's a different story. It's not what we're attempting to do. And so, you know, in our capability framework, which we've built.

[36:50] Which we couldn't find one, so we had to build one, you know, stakeholder engagement and a real in-depth into stakeholder engagement and how as a subject matter expert working on multiple projects, do you manage stakeholders? How do you understand and manage them? this is people can experts can see the immediate relevance of learning there to help them get through the day you know um so it's super applied um you know similar similarly with collaboration you know where what are the secrets to collaboration between technical teams and indeed technical and non-technical teams which is very often where all the barriers are and you know what sort of tactics can we use to improve that and you know how do we make good decisions about productive collaboration versus unproductive. So we, you know, and I encourage everybody in our space, if you like,

[37:41] to think very hard about it. You have to imagine yourself being productive.

[37:47] A day in the life of an expert and understand that intimately and those pressures that people are under because they're under a lot of pressure they're very committed unbelievably hard working you know my experience even if even if the outside they can occasionally be abrasive or direct or apparently not in they are absolutely just like most humans gorgeous people and and if you can help them interface with people in an effective way and improve their day they light up just as you say and um you know it is i've done leadership development and executive coaching what have you for i don't know 20 years or what have you this stuff is the most fulfilling by three times that i've done this is right up there on the top of the mountain um and this is one of the reasons why we're really focusing the organization on this, because there's a lot of demand for it. Very few organizations are doing it.

[38:50] But you're helping, and thank you so much for helping, in just getting the message out there that developing technical experts has at least, if not a bigger payoff, than developing emerging leaders. And that's really the decision people need to get. Well, that's what I wanted to dive a little more into, is this concept that you've created, this expertship, right and how it i'd like to discuss maybe a little more about some of the foundational principles and how it's it's different from traditional leadership obviously you've taken out leadership in that i know you've spoken a little of it but what would you say some of the foundational principles of expertship are if we could maybe dive a little deeper than what we've already kind of discussed so yeah so so i think um, The key principles really are underpinning everything is andragogy. So many of your listeners will know that pedagogy is how you teach children things and andragogy is how you teach adults. So you have to go super andragogy to teach technical experts because one of the things that I learned very early on, and I've got the bruises to prove it.

[40:05] Is that you can't teach experts anything. They have to learn it themselves, which is why you're unpacking, you know, neuro-programming and what have you will really help because they want to know how it works, you know, and they want to figure it out for themselves. So anybody approaching experts with the view of telling them what to do, is heading for a really, really uncomfortable experience, which will ultimately fail so the fundamental principle is that we have to put them in a learning environment where they're able to think about what's getting in their way, and think about what the possible you know opportunities to solve that problem are and we get them to do it in teams and it's amazing how the answer is always in the room so so the first thing is, I think, the learning approach. That's the first thing. Secondly, I think it's really important to respect the fact that being an SME, subject matter expert, is quite different from being a generalist or a people leader. It's a completely different way of working. It's a completely different pressure.

[41:24] You know, if the email system goes down and you're responsible for it, like, you know, in a company of 5,000 people, no people leader in the entire business has felt pressure on that Monday morning like that, you know, that is the definition of pressure, you know, and so, and you wonder why people get grumpy when people break their systems, it's because those sorts of things happen, and, you know, the irony is, just.

[41:55] There's probably a team of experts in every large organization who works around the clock to make sure our email works, you know, and they work a bit like when you turn on the tap and you expect water to come out, you know, it's a utility and no one thinks about the effort that's put into that for that sort of seamless transition, safe transition of email until it goes wrong and anyone wants to know whose fault is this you know um so for 364 days of the year it's worked absolutely perfectly and for one hour it doesn't and you know you know my goodness me so so the learning environment will be one the second thing from a the expert is you know we have to put ourselves in their place and then i think we have to ask them what what would they like, what value do they believe they can add? And what new skills are they going to have to learn in order to be able to add that value? We have to give them, if you like, a mission from God. Where do you want to get to? Most experts will say they want to be more strategic. They want to work on bigger projects. They want to work on higher value, higher level innovation.

[43:12] But they don't have any of the business context, generally speaking that allows them to do that so they have to for example you know change their reading for example you know those 26 unix newsletters that they read every month you know they need to cut that down to three and start reading the economist and probably listen to your podcast you know they need to really expand their you know their their way so so i think it.

[43:40] It requires a respect for the role and the journey. And that really will be my starting point, because so many of them have been on programs before and not enjoyed them. They haven't resonated, as you described early on. And I think that people are trying to fix them, whereas I think they have to believe that people are trying to help them go to the next level. I think it also comes back to what you said before. You know, it's not just the responsibility of these technical experts to sort of evolve to leadership. But I think it's also other parts of the company to evolve because I work in as I've I've worked in a number of larger organizations. And it's funny if you move from, let's say, accounting to travel to engineering to marketing or whatever. A lot of the a lot of the business doesn't know how the other parts of the business works. So I don't think this is just a technical thing where they're just so super focused on some niche engineering challenge or whatever the expertise. I think this goes across the board. And what I have found is that if you sometimes have these lunch and learns, right, where one department will talk about sort of the governing details of what they do to another department, all of a sudden they start understanding the connective tissue that holds this company together.

[45:01] And I find this, there's a level of ignorance sometimes when it comes, not intentional, of course, completely unintentional because people are so focused on what they do. But sometimes the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. And so I just don't want to just put all the heat on technical experts, but I think this goes across the board. And I think also what you're saying is that, you know, technical experts, they may come off as a little abrasive, a little straightforward, really direct. Maybe they need to learn more diplomacy. But I think also, on the other hand, is that the leaders who are sort of leaders in the traditional sense have to also understand that these technical experts are probably guys and gals that bend over backwards, that have one of the deepest loyalties.

[45:47] And if they just reframe, I think that was a good word you used earlier, to understand that these technical experts, they have the most probably very noble and positive intentions. So their their intentions are there but it's sometimes how they communicate that the impact affects the perception that oh they're just they're rough and abrasive they're just their own their own little fiefdoms no you know and so that's why i think that there's this loss in translation that goes both vertically horizontally diagonally across organizations yeah look i think everything you just said is you're completely backed up by our experience and our data and And, you know, they...

[46:32] You know, I think they're incredibly passionate about what they do. But remember that, you know, an expert wants to be the very best expert they can. And so in our capability model, we have, you know, three levels in our model. We have specialist, we have expert, and we have master expert. And most experts who come on our program are operating at expert level.

[46:56] And, you know, that's where they're, you know, they're quite transactional, maybe a little bit of strategy. That they're pretty much now immediate they're probably the departmental internally focused maybe and the level above master expert where you're adding mega value to the organization as in this you can imagine is strategic it's a longer horizon you know it's creating competitive value or community value it's just this high level stuff and the stuff you need to know to be the master expert as opposed to expert is completely different. And you mentioned there in passing that the questions they ask are critical. So most organisations are very siloed, as you described, and very often the experts are working across these departments and don't understand what these departments do well enough in order to be able to shape brilliant technical solutions for them, you know, whether it's in finance or law or IT or whatever. So a lot of what we do is to say, you've got to stop telling people what you think and start asking people questions.

[48:08] And, you know, this concept of expert as coach is probably the most fundamental tenant, if you like, of expertship, that you have to understand what the long-term goal of the business organisation, government department, whatever it might be, not-for-profit is, and understand the customers and understand what the customers might be asking for in 18 months' time, then you can build a solution starting now that will deliver that customer value. But if you're head down, bottom up, just getting stuff done in your technical department, you've got no chance of adding extreme value. And most experts want to be in that extreme value place. They believe they've got the ability, And most of the people I've met have to really add way more value, but they're just not going about it the right way. I've got one small piece of bad news, which is, and somebody said this to me, Jason, a few years ago when I started this business, and it's turned out to be true,

[49:09] very true, very thoughtful of the person. This person said to me, Alastair, your biggest problem is that the subject matter experts, the SMEs who most need expertship, will believe they least need it.

[49:24] Because they'll believe they're as expert as they can be already. And for those listeners who are still tuned in, I'd really encourage you to spend time with people who resist, you know, learning about enterprise skills and how the brain works and so on and so forth. Forgive them their early sins, you know, because the people I've found who are the most resistant to this get the most out of it. It just, there's this lighting up that you're describing, but, you know, it's, you know, it's an exploding sun when they finally get it. So, you know, we've got quite a few organisations to work with where people they nominate to come on the program resist the nomination. Indeed, one person said to me the other day when I was at a program in New York, I said, what were your expectations of the program? He said, well, I thought I was sent along as a punishment, as a punishment.

[50:25] And, you know, people laughed and what have you, but I took that very personally because that's not his fault.

[50:34] That's the leadership in his organisation's fault. That is a huge amount of bias that that person has been, you know, exposed to over many years. and that's on us. And, you know, I feel that very deeply. So we have to... Don't imagine everyone's going to come rushing and giving you a big hug if you start offering them development. They'll need to be brought slowly along. Speaking to that, again, from my experience, I've come across many HR professionals or training experts per se, and they find it's one of the hardest combos to crack. I think that's why what you and your team or your company delivers, Alex, are so important. Because I'm sure there's going to be people out there who want to reach out to you to understand because traditional leadership programs, they may work to some regard, but you've created a much more bespoke based on, I think, three levels, specialist, expert, and master expert or something like that you said, expertise. And obviously there's a lot more there we could discover operationally how that works. But I think that is so important because I think a lot of training experts and HR people kind of bang their heads because they'll roll out something or they'll hire a traditional management leadership course, and they cost whatever thousands of kroner or dollars or whatever it is per person.

[52:03] And, you know, the return on investment on that, you know, within 72 hours, more than likely, most of the people have gone back to default or just maybe a little above default, but the return on that investment is negligible. And so that's why I really wanted to have you on the show, Because I think there's a lot of, there's a huge hunger out there for this expertise versus, or sorry, expertship versus leadership training. Yeah. I think one of the interesting things, you know, you and I have probably both done lots of leadership programs, run leadership programs. And the difference, the biggest difference I notice is that there's two differences. The first is, you know, we do a leadership program. At the end of the workshop element or whatever, people make a list of things they're going to do differently. Thank you. And then, you know, you check in with them two months downstream, four months downstream, and they've done maybe a third of those things, you know. And that's very frustrating and it goes to the low ROI that you were describing return on investment.

[53:07] But with expertship programs, they make a list of things and they start the next day. They start the next day. It's extraordinary. I have a manager check-in usually two weeks after the workshop element of some of our programs. So it's a triangulation session between an expert and their coach, which might be me in this instance, and their manager. And their manager will routinely say, this person is completely different from what they were three weeks ago, like straight away. And one of the things that the managers will have noticed is they're asking to go and meet customers. They're asking to go and meet stakeholders. You know, they're asking lots of questions. that they are thinking and acting differently from day one. And this goes to the message of unleashed potential here, you know, the unfulfilled potential. Most senior people leaders have large groups of these people ready to rock and roll. You've just got to let them go and you'll see the results. And even though it's quite a difficult concept to sell into a lot of organisations, once they start, They generally, they go big, Jason. And that's not because we're great facilitators or trainers or what have you. It's exactly as you were describing.

[54:22] It's needed, you know, and there's an opportunity to really, you know, improve the effectiveness of the workforce sitting right there, you know, as yet unfulfilled. So to create this sort of sustainable growth and development within these individuals, I mean, from your expertise and your knowledge, I mean, at what point, obviously you have the training, then you follow up with coaching every so often, but how long, again, in general, is it where you guys can kind of drop off the radar, you can fade into the background and they are able to be self-sustaining to some extent?

[55:02] Yeah, it's very possible. I mean, I'd love to tell, you know, all of your listeners and you that what we're doing is complete rocket science, but actually it's just sort of kind of advanced common sense, really. And it's just, and I'm not being too critical of all the talent teams because their budget and their mandate tends to be on leadership because that's what senior leaders tell them to spend their time on.

[55:25] What I'm arguing is that if senior leaders really looked at who are the most important people in their organisation, where they'll find a lot of them are subject matter experts and they need development as well.

[55:35] So, you know, we've published some books. There's a book out there called Master Expert, which is basically a textbook to do all of this. People can simply go and buy it on Amazon and read through it. There's a self-assessment people can do to see how expert they are. So part of our role is definitely to do that technology transfer that you're describing and get organisations to be able to do it themselves. We accredit large organisations to run programmes, design their own programmes themselves. They usually start with us as a pilot, just to prove, but they don't have to. We've got an assessment, a global assessment, so you can figure out how expert you are if you're an SME out there called the Expertship 360, and that helps you figure out, and there's a global benchmark on that assessment. So there are lots of tools that are very, very low cost and people can get started with straightaway without having to engage expensive consultants. And definitely our objective, we're a tiny company in Sydney, our objective is to help as many experts as possible. I mentioned there's 40 million out there at the beginning of the call. We'd like all 40 million to be helped, but we certainly can't do it. So very, very open to anybody connecting with us and saying, where do I start? We're very happy to offer some free advice and, you know, even that expert ship model I described with the three layers, you know, that's free and available off our website so people can just download it and start working with it tomorrow morning.

[57:04] That's brilliant. So just quickly, though, you're based in Sydney, but do you sometimes run these trainings online?

[57:15] Yeah, so we do them online. We do them around the world. So I referenced New York recently. It was in London recently, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia. We're hoping to start something shortly in your original home country, Canada. And and so on so um and everything's able to be done the one good thing that covid did for our industry is we can do everything online now i i don't think there are many good things about covid but that was one of them um so yes it doesn't really matter where anyone is in in the world we've got different foreign language coaches that we have so so um our objective is to help as many experts in your organization unleash their potential and anything we can do to help whether for free or on a paid basis we're happy to do and it's also one really grateful for you reaching out to us for as a guest for the way for the podcast well i'll be sure to leave all the contact information and your book master expert i will also leave a link to amazon where people can pick it up and i highly recommend you know reaching out to alice gordon to have a deeper conversation on this. Alistair, I just want to thank you again for showing up and being very flexible

[58:34] between Sydney and Oslo. It's not always easy to find a civil time to do it, but you bent over backwards and I very much appreciate that.

[58:43] So thank you very much, Alistair, for being on the show today and sharing your expertise.

[58:49] Music.

[58:56] In the last part of our conversation, Alistair and I focused on how technical experts can benefit from training that's designed with their unique needs in mind. Now, traditional leadership programs often fall short for these individuals because they don't address the specific challenges and pressures technical experts face. You know, I shared how breaking training down into how the brain works has been effective in my experience. And Alistair, well, he agreed that respecting the perspective of technical experts is key. We discussed the idea of expertship, and that's a way to help technical experts grow into their roles while staying true to their strengths. We also touched on the challenges technical experts often encounter in large organizations. You know, miscommunication between departments and unclear career paths, well, they can make SMEs feel stuck. They can make them feel undervalued.

[59:50] And Alistair pointed out, quite frankly and quite rightly, that those who benefit the most from expertship programs are often the least likely to recognize the need for them. And it becomes a clear reminder that growth starts with self-awareness and a willingness to step outside of the technical bubble. I mean, those are just some of the points. Those are the things that I plucked out. But there's a lot of insights that you can gather that you can pull from this by just rewinding and replaying but for deeper exploration and discovery of this idea and i think it's a very unique way of moving from leadership to expertship i will leave all of alistair gordon's contact information and website in the show notes alistair i just want to send you a personal thank you for such a brilliant conversation. I haven't had a conversation based on this evolution from leadership to expertship or the other way around, vice versa. And it does take a little more of a bespoke training program or design to meet the needs and the wants and the wishes of SMEs. So thank you very much.

[1:01:01] Well, folks, that brings us to a tail end of yet another episode. I will see you at the tail end of this week also for Bite Size Fridays, where we will continue the exploration of the contrarian mindset and the skills needed to navigate challenges, to navigate complexities and change, to find a way to build that inner resilience. All right, folks, until then, keep well, keep strong.

[1:01:29] Music.