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Being the most knowledgeable and experienced person on your team is always a good thing, right? Sydney Finkelstein says that expertise can steer you wrong in two important ways. It can stop you from being curious about new developments, and it can make you overconfident about your ability to solve problems.
Finkelstein is a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and an expert in leadership and talent development. In this episode, he offers leaders a supplement to expertise, becoming more humble and open-minded. And he has research-backed advice to help you get there. This episode originally aired on HBR ideacast in April 2019. Here it is.
Welcome to the HBR idea cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Allison Beard. People work for years, decades, to become experts in their fields. There's a sense that once you reach that level, you're set. You're at the top of your game and can complete your tasks and command most situations with ease. But our guest today says there are also big downsides to expertise.
Sidney Finkelstein has studied many managers who are the best at what they do. CEOs, generals, chefs, coaches, and he's found that some fall into what he calls the expertise trap. Because they know everything or almost everything about their businesses or fields, they become incurious about different perspectives on them or overconfident in other areas. Their knowledge and experience actually holds them back from continued professional success.
Luckily, there are ways to avoid this trap, and Sydney is here to discuss both the problem and those solutions with us. He's a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and he's the author of the HBR article, Don't Be Blinded by Your Own Expertise. Sydney, thanks so much for coming on the show. Great to be with you, Allison.
So when you talk about an expert, what exactly do you mean? What level?
Well, you know, there are experts in many walks of life. My focus is mostly around leaders in organizations of every type. And so it's someone who has a track record, who has mastered a body of knowledge, if you will. It has been recognized for a degree of success and doesn't actually have to be only very senior executives. It could be someone who is, you know, the best coder, the best market researcher. It could happen at any level and most of us could think of people like that.
And we think of that kind of expertise as a huge positive in the workplace. So what are some of the key ways that it can be bad when it comes to making the right choices?
So, you know, like a lot of things in life, it's not that it's all one way expertise is good. Experience has value, but it could turn the wrong way. And in my research, there were two primary ways in which this could happen. One is when you start to learn the wrong lessons from your experience from your expertise.
And so you think you understand something and then you start applying it maybe in a little bit different area and it doesn't quite apply. The second type of thing that kind of creates this expertise trap is, you know, when you're really good at something, you really know something. There's a natural tendency and incentive really to keep getting better at it because you're getting rewarded for it. You're being recognized as the expert.
And at some point in time you get a diminishing returns thing going on and your improvements in knowledge, if you will, are going to be incremental. And the real risk here is that while you spend all your time trying to get better at one thing, it turns out something else becomes much more important. And you've lost the position because of that.
Is it really a problem of going on autopilot to some degree? You have figured out the most efficient, effective way to get things done so you no longer question the process. At the same time, you're highly productive. So how do you balance wanting to be as effective and efficient as you can be while also remaining open to new ways of doing things?
I think a lot of managers, a lot of executives ask themselves that question and part of it is their window, their lead time. If you're later in your career and you think you can write out that expertise, I can see a lot of people saying, I'm going to do that. But for most people, especially with the pace of change and artificial intelligence and all kinds of other things going on, the necessity to keep almost reinventing yourself has never been
never been higher. So yes, you can have a short-term or continue to have short-term wins by being the expert. But you better hope that that expertise is going to continue to be the key element in the success of your business, of your team, of your organization. And it's really hard because if you think about it, it's the thing that made your name. Everyone knows who you are. They know why you're good. And you need to give that up at some point, at least to some degree. And that's a tough transition for people.
And so how do I recognize this problem in myself? If I'm a leader, I'm very good at what I do. I'm trying to project confidence. I'm trying to teach people. How do I know when I've gone too far and crossed the line?
Well, you know, there's no replacement for self-awareness. It's a tough thing to do because it means you're looking at yourself and evaluating yourself, but you want to get feedback from other people. I'm a big fan in the idea of 360 feedback, but not just that because that's an old idea, but what you do as the follow up.
So go out of your way to look for new sources of information. I think another basic thing you can do is look at your business, your team leader, look at how it's going, look at what's going on around you and ask yourself, what else could happen? Many times we talk about, especially today, digital transformation of all types and everyone says, yes, it's coming and we're being disrupted and all the rest.
No one can kind of predict exactly when it's going to happen. But what if you actually said, let's imagine that, in fact, what I'm really good at is not going to be so valuable. What our strategy is that's based on our capabilities that are usually around body of knowledge, body of expertise that have now been shared because of culture across a lot of different people. What if that actually starts to decline in importance? It depreciates. What would that world look like? What should we do about that? When you do that little exercise, which I've tried with executives,
It takes away a very common kind of excuse, which is, well, you know, how do you really know? Well, you have to be working continuously about that because nobody tells you when the clock strikes 12 and what you've been good at is no longer going to be going to be that important. It happens gradually, gradually, and then it's happened. And so you just got to be ready for it. Yeah. Are there any other specific things you can do to push yourself toward that more curious perspective?
I think every kind of strategic move that we do as a managers and executive, actually any action, almost anything we do in life, if you want to really generalize, there are underlying assumptions behind that. And so even the little exercise of
Identify the three, let's say, core assumptions behind whatever it is you're planning to do or you want to do. Why are you really doing this? Write them down. Don't just say them or talk about them. When you write something down, it becomes much more real. Then ask the question, what would happen if these assumptions were wrong?
I think we know from a lot of research and a lot of trends that people have been looking at in surveys that there are two or three skill sets that are really important now and continue to be important. Their creativity, which by definition requires you to be curious and be willing to get off of that expertise and challenge yourself. It's critical thinking. And then because the world is getting more complex, your ability to connect the dots, almost like a pattern recognition,
process. And I have seen many people that are strong in finance or marketing or ops or whatever their expertise is, they tend to define problems in terms of that expertise. And that's almost the last thing you want to do. It's almost like you know the answer before you start and then you kind of back into it to kind of connect the dots in a way that you're comfortable with.
And so there are a lot of things that we know and that we can do as leaders to try to kind of crack through this expertise trap.
So you've studied so many executives, this piece of the expertise trap, the idea that you get so knowledgeable and expert in your own business that you don't see what's coming. Who have you seen get it really wrong and fall into that trap? And who have you seen managed to never get stuck?
Never is a big word. So the people that and the companies that have struggled while we could take the whole retail, almost the whole retail.
sector where retail has traditionally been all about merchandising and understanding your customer and sales management and things like this. In a digital world, there's just so many other things that we kind of know from the world of Amazon that we're in today or the world of Alibaba that we're in today. We understand that that's a different world.
There are a lot of examples in business history as well. Almost every one of them, it's companies looking for incremental improvement, always believing that getting a little bit better at something, at that expertise, that core capability of yourself, of your team, of your CEO, of your company is the right answer. In fact, a much more significant transformation is going on.
who's getting it right. I'm kind of surprised at what's been going on in the automobile industry because everyone from BMW to Lexus to GM and Ford are making gigantic investments and trying to make this transition from a reliance on the combustion engine and a particular technology
which was central and they always look for incremental improvements to electric cars and autonomous vehicles. It's somewhat early in terms of knowing exactly what's going to happen, but this is a really good, I suppose, example of almost an entire industry sector as not waiting for the whole place to blow up Tesla with all the problems of Tesla. It's scared the heck out of a lot of CEOs of a lot of companies.
And while no one can ever guarantee that making this shift from one body of expertise to another is guaranteed to work, we do know that if you don't do that, it's not going to work. What about some of the specific leaders you've studied? Have you seen anyone do a really good job of avoiding the expertise trap?
Yeah, so there are several CEOs that have gone out of the way to try to avoid this. And it's kind of funny because what they do sounds almost trivial or simple, but it highlights how first you got to do something, you got to try. But secondly, sometimes the little things actually pay off.
And so, for example, Aaron Ayren, who is CEO of Chronos, the software company, he's always walking around, kind of holding impromptu focus groups with groups of employees up and down the organization, and he genuinely wants to
here. He wants to understand, he wants to know what people are thinking, and that's almost like being a teacher and a learner at the same time. So he's trying to do that, then you have people that pick up all kinds of hobbies. You know, David Solomon from Goldman Sachs, he sometimes DJs at parties in Manhattan, which is an unusual thing to be doing, but it just
puts you in front of different people and triggers different parts of your brain. Then there's the kitchen cabinet approach, you know, where you bring people together, they have nothing or very little to do with your business. The CEO of Scripps Health is a good example of that, Chris Van Gorder. And he's got his kind of group of friends that he expects. He wants them to provide them with honest feedback, tough feedback, something that could help them really learn. These are all kind of unusual
some more than the other than the other examples. But this last one that, you know, Van Gorder does its scripts, I can't believe that any manager, CEO or not, can't do a thing like that. Just put together a group. You don't need, you know, 10 people. How about, you know, even even one could be helpful, but, you know, two or three people and they'd be from different industries and there might be people you went to school with or you met in some program or who knows where it could be neighbors.
and ask them, you know, here's what I'm doing. Here's what I'm thinking about. Rip it up. Tell me what's wrong because it's so hard for people, you know, within the organization, you know, your team members. So they'll scare you to go and say that to your boss, even when they ask you to do that.
So we've spent a lot of time talking about that second piece of the expertise trap that you talked about, the idea that you don't push yourself in your own field. I'd like to talk about the overconfidence bit of it, the idea that because you're an expert in one situation, you can then apply it.
elsewhere. There are lots of times when that can happen very easily, especially when it comes to management skills, like how to lead through a crisis or roll out an effective marketing campaign or negotiate a deal. So how do you tell when your knowledge and experience is going to be useful in an unfamiliar situation and when it won't be?
Yeah, well, that's tough. But what I would do, what I would advise is, first of all, start with the question, in what ways might my experience, my background, my expertise, actually hurt me in making this type of decision or whatever the scenario happens to be. Don't start with the assumption. It's like switching the burden of proof. You're guilty until proven innocent, with very few people like to do that. I think that's a really good place to start. And then ask yourself, where did it come from?
this experience. Why are you so confident? And one of the things I've found is very often people become very confident even if they've only done something once and went reasonably well. It is rather remarkable how
Human beings have an endless capacity to overgeneralize from tiny sample sizes. You do something once, it went well. The same problem arrives on your desk. You feel okay. You feel, yeah, I know how to do it. But what's the underlying assumption that what you're dealing with today is exactly the same problem that you dealt with yesterday.
And that's a dangerous thing. So some of the things we've talked about already, I think, can be helpful with respect to bringing in different points of view and diversity and kind of expanding your thinking. But start with this kind of really basic, almost unfriendly question to yourself. I mean, switch that burden proof. In what ways could you be screwing up because of your experience?
At the same time, when you're a leader, you want to be projecting confidence and you want to be decisive. So how do you limit the perception of you as someone who needs to consult every person in the room before you make a call?
Yeah, there's a couple of things to say. Number one, things that are good for you, like confidence, projecting an image of making people feel comfortable that there's somebody really in charge. Those are really good, but taken to an extreme actually end up getting you in trouble. I mean, we could say exactly the same thing for expertise.
I'm not going to say it's a bad thing to be an expert. Something is great to have deep knowledge about something, but we can go too far and overestimate the quality or the relevance of that experience.
Many things when it comes to leadership are balances. It's not either or you kind of need both. And then the second thing I'd say is, well, what would convey to the people around you that there's an adult in charge and she's really thinking this through and she's confident? Will it be that you just kind of plow ahead and show no vulnerability, show no questioning, convey that you have all the answers to all the problems? Or is it someone who's going to actually
I want to know what might be a concern and issue because we need to deal with it, which would provide more confidence to the people in your team. I think it's the more thoughtful, more engaging leadership approach than the one that says, I've got to figure out, don't worry. What do you think of the practice of appointing the people who are the very best at what they do to be managers?
Well, unless they aspire to be a manager, they want to learn that skill set right away. I could see that it could lead to a lot of difficulties. The other thing is a lot of people that are appointed as a manager of their group, they're not given much training at all in leadership or management. But then you have to decide, how can you promote somebody like that? How can you give them bigger responsibility? How can you allow them to make more money?
So sometimes companies have tracks that are more technical where you become more senior, you know, engineer or scientist, and your job is not so much managing other people as you have a bigger portfolio or bigger projects or more important projects to work on. And that's something that you do see. I think it's knowing your talent really well and making an assessment, a joint assessment with the younger manager.
Is this someone that has the potential and the interest and the aspirations to become a leader? And you might not know that right away, but you want to be evaluating and thinking and having that conversation. If the answer is yes, then I think you have to go through the kind of challenging transition that we've been talking about from individual contributor to manager. And then you need to develop expertise in leading.
Then you have to develop expertise. That's right. And maybe the most important thing about expertise when it comes to leadership is that you have to constantly learn new things. And so, yes, it's funny, we can talk about expertise and kind of boil it down to that. And you can say, well, you need to be an expert at learning new things. Well, okay, I'd be okay with that. Are there certain jobs or industries where you think people are more susceptible to the expertise trap?
Yeah, I do. I think what you might call high intellect industries. You see this a lot, so that would be places where a lot of the managers are scientists or, dare I say, even professors and other people that somehow think they know more than everybody else, which is really a bad thing to do because it's such a narrow-minded thing as we've been talking about.
You see it sometimes in IT, you see it in pharma and biotech, in science-based industries. And it's a tricky thing because these types of industries, they're deep, deep knowledge, they're dealing with very, very difficult problems. And it turns out that they really do believe that there's a right answer. And many things in life, it's hard to say there's a right answer and there's a wrong answer.
There's a lot of nuance to it. But when you're trying to solve an algorithm, you're trying to create a technologically based product. You're trying to do a drug discovery that has to solve or ameliorate a serious medical problem. Well, there probably is a right, more of a right answer than some of these nuance. And therefore, there's a belief
that expertise will win. If you want to really move up to significant leadership positions, yeah, you've got to have the expertise, but you also have to realize that expertise doesn't necessarily win. Having the best product, the best technology doesn't necessarily win. Customers have to care about that. You have to be able to communicate that, convey that, build the story, create the ecosystem, all the kind of fundamental building blocks that great managers, great leaders understand.
the science-based industries dominated by expertise, I think they have a tougher time with it. You'll have scientists that will never give up because it's that important. They're never going to stop. They think that their expertise, their capability, their scientific skillset, they think that that is going to win. And they're trained that way, and maybe we want that.
For those people, as long as there are partners in the team or in the top of these companies that have an analogous skill set or a complementary skill set that says, you know, we've got to be realistic about this. And striving for perfection sounds really good, but most people realize that when you keep trying to be perfect at something, you end up not being able to do anything. Well, Sydney, thanks so much for being here. Great to talk to you, Allison.
That was Sidney Finkelstein in conversation with Allison Beard on HBR ideacast. He's a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and an expert in leadership and talent development.
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This episode was produced by Mary Dew, Ramsey Cabaz, and Sandy and me, Hannah Bates. Ian Fox is our editor. Music by Coma Media. Special thanks to Maureen Hoke, Erica Trucksler, Nicole Smith, Ann Bartholomew, and you, our listener. See you next week.
