The higher you go, the less you know. And that’s ok.
And I’m not talking about the Peter Principle.
One of my high performing team members recently came to me to talk about how she was adjusting to a new role at work. She had kicked ass on her previous project where she served as a subject matter expert and led a small team on an important set of tasks. Her bright spark and leadership skills had shone through on that work, and she knew she was ready to level up for her next project. She scored a position on a project that was less within her content area of expertise and was more focused on leadership as a deputy project manager. She was excited to tackle this new experience, and I was delighted for a new group of people to see what she has to offer.
Unsurprisingly, she immediately impressed everyone on the team with how quickly she picked up the new context and seamlessly found a way to integrate with the team and learn the language of this new content area. I received multiple emails from her new project leadership about the amazing job she was doing and how they couldn’t believe what a natural she was with this new project.
But that wasn’t her perception of how things were going.
She told me that most days, she was feeling unsure and worried, and felt inadequate that she didn’t have the same level of content knowledge that she would have had in previous roles. Because she had always prided herself on and been applauded for her high level of excellence and attention to detail, it was hard for her to let go of control and trust others to do tasks as well as she would have. As I reflected back to her what I heard her saying about her worries and lack of certainty, she was able to clarify that she was actually still feeling excited to be in this new role and exercising her leadership skills that had previously been underutilized, but she realized there was also some grief and loss in no longer being known as a subject matter expert.
In short, she was out of her comfort zone, which was being the go-to person who “knew everything.”
My response to her: “The higher you go, the less you know. And that’s ok.”
What did I mean by that? I’m not talking about the Peter Principle, where people get promoted and promoted up through their organizations until they rise to the level of their incompetence. My team member is the furthest thing from incompetent, and I honestly have total faith that she will continue to shine in this new stretch role. What I meant is that there’s something paradoxical as you move up from being a do-er to being a leader — sometimes you have to let go of control in order to take control.
This sort of eye-opening experience can happen as people progress up through the chain in a variety of work contexts. The example I’m sharing here is of someone in traditional office job, but the same sort of thing can happen, for example, as the sous chef in a kitchen is promoted to chef and is now doing less of the day to day technical and creative cooking that brought him acclaim and recognition and is now having to deal with schedules, payroll, social media, and human resources tasks. “This isn’t what I went to culinary school to learn to do!”
As you learn to rely more on your leadership and management skills, the more important role for the manager is to coach your team members on how to solve problems and find the answers rather than being the one to know all and give the answers. It’s a quantum shift from a career to date where you have distinguished yourself by being the go-to person in specific content areas or skills. That was how you shone and led — by knowing and executing. Once you get to a certain level, though, it’s actually inefficient for you to try to know all the information that you expect your team to know, and the rising leader needs to accept the feelings of uncertainty that naturally come along with moving to more of a coaching and managing role that requires a different source of confidence.
My friend Leann Harris said it well: “Being confident isn’t about knowing everything. Being confident is about knowing that you can figure out anything.”
As we continued to talk, I validated her feelings of uncertainty and didn’t try to just cheerlead her with platitudes about how I had inherent faith that she was going to be awesome at this (I definitely always do the cheerleading at the end of these conversations, but not at the beginning — it’s important to explore the more challenging feelings first without trying to just smooth them over and make them go away — that’s an important part of the growth and transition process, in my experience).
I suggested that she try out a new metric going forward other than whether she had created and delivered the best quality deliverables herself. At the end of each day, I suggested that she ask herself, “did I help move the project and the objectives of the team forward today?” She followed up with me a few days later and said, “I asked myself this last night about yesterday, and it was a resounding yes. But without this shift, I would have likely stayed in the feeling of treading water / not knowing all the content yet.” She said that connecting with the idea that “the higher you go, the less you know” is both comforting and scary.
And I think she’s right. Taking on new challenges and growing in meaningful ways always has a measure of “scary” to it. Ironically, I believe that by recognizing that inherent part of growth, there’s also some comfort in embracing a new way of leading.
[Image by Free-Photos by Pixabay]
