You did the application exercise about the expertise trap and you have a little bit better sense for yourself. Let's talk about, in this video, what you can do, how are we going to take on that expertise trap. There are a bunch of ideas. Of course, you want to challenge that expertise, we know that. You want to bring other people in. I like the idea of thinking about teammates, or colleagues, or peers almost as teachers to try to seek out fresh ideas. Adding people that are different than you are is really great if you're in a position to hire some of those people or create opportunities like that. You want role models, whether it's somebody more senior or even a learning buddy as we'll elaborate on, and you want to think about how to learn from your mistakes. There's a lot of things there. But let me dig a little deeper and elaborate on a few of these ideas. Well, let's start with checking your ego. Check your ego at the door. Do you sometimes overshadow others so that you can look good? Do you sometimes dictate solutions to team members rather than rely on their own capabilities? Do you put pressure on yourself to always appear right? The pressure we put on ourselves to always feel like we're better than everyone else, it's really hard. How much pride do you take in the company-wide accolades, the conference invitations, the industry awards, all these things are signs of expertise and success. But if you're excessively gratified by the status that comes with your hard-won knowledge, maybe you want to try grounding yourself a little bit. Michael Bloomberg, pretty famous guy, pretty successful guy, he famously gave up this lavish private office at his media company for a small, unremarkable cubicle. Or IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad, he also lived a pretty simple life, traveling inexpensively, driving an old car. Ian Cook, who was the former CEO of Colgate-Palmolive and afterwards became the Executive Chairman, he made sure to visit the locker room at every plant facility that he visited of Colgate-Palmolive. He wanted to find out what was really going on. He wanted to talk to the real people doing the real work. Some executives I've worked with also forgo their reserved parking spots, and they park in the back lot so he can ride the shuttle with rank and file employees. I mean, I heard that in some of the interviews I did with CEOs. They don't believe in having the executive reserved parking right in front of the building, which you see in so many companies. They rather just park wherever they park, they are on the shuttle bus, and they just talk to people on the way there and they end up learning about what is really going on and it grounds them. They can spotlight others' accomplishments in meetings, at industry events, and they resist the urge to take credit for every success. Most importantly, maybe they spend time listening to team members instead of just telling them what to do. Checking your ego is not going to take away your expertise. In some ways, it's going to enhance your expertise and enable you to keep on learning. Second point, methodically revisit your assumptions. One executive I coached, who was a senior leader in a mid-size medical device company, was struggling to build market share even though her company possessed great technology. When I asked her to do this exercise, she responded, "Well, medical specialists are the key gatekeepers. Our largest competitors have locked up relationships with the largest hospital systems. Our technology is the best on the market." Well, when she analyzed those statements, she realized that although the specialists were gatekeepers, the more entrepreneurial among them might be open to working with new partners. Her company could support doctors who sought to break away from the big hospital systems and form their own independent clinics. This type of thinking allowed her to really bust out of that expertise trap and lead her company to compete in non-traditional ways and actually with excellent results. Here's another idea: look to teammates as teachers. I mentioned this point earlier. Let me elaborate little bit on what that means. Well, set aside a few minutes every month to reflect on the most important lessons or insights you gleaned from your team members. Not work you've done, not your ideas, but what you learned from other people that work for you or work with you, whether they're on your team or peers, especially those whose expertise is less than or is different than yours. In other words, people may be younger or less experienced or have expertise is very different than yours. Write down, reflect upon, think about, capture some of those lessons. Ask them open-ended questions to trigger their thoughts and encourage them to challenge your thinking and give you feedback. Then make certain that you take their comments seriously. Reward rather than dismiss or criticize those who speak up. Aron Ain, the CEO of the software company Kronos has described his habit of walking around the office to cubits or hold impromptu focus groups with employees at all levels of his organization to get their opinions on pressing business issues and to try to capture some new insights. All of these things are important. Look for ways to try to learn from teammates, learn from peers, but especially people that are not necessarily at your position, people that are at your level, people that are lower in the hierarchy as well. You got to go out of your way to make that happen. In my experience, some of the best leaders do that regularly. Then another idea, add a role model or a learning buddy. For example, Marcus Samuelsson. You know I'm a big foodie, so I follow these chefs. Marcus Samuelsson is the Ethiopian Swedish executive at New York's acclaimed Red Rooster restaurant and a whole bunch of others. He looks to peers, young and old, for inspiration to keep learning. One of them, Samuelsson has said, is a woman named Leah Chase, who has been a New Orleans chef and is in her 90s, and she's still questioning things with the same sense of excitement. That's a quote, "Still questioning things with the same sense of excitement." Who could look at things the same way when you interact with people like this? Is anyone at your company or your industry unusually dedicated to creativity of growth? Look up that person, follow her activities, ask if you can check in regularly to compare notes, compare ideas. What is she thinking about? What is she reading? What is she doing to broaden her own horizons and to stay current? You could do the same type of thing by cultivating learning buddies. These are colleagues that could be in your company or not, in your business or not, who challenge your thinking. People you can bounce ideas around, people that will give you an honest assessment. The CEO of Scripps Health, Chris Van Gorder, consults with a group of loyal friends inside and outside of the organization who he knows are going to provide him with honest and sometimes tough feedback about his performance. The next time you're out in executive development program, for example, and just the other day I was running one here at Dartmouth and I said this to the group, you're going to be together, you're together for a week. You don't know each other walking in, but because you're going to work together in teams and be very active together and have meals together, you're going to get to know each other. See if there's anyone else that's here in the room that you start to develop a bit of a professional relationship so that maybe the two of you can connect as a sounding board for each other. I even say, maybe schedule once a month a meeting for 30 minutes. Just schedule on the phone or on Zoom or whatever, where you can share something is going on in your business that you really want some feedback on and they could do the same thing for you. I mean, you can create these learning buddies. These are things that we all can do. The purpose of all of this, let's remember, is to avoid falling into that expertise trap where experts think they've got it, they're done, they don't have to keep learning. But the reality is you have to keep learning and unlearning and re-learning and the more opportunities you give yourself to do that, the more places you look for information, for ideas, for different points of view, the better off you're going to be.
