Breaking the technical ceiling: how an expert can go from specialist to strategist - with Alistair Gordon of Expertunity

#216: Alistair Gordon is the founder of Expertunity, and a world-renowned authority on subject matter experts.  He explains why talented specialists get stuck doing low level work, the skills specialists need to advance their career, and the options specialists have for career progression. 

What you’ll learn

• [02:05] The signs that you’re hitting a ceiling in your career. 
• [04:58] Why some high-level workers get stuck doing low-level work. 
• [08:30] The options specialists have for career progression. 
• [13:11] The skills specialists need to build to advance their career. 
• [15:21] How enterprise skills enable specialists to add more value. 
• [17:37] The most important enterprise skills to learn. 
• [20:48] How to justify spending time on non-essential tasks. 
• [23:50] Why technical experts aren’t good at training. 
• [25:35] How specialists can develop their stakeholder engagement skills. 
• [29:20] How to move from low-level tasks to an understanding of the higher aims. 
• [32:20] Why you should ask for the reasoning behind the tasks you’re asked to do. 
• [35:20] The power of asking the right questions. 
• [36:50] The restraints specialists have placed on them. 
• [44:42] How specialists can make others understand the value of their work. 

Resources mentioned in this episode
Please note that some of these are affiliate links and we may get a commission in the event that you make a purchase.  This helps us to cover our expenses and is at no additional cost to you.

• Eisenhower Grid
• Putting Stories To Work, Shawn Callahan
• Emotional Intelligence 2.0, Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves

For the show notes for this episode, including a full transcript and links to all the resources mentioned, visit:

https://changeworklife.com/breaking-the-technical-ceiling-how-an-expert-can-go-from-specialist-to-strategist/

Re-assessing your career?  Know you need a change but don't really know where to start?  Check out these two exercises to start the journey of working out what career is right for you!

Transcript

0:00

If anyone at work has got a how-to question, you're the person they go to. You're the subject matter expert. You're the fount of all knowledge. People can rely on you to get the job done and to get it done well. Trouble is, you're starting to feel stale. Your work's becoming repetitive. You're spending a lot of time doing low-level tasks that you just don't feel like you should be doing anymore. You're starting to ask yourself, what's the next stage of your career? How can you grow, develop, get promoted? Do you have to become a people manager? Become a leader? What are the options available to you? That's what we're going to be talking about in this week's episode. I'm Jeremy Cline, and this is Change Work Life. Hello and welcome to Change Work Life, the show that's all about beating the Sunday evening blues and enjoying Mondays again. I'm a career coach, you can find out more about that at hangeworklife.com/coaching, and in each episode, my guests and I bring you tips, strategies and stories to help you enjoy a more satisfying and fulfilling working life. When you're a technical expert, you're a safe pair of hands. Everyone knows you can be trusted to do the job well. And if anyone has a question about your area of expertise, they know they can come to you for an answer. But what happens when you start to feel stuck, maybe a bit stale in your role? Is management the only option, even if it means losing the technical work you love? Or is there a way you can enjoy the best of both worlds? To help navigate this path, I'm joined this week by Alistair Gordon of Expertunity. Alistair has coached and trained thousands of subject matter experts to develop the skills they need to amplify their influence, impact and professional satisfaction. Alistair, welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for the invite, Jeremy. Really happy to be here. So, I thought that we would frame this conversation around a listener avatar. This is a chap called Tom, who regular listeners will know I've introduced once or twice before. So, Tom's been in the workforce for about 15 years with a decade of deep expertise in a highly specialised field. His colleagues respect his technical brilliance, but most of his work is narrow in scope and often low level, despite his ability to deliver much more. He's the go-to person when problems get messy, yet he's rarely brought into the room early enough to influence direction. Tom's frustrated. He sees less capable peers leapfrogging into leadership roles while he feels stuck in a technical bubble. He's starting to wonder, should he aim for leadership, stay a specialist, or is there another path that allows him to have more influence without losing the work he loves? So, first of all, what are the signs that Tom might be hitting a ceiling in his career? Well, I think a number of the ones that you've put in that description. Probably, repetitive work, Jeremy, the same sort of problems, the same sort of fires having to be put out all the time. Maybe areas where Tom could add more value, but he never gets to them because he's too busy putting those fires out. He's probably frustrated by the amount of low-level work he's still doing all these years later. So, I think those would be some of the signs and symbols. Seeing opportunities to add more value, but not getting traction with those ideas. Unable to get either funding or resources to do them, let alone time. And probably, I think the other one would be doing some really high-quality work that's almost invisible because of its nature and very often invisible to his manager. So, doing great work regularly but not really getting the recognition, certainly not getting any advancement, those would be the typical things. And I have to say, I work with a lot of people that can tick almost all of those boxes, Jeremy, not just a few of them. Just on the repetitive work, coming from a background where, in theory, we were encouraged to delegate to more junior colleagues as much as possible, is this something that is still an issue the more senior you get, that you are still doing the kind of drudgery stuff that, I don't know, a highly trained monkey could do, and it shouldn't really be you with your 15, 20 years of expertise? Yeah, well, I think it is very typical. And I mean, it's really worth exploring why. In some instances, it's that the person has become so technically good that the gap between them and the junior people is significant. And I think the senior people occasionally think unbridgeable. So, I constantly hear people say, 'Well, there are junior people, but they've got no clue. And it would take me five times longer even to explain how to do half of it than me doing it myself. It's just quicker to do it myself, at least then I know it's done properly.' So, there's that piece. There's a level of hubris about only I can fix this, junior people can't. So, generally speaking, in my experience, that's not true. People are totally capable. It's just that maybe the senior expert is not very good at knowledge transfer or training, or is actually not really invested in it. Quite a few senior experts get to the point where they think that because they've had years and years where they're only recognised for their technical exploits, they want to hang on to some of their technical secrets, so that their employment is safe, and their status as a guru of the dark arts is well established and means that no one would dare fire them or anything else, because the whole world would end if they were to leave the building. In fact, this is something that you hear them say quite often, Jeremy. Can I just say, they might not say it out loud, but they're certainly thinking it. Whenever I was aware of that, I always found that quite frustrating, because it presents such a risk for the business. I mean, okay, maybe they are extremely valuable, maybe they do have an awful lot of knowledge, but if they went under the proverbial bus, well, the business would have to cope. Yeah, well, I was talking the other day to a CFO, and he was saying to me that when he loses an experienced business analyst, somebody who is really working on the numbers and working closely with a business unit, when he loses one of those people, it takes about a year to replace them. Not just to hire somebody else, but for that person to get up to speed with all the tacit knowledge that's involved and all the subtleties that are involved in helping a GM of a business unit operate effectively. Because a huge amount of tacit knowledge, by definition, is undocumented. It's not written down anywhere. So, it comes up and down in the lift every day. So, I think that's quite typical. And in some instances, there's very high cost to losing a really good technical expert for the leader of the technical department, because when they do get someone new in, that person might not understand the way it's been done previously. They might want to completely reinvent the wheel, which the technical leader doesn't want. They just want someone to come in and do it. So, this is one of the reasons why some technical experts do get stuck, because they become mission critical. They become sort of unreplaceable. And as a consequence of that, no one wants to promote them, because who would do that job if they're not there? But at the same time, they don't want to move them on. So, it's a classic catch 22, and the longer it goes on, the more embedded and the worse it gets and the more difficult it is to resolve for both parties, both the expert and the head of department. So, if we're giving Tom, let's start with a fairly broad menu of options, or maybe he's got a certain number of doors in front of him. One of them might be the leadership management track, another of them might be carrying on as he is. What are the other doors that he might go through? Yes, there's probably a couple of doors in the middle that are hybrids of those two. And we probably strongly encourage people who are very technical and very specialist, deep specialists, not to immediately jump over to the people leadership track. I mean, anecdotally, we see a lot of people do this, and in 75% of cases, I don't think it works. Because the whole fact of the matter is that they've spent 10 years or 15 years learning their technical expertise, they've over invested in developing their expertise and that experience, and they haven't really been working on this other thing that we call enterprise skills. I mean, Jeremy, I think in general terms, people would call them soft skills, but probably you and I would agree that there's nothing soft about them, they're difficult to learn, they're extraordinarily important. But a lot of technical experts, because they only get feedback on their technical prowess, don't think those things are relevant to them. So, moving across into a people leadership role without having developed those soft skills or those enterprise skills is quite dangerous, and it's setting people up for failure really. So, the ones in between, I think, are working on projects, potentially leading projects, certainly leaning in more to projects, doing projects that are broader across their organisation, maybe not just in their own technical bubble, the technical expertise they have is valuable, but the project is bigger, and they can make a bigger contribution. So, there are lots of opportunities to move laterally, if you like, in terms of influence. And then, there's the opportunities to move beyond being a technical expert and becoming what we call a master expert, which is someone who is still technical but is much more strategic, is much more future focused, working on transformative type of projects and initiatives, rather than the day-to-day POU of fixing technical issues. So, there's an avenue upwards, and there's an avenue, if you like, to the left into projects, and if you get into bigger projects, then it's a kind of a 45-degree angle. And how much do these opportunities depend on the sector or industry that Tom works in? Or can you say that it's pretty much there's going to be these opportunities almost everywhere? Well, I'm sure some of your listeners will say, 'Well, it's not possible in where I am', but I'd have to say my experience. So, just to give you a sense or to give your listeners a sense, we've worked with subject matter experts from almost 600 different job descriptions. So, everything from scientists to nuclear physicists to clinical people, IT, data, cyber, you name it, any specialism you can think of. And I think we've been able to find opportunities to grow in all 600 of those jobs' descriptions. So, it's a question of first knowing where to look, and secondly, getting to the point where your personal brand people want you to be on that project, and they want to invite you, and you're given a seat at the table. And quite often, the way that experts are perceived in role and in their organisation gets in the way of those invites arriving. And I think, to a certain extent, your avatar describes this. Tom is rarely brought in the room early enough to really influence the early stages of projects. And that's probably because Tom has done things and has behaved in a particular way which, as far as a technical expert is concerned, is entirely sensible, but in terms of being a more strategic contributor, it seems like Tom's the wrong sort of person to invite to that sort of meeting. Okay. We'll explore in a sec what Tom might be able to do about that. But going back to, I think we ended up with four doors in front of Tom in terms of the options that he's got. How important is it for Tom to have clarity on where he wants to get to before he starts taking some kind of action? Acknowledging that there probably is an element of ability to course correct, but I'm thinking in particular of whether he wants to go the master expert route, or whether he wants to go the project route which then may lead more onto the people side. Yeah, how much clarity, how much of a plan does Tom need at the outset? It's a great question. I don't think particularly they have to make a decision whatsoever. I think the idea is, what's getting in the way of Tom having those opportunities, avenues, if you like, open to him is that he has brilliant technical skills, but he's missing a whole bunch of skills he needs to be successful in any of those three or four areas, these enterprise skills that we're talking about. If he starts working on his communication skills, his ability to storytell, his ability to build win-win stakeholder relationships, rather than stakeholder transactions, if he starts exploring how to articulate his better ideas, his more innovative ideas, if he begins to build skill sets in all of those things, then all of those doors become ajar. And as he builds those capabilities, they all become open to him. And it really is quite interesting from people like Tom that you've described really beautifully, Jeremy, that they really are stuck, and the good news is, it doesn't take much to get them unstuck. That's the most important thing. They start working on these enterprise skills, they can really begin to design their own adventure downstream. They can decide what it is that they want to do, what they're passionate about, what they're comfortable with. And it could be any one of those four, or it could be a combination of them. Okay, so even if Tom is stuck at the moment, he doesn't necessarily need to decide now or even necessarily have much of an inkling about which track he might follow. Maybe the first step for him is to start to look to develop some of these enterprise skills that you've touched on. The enterprise skills are the things that will enable Tom to begin to make a decision about where he can add most value. So, the key scenario, I mean, I think you said in your avatar that Tom believes he can add more value to the organisation and to his department and to his team, and maybe the customers of the organisation or citizens of the organisation services. So, that's really where, from a coaching perspective, I would begin. Tom, where can you add more value? What would that look like in two years' time if you could add that value? And what's going to be required in order to get you to the point where you're adding that extra value? Well, I have to persuade this person of X, and I have to stop putting these fires out so that I've got time to do so. It really emerges quite quickly that there are some things that Tom has to change personally, he has to change, both from a behaviour perspective, from a prioritisation perspective, and from a mindset, he has to change some of those things in order to begin to open those doors. And he can do so just by doing some reading and some thinking, listening to this podcast, he could do so by getting some coaching and what have you. But the good news is that having worked with those thousands of experts that you referenced at the beginning, Jeremy, I can tell you that there's like a 95% success rate, because most technical experts are really smart. That's why they're capable of that deep technical knowledge. And they've actually learned the hard bit, I reckon, which is the technical stuff. And the enterprise skills, if you make the decision, I want to master them, my experience is the vast majority of experts have no problem at all mastering them. They have to put some effort in, and they have to do things quite differently, and they're changing some really big muscle memory type behaviours. But most people make it, and then, really they are in a position to decide what it is they want to do because they've got lots of offers. Going back to those enterprise skills, what are the top ones that Tom might think about starting to learn or practise? I would say the first one has to be stakeholder engagement. So, a lot of experts get stuck in this sort of scenario where they're servicing a whole pile of stakeholders who ask them to do things, and they kind of take the order. Somebody says, 'Oh, well, I want a green button on the website, top right, that does X, so can you build that for me?' And a lot of technical experts then do that. They build a red button, a green button, I should say, on the top of the website. They're not asking those stakeholders why. What are you trying to achieve with that button? Are you expecting people to interface with it? There's those consulting skills that really enable you to understand what the stakeholder is trying to achieve, because very often the stakeholder is deciding a technical solution from a very inferior capability base. The expert actually would know how to do that much better, probably. But because they don't ask all those questions, they don't really explore what the end game is, what the outcome the stakeholders are looking for and what they're trying to achieve, both short and long term, they're not able to create as much value as they could. So, really getting to know stakeholders, understanding where they're coming from, what their key performance indicators are, what success looks like for them, are they big picture, are they detailed, how does that mean that we need to modify working with them, what would a win-win relationship look like, those sorts of things is, absolutely, I think, where I would start. And then, the second thing I would start on would be prioritisation. What can you stop doing to create time to do the bigger picture stuff? And I think the reason I'm saying these two things, Jeremy, is because of all of the people we've worked with, we get them to do what we call a personal growth plan. And those two things appear on almost all of the personal growth plans. Once they've been through some programmes and things like that, they all say, 'I need to absolutely get to know my stakeholders better, far better than I currently know them. And secondly, I need to make time to get to know my stakeholders better and to be able to create that extra value.' So, it's very typical that those are the two things at the top. I want to start with the prioritisation, because I imagine that Tom is going to say, 'I'm just really busy, my inbox is full, my to-do list is full, I've got so much going on.' So, how does Tom look at that and find space to even begin to learn and develop a skill like stakeholder engagement, especially if he's kind of being measured, his KPI is based on his productivity, I don't know, answering tickets, be they internal or external or whatever it is, I mean, how does he justify spending time that he's being paid to do stuff that doesn't seem to fit full square with that? Yeah, so that's a great question. So, I'd ask your listeners who are technical experts and thinking this is quite relevant to my situation, to ask themselves the following questions, and in no particular order. The first is, does unplanned work happen to you? Do you plan a day, and then suddenly, some unplanned work comes in, something's broken, something has to be fixed, fire needs to be put out? 99% of the time, people say, 'Yes, unplanned work happens to me.' And I ask them how often? And they say pretty much every day. And so, I say, okay, cool. Now, is that unplanned work, is it every single time different, or are there patterns in that unplanned work? And of course, there are patterns. It's the same thing repeating all the time. So, do you have a solution that would resolve those fires breaking out in the first place? Generally speaking, most experts do, but they don't have time to get to it. It's what's in Quadrant 2 on the Eisenhower grid, what's important and urgent, that grid. Where experts add most value is in Quadrant 2, which is stuff that's important but not urgent. And generally, that stuff in there, those top projects and what have you, are the things that fix all the fires that are breaking out in Quadrant 1, which is important and urgent. They need to find patterns, and they need to start resolving those, finding time to actually solve the problem. That would be the first thing I would suggest they do. And the second thing they should do is to find somebody who they can train quickly to put out those smaller fires, the less problematic ones. There will be somebody junior who will want to be growing their technical expertise. Find that person where the grunt work for the senior expert is actually exciting developmental work for the more junior person, and hone your skills to get that person across the line so that they are doing quite a bit of that putting out of the smaller fires. You'll still be putting up the big fires, of course, or the ones that are more complicated or don't happen all that often. But those two solutions tend to be very doable if the experts decided I'm going to attack this, and I'm going to solve the problem. If their mindset is, it's everybody else's fault, there's nothing I can do about it, then they're going to be stuck in their technical bubble for quite some time to come, unfortunately. Okay, so it sounds like almost identifying those patterns and either identifying or coming up with a standard operating procedure for how to deal with those things that come up, or if possible, going back to the root cause, and rather than just putting a stick and plaster on it every time, finding a more long-lasting solution. Well, even that's coming up with that standard operating process or procedure that you're describing, Jeremy. Very often, experts solve problems, they instantly know what the solution is. But of course, it's not instant. It's all those years of experience. It's all those times that the fires have broken out. So, they instantly know that fire over there needs a blue pill, and this fire over here needs a yellow pill. They just automatically know, except there's actually process. There's a series of questions that they're asking. How big is it? What is the colour of the flames? What seems to be the accelerant? So, once they've unpacked how they solve problems, it makes it a great deal easier to train more junior people to solve the problems. I think knowledge transfer, we have a sort of a 360-tool, where thousands of people have done this survey, and it's quite interesting, technical experts, by and large, are not particularly good at training because they know so much. They tend to start by training in an over complicated way, rather than with some of the basics. So, we work with the people that we're coaching to say, well, how do you know that that's a blue pill and that's a yellow pill? How do you know that? What process in your head do you go through? Is that teachable? Yeah, of course it is. Once you break it down, it is teachable. But basically, the experts have to remember what they knew or how little they knew 15 years ago. And you know, we've forgotten how little we knew. Okay, so Tom's gone through this process, and he's found he's now got a bit more time because he's got someone junior who's helping to put out these fires. You mentioned stakeholder engagement. I mean, how Tom even start to learn or develop this? Is this something that you learn in a book or in a podcast, or do you go on a training course, or do you just try and do stuff? And if you're doing that, what are you doing? Where does Tom start? Well, I think Tom starts by attempting to become someone like you, a coach and somebody with really, really good questions and a very high degree of curiosity, as opposed to someone who jumps to solution. I think when it comes to stakeholder engagement, the example I use, and forgive me for using an example as IT, because people tend to think technical expert must be IT, but we're talking about it much more broadly here, if I use an IT example, when I'm working with IT teams, I ask them, how do you know what your organisation wants from you as an IT team? And the typical answer, Jeremy, is,'Well, we ask the business.' Okay, so i. e., the non-IT team. Okay, next question. So, on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is nothing at all, and 10 is lots, how well does the business, the generalist business managers, the senior leaders, if you like, of your business or your government department or your not-for-profit, how well do they understand what IT can do for the organisation? And most IT teams just roll their eyes and laugh. They can't even fix their phones, let alone understand what IT could do for the organisation. And I say, okay, great, so what's your number? And mostly it's twos or threes. Some joker will say minus one, you know, it's always the case. And so, I ask the same question in reverse. Okay, how much do you as an IT team know what IT could do for the organisation? One is not very much, 10 is lots. And they say, 'Well, you know, 9, 10.' Someone will say 11. And then, I say to them, okay, so can you just help me understand this? You're asking the least qualified people to tell you what to do, how to add value to the organisation, what you should do. This seems insanity to me. Why are you going about it this way? Why are you asking them what IT should do, when clearly you know best? And they eventually conclude, Jeremy, that what they're doing is they're asking the business the wrong questions. Well, they should be asking the businesses, which business processes are clunky and time consuming, and do you want fixed? What do we think our customers who are going elsewhere, what's making them leave us and go to the competitors, and what can we do about it? And what customers the competitors have do we want to win, and what would bring those customers across to us? And what are those customers going to be wanting from us as an organisation in 18 months' time or two years' time? As soon as you start asking these much higher-level, higher-order questions to your stakeholders, you get real insight as to what their problems are and their business problems. And then, the IT team can say, 'Right, how can we help the business solve that problem?' It's a simple enough circle, but you would be amazed how many teams haven't thought about it that way. They say, 'Well, you know, do you want a unique system? Or do you want an open system? What do you want?' And these are questions, obviously, the business have got no clue on how to respond to at all. So, they say something, and it's usually the wrong thing. Okay. Going back to the example that you gave earlier where Tom's being asked to, I forget exactly what it was, but let's say he's asked to move the green button from the top left to the top right or something like that. If Tom then responds with, 'So, what's keeping our customers?' and that kind of thing, I mean, that's just going to be sort of way, way above what's expected. So, if Tom's been asked to do this relatively low-level technical task, what are some of the things that he can do when that kind of thing comes in that helps him build up to this level where he's asking these big deeper questions? Yeah, look, extremely insightful, because what happens is, people say, 'Don't worry about what we're using it for, just build it.' Right? And that needs to be unacceptable. Now, obviously, you have to be diplomatic, and you have to say, 'Okay, well, can I explain why I'm asking you? Because there's lots of different ways that we could move the green button to the top right corner, but it would help me if I understand what you're hoping someone will do with that green button, what do you hope will happen, it will help me design the fastest, quickest, most efficient system for you, the best green button you could possibly have. Whereas if I just design anyone, you're going to be back here wanting changes and so on and so forth. And it will be back and forth all the time.' So, the expert has to explain that. I'm not trying to be difficult. I'm not asking loads of questions like the Spanish Inquisition just to be difficult. I'm really keen to make sure that we design for you the most elevated solution we possibly can that lasts you not just now, but it might be fit for purpose for several years to come, not just for the next three or four months. So, I'm on your side here, but I want you to take an extra 10 minutes to talk to me about what you're trying to do. These are the coaching questions, and also that sort of curiosity that I mentioned before that works really well. If the expert, on the other hand, is saying, 'Well, Jeremy, why do you want to do that? Why does it have to be green? How big do you want it?' If they immediately get into the weeds, then suddenly, we have a very transactional relationship, not a win-win stakeholder relationship where we're talking about outcomes, we're talking about details, but the natural way technical experts do, they tend to go to the detail far too soon. They need to stay up at what we call 70,000 feet. And when they do that, and they ask those business orientated questions, they're immediately changing their personal brand in front of that stakeholder. That stakeholder is now perceiving him to be a colleague who's trying to help to get to a solution, not just a technical bod. Even just asking some different questions is transformational in terms of the way that people look at technical experts. Okay, so Tom's coming back to you and says, 'Alistair, that's never going to work. I'm going to ask these questions that I've never asked before, and people are going to look at me and go, "Oh, Tom, just do what we ask you to." What's the point in me even trying?' Well, I wish I had a dollar for every time somebody had said that to me. Jeremy. My question would be to put my coach hat on. So, if you don't challenge, if you don't ask some of those questions, what's the implication? What happens? Well, I end up doing something, and then they want it changed because they haven't described it properly to me. I followed the brief exactly, but it's rework. And I get very irritated, I get very frustrated, and I could have done it. Why didn't you tell me that at the beginning? So, I ask people to work through what are the implications of not having the courage to ask those questions. The same thing I'd say is, how do you know they're going to say that? How often have you asked these questions before? How did you ask them before? What was the tone? Did you explain why you were asking these questions? Generally speaking, if you get the technique right, and you have the courage to do it, by and large, nine times out of 10, it actually goes much better than the experts think it's going to come. I ask them to have some courage. We help them figure out some of the right questions. There's lots of material around, not just from us, about coaching and asking great coaching questions, and there's lots of material around consulting skills and asking great consulting questions. These are the ones that the experts need to go out and find and purloin and start using, and they'll very quickly see people... These questions also, Jeremy, will get Tom invited earlier on into the meeting when they're doing things, because if the expert gets known for asking some really big picture questions, that means they can add value at the strategic bit. The reason they don't get invited into the room at the strategic views often is because they want to get into the weeds too quickly when they get there. And people go, 'Don't involve Tom yet, he'll ask us a thousand questions we don't have the answers to, and he'll just be a negative influence when we're ideating this great big idea.' So, the question technique, expert as coach, expert as consultant, expert as business person or a broader community person, these things change the way people see Tom, and they change when Tom gets involved, and suddenly, he's in demand because he's got some great questions, and he's making a contribution at a much higher level than just the technical level. Does that make sense? So, giving a very simple summary, Tom should learn how to ask good questions. I think the power of the right question asked in the right way, in the right moment, for the right reasons, is inestimable. It's absolutely game changing. And this also means that the experts have to, this is something that absolutely they hate doing in my experience, they need to ask a question that they don't probably know the answer to. The whole shtick is, if you ask an expert,'What's your favourite colour?', if the expert happens to have done quite a bit of analysis on it and thought through all the shades of different colours that there are, and decided that sky blue is their favourite colour, they'll say sky blue. But if they haven't done that analysis, they think it's sky blue, but there might be a slightly different shade of blue that I prefer, they'll say, 'I don't know.' The whole shtick of most experts is to be right all the time. So, when you're beginning to ask questions where you have no idea what the answer might be, that's actually quite scary. And they're worried that they're going to look stupid because they're asking that question. In actual fact, the fact that they're asking that really open question makes them look very, very smart, indeed, as far as the businesspeople are concerned. We've touched a bit on the mindset. I'd like to expand more on that. I mean, from Tom's perspective, how much of this is down to his own beliefs and his own limiting beliefs about what is possible, and how much of it is grounded in reality that the company really does just want him to carry on being what he is? Yeah, well, do we have another hour? The issue, so I think there's no simple answer to that great question. Let's start with his mindset. If Tom is typical of a lot of the people I work with, he will believe that the reason he's not invited to these meetings and he's not given these opportunities to work on bigger projects and he's not listened to and he doesn't have the influence he has, he will believe that it's mostly everybody else's fault. Now, it's not everybody else's fault, 100%. It's a combination of the biases there are in large organisations towards experts, because there are plenty of biases, but there's also the biases that the experts themselves have that management are useless, and management don't understand anything, and it's all management's fault. So, that's the first thing. Other people's attitudes do impact Tom, but his attitudes also impact Tom. In terms of behaviours, Tom is rushing around, according to your description at the beginning of this podcast, he's running around putting out fires, no time to do anything, he's busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. And he tells everybody how busy he is, and he tells everybody how he's going around having to fix things all the time, and he's moaning about that. So, he's clearly too busy to be invited to any interesting meeting about strategy or whatever. So, I think a lot of experts do themselves a disservice by pointing out so often how busy they are, that people then stop coming to them for the more speculative conversations. So, I think that's a problem. The manager of most experts, the manager of Tom definitely plays a part here. I suspect the manager of Tom is super happy with the job Tom's doing. There's all this technical stuff over here, and Tom's there, and Tom fixes it, and he moans a bit, but it's all fixed, I don't have to worry about that, set and forget. The last thing we want to do is Tom to go somewhere else, because then I've got a problem in dealing with that technical stuff. So, managers not seeing the potential in their experts and thinking that the experts are perfectly happy being there for the next 15 years or what have you, they are certainly contributing negatively. I'm going to say something controversial, which is that I think HR teams, talent teams, have a lot of responsibility in this area. They tend to perceive potential like, you know, oh, let's work with and develop the high-potential people in organisations, their definition of potential tends to be ability to lead more people in the future. In other words, it's entirely people focused. And that is an appalling definition in the modern world of potential. Because the fastest growing organisations are investing lots of money in their technical experts, because their technical experts are the people who have the potential to add the most value in terms of innovation, system improvement, efficiencies, creating new products, markets. So, I think, when the allocation of money for developing Tom and his enterprise skills and things like that is on the table, Tom doesn't get a looking, because he's a technical expert, and he doesn't have potential to lead lots of people. He's showing no ambition to lead loads of people in the future, so we're not investing in him. He can't be high potential, so we'll just leave him in his little technical bubble or silo. So, I think there's a lot of these things going on, Jeremy, that are impacting. The challenge for experts is that, I think, they have to ask themselves this question. Their strategy has been waiting for someone to come and save them and help them, and they've been waiting for that for 10 years. It's clearly not working. So, they've got to decide that they're going to be proactive and not wait any longer. They're going to get on the front foot, and they're going to build some of these skills, they're going to have a really good conversation with their manager about how they can add value and begin to break out of that technical bubble. So, it's got to be a key message here that there's no one's coming to rescue you. You need to take control of this yourself. I mean, what is your strategy? Well, they'll see how good I am eventually. Okay, how's it going for you? Well, it's not going very well. So, I think, was it Einstein who said, insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Well, he was right. I might just say one other thing that gets in the way of this is, in my experience, most of the best work technical experts do tends to be invisible. Tom is a perfect example of where I suspect that his manager catches up with him once in a blue moon, really, because Tom is just incredibly efficient, does his work, he's very committed to excellent work. So, a lot of the extra miles that he puts in, the extra pieces of work that he does to help resolve people's issues, a lot of that effort and work and brilliance is invisible, generally speaking, to the manager, and probably not invisible to maybe his technical cohort, the people who do the same sort of thing as Tom, but to everybody else, it's invisible. So, they don't get the credit they deserve. And if anybody doesn't believe this, I'd ask them to think about, they get to work on a Monday morning, or they dial in, they're working from home on a Monday morning, and they open up their email, and it works every single day. You know, corporate email works every single day. If there's a slight outage for an hour in 365 days, there's outrage, and, oh, my God, the whole organisation stopped. What all of us don't understand is the sheer amount of technical brilliance and work that goes into making that email work every day. The technical prowess of those teams to stave off cyber-attacks and maintain security and so on and so forth. Huge amount of work is involved, exactly the same way as I think if anybody wants a real education about how we've just become spoiled, go into your bathroom and turn the tap on. And this clean water comes out. We have several clients that are water companies, the amount of effort that it takes just for us to turn the tap on, and clean water comes out, is extraordinary. But of course, we don't think about that. What happens is, if it's not coming out, or it's brown, we immediately are moaning, because we're just assuming that that thing arrives there, it must be simple. It's not. It's really complicated. Technical experts are sitting behind almost all of the things that we take for granted. And one of my passions is to get the rest of us, generalists, to understand just what a great contribution technical experts made to this world, and how they're improving it all the time, and we should give them some recognition for it. So, if Tom's going to be the master of his own destiny, and he's got to be the person who is making this point, how does he do it, and to whom does he do it? Because certainly, we Brits here, we don't like to blow our own trumpet. I mean, has he got to kind of say, 'Well, you know, on my watch, we had 99.7% uptime', or something like that. I mean, how do you do that genuinely, without coming across as someone who's just boasting? Yeah, it's a very good point. I mean, it's difficult, because you can't go, you don't, I mean, we hear experts saying, 'You don't realise how good I am.' And that doesn't cut it. Or they say, 'I'm really, really busy.' Well, that doesn't cut it either. Everyone's busy. So, I think the way to do it is to gradually help those stakeholders who are asking them to do things on a constant basis, make the website work, make the email system work, make sure that we're spending the right amount of money in the right place, making sure procurement from, for example, where we're not overpaying for things, all of these technical tasks, we have to, in a way that's not self-promoting, gradually educate people, as to there are actually some risks involved here if we don't do this right, and I'm just concerned to make sure that we are thinking about what all those risks might be and planning for them and mitigating those risks, regardless of what it is. So, they have to get good at storytelling and thinking about what their narrative is, and thinking about positive language, and thinking about helping inspire those generalists to support them in doing great work. So, those influencing skills and storytelling skills, I think, are really essential. And there's lots and lots of stuff out there that people can go and buy and read. You've asked me to prepare a couple of resources. One of them is a storytelling book where people can literally spend 50 dollars or 50 pounds and immediately start making a difference in the way that they actually express themselves, and the way they put forward ideas, and the way they build narratives or stories that are going to be compelling for those they're trying to influence. So, what's that book that you've got in mind? So, the book I have in mind is called Putting Stories to Work, and it's by a guy called Shawn Callahan. It's won all sorts of book awards in Europe and down here. And it's a really practical, readable, you'd want to hope a book about storytelling is quite readable, wouldn't you, really? So, very readable, very accessible, some great tactics. And Shawn is, I think, one of the top guys in the world in terms of really talking about storytelling and what a difference it can make in all walks of life, not just work, but I find that very accessible, tactics that people can immediately deploy. We could easily talk for another hour. What haven't we covered that we should cover in the last couple of minutes? I think we've covered a great deal. I think the thing that I would hope that anyone who's thinking, 'Oh, this is resonating with me', would do is just to have the confidence to start. Because when I started working with technical experts about nine years ago, I wasn't sure that these solutions would work for them, or they could make the change, or maybe the change would be really, really problematic, and only a small percentage would be able to really begin to master these enterprise skills and completely change the way that they got fulfilment out of work and the value that they delivered to their organisations. But the vast majority have really, really managed to change the way that they're perceived and the work that they do and the value that they create. So, I think, I'd just encourage people to start, and simple steps, there's a lot of material out there that they can access quite quickly. It means they probably have to change their reading habits a little bit. That technical newsletter that they read for an hour every day, maybe just use some other things that they're going to be doing as well and read some other things. But I think the thing that I would most want people to walk away from this is that they can start, and they can have confidence that they'll make some progress, because they're smart enough. It's just a question of them believing that these enterprise skills, on top of their technical skills, are going to change their lives. Awesome. If someone wants to find more of you, where would you like them to go? So, the best place to start, I think, is expertship.com. We have a couple of books out, and there's lots of free chapters of that book on that website. So, www.expertship.com, and from there, they can find all sorts of other things that we do. And the other thing I was going to suggest in terms of an asset is, there's a very good book on emotional intelligence, and emotional intelligence is a really critical skill, is one of those enterprise skills, I'm sure you've covered it many times on your podcast, including authenticity, where you had a podcast just about authenticity just a couple of weeks ago. So, I think Travis Bradbury, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, I love this book because it's really simple, and it comes with a free assessment. So, you do an assessment, and then it tells you which bits you're already strong in, and which bits you need to grow in. And then, you go to those chapters, and it tells you how to build those emotional intelligence skills straight away. So, it's really practical and applied and strongly recommend. I just reread it, just the other day when I was preparing some material, and I'd forgotten how good it was. So, there are very easy starting points here, just got to get your head into the game and open up opportunities. Fantastic. I will certainly put those links in the show notes. Alistair, thank you so much for coming on the show and delivering such great value. It's been an absolute pleasure, Jeremy. Thank you very much indeed for the invite and the opportunity. Okay. Hope you enjoyed that interview with Alistair Gordon. My biggest takeaway from this episode was that going into people management or leadership is not the only option if you're looking to get promoted at work. In fact, as Alistair said, sometimes that just doesn't work. If I was to sum up what I think Alistair was saying, it's that it's kind of a mental shift to adopt more of a consulting mindset, rather than being the person who just does what they're told and answers the questions there are asked. You become someone who asks your own questions. Why is it that someone has asked you to do something a particular way? What is it that they're trying to achieve here? And do you know of ways that the same result could be achieved, but in a better and a more efficient fashion? You become known as someone who is more collaborative, and also you make the people you're working with look good. If, say, someone in the sales team asks you to do something a particular way, and after a bit of digging, you get to the bottom of what they're trying to achieve and realise that there's actually a much better way to do that, then the result is that you end up making them look good, as well as yourself. And I think there's also breaking down this idea that you need to present yourself as being indispensable. You don't want to be the only person who can fix a problem, and you don't want to be the person who is just so busy fixing other people's problems. It's a very defensive position, and it's often born out of the fear that, if you don't do that, then maybe people will think that you're not so indispensable, and your job could be at risk. Well, I tend to look at it the other way around. The person who is more valuable is the person who enables other people. They're someone who makes sure that things still happen, even if for whatever reason they're unavailable, say they're on holiday. It goes back to being more collaborative and more curious. Developing that curiosity about what is the ultimate goal here, what are people trying to achieve, what are they trying to get done. So, if you are that subject matter expert who's looking to figure out ways to advance your career, then do have a listen to this episode again. Show notes are at changeworklife.com/217, that's changeworklife.com/217. And if you're a bit stuck about what you want your career to look like, how you want to advance, then do check out the exercises on my website at changeworklife.com/happy, that's changeworklife.com/happy. There's a couple of exercises there which can really help you drill down to what are the aspects of what you do that you really enjoy, and what are the things that maybe could be added which will make things even better. So, again, you'll find those exercises at changeworklife.com/happy. Now, as I record this, I'm planning to release an episode in two weeks' time as normal, but it's possible that circumstances might get in the way, and I might need to take a bit of a break. I record my episodes from home, and we're having some fairly major building work done to the house, which, if it ends up being too noisy, I just might not be able to record episodes. I'm going to play it a little bit by ear and see how the land lies once the work actually starts. But you might find the release schedule ends up being a little bit patchy for the next few weeks. That said, as long as you stay subscribed, then you won't miss any episodes when they come out. So, make sure that you have hit the plus or like or bell or whatever it is you do to subscribe to the podcast, and I can't wait to see you next time. Cheers. Bye.