You are the Expert. Who Me?
At my first credit union, we had an extremely competent board with strong business acumen. I was lucky to engage with this group as they taught me a number of valuable lessons. I remember vividly having lunch with one of these individuals. He was sharing a story about the early days of his career when he received a promotion. He told me, “I was leading a competency that I had never done before. I had no idea how to do what the people on my team were doing.” He shared with me that he quickly adopted a technique to elicit ideas and solutions from his subject matter experts. When they would come to his office and say, “We have this big problem. What should I do?” He would say, “What do you think we should do?” He alerted his team that they should not even enter his office unless they had ideas about how to solve the problems they faced. He had quickly positioned himself as an expert and quite a dominant influence without any subject matter expertise. He laughed and said to me, “They ...