I've noticed a bit of a trend...
Organisations with a technical or specialist bent looking for the language and skills to connect the expertise of their people to their organisational purpose, goals and performance. Science, technology, cybersecurity, finance, health, engineering, and energy, to name a few. There are many more though - legal, accounting, education to name a few more.
What the technical specialists in these industries have in common is a huge amount of knowledge and experience in their area which enables them to make expert judgements. In other words, they know their stuff.
What they often struggle with is getting their point across to the 'powers that be'. These are clever people, and they've been hired to contribute their cleverness to whatever their organisation is trying to achieve, and they're passionate about doing so. These specialists can see the answers, which can often seem obvious, but they're not obvious to others who don't share the same expertise. What ensues is often frustration and disconnect between strategic direction and specialist expertise. And what a crying shame that is!!
Why is this such a common challenge?? Because subject matter experts have cognitive abilities and styles that lend themselves to… well… being a subject matter expert:
🤓 They are highly intelligent but they think with more depth than breadth.
🧠 They cope better with detail complexity than dynamic complexity (that's another whole post/article right there).
🧐 They are excellent, and more comfortable, at coming to conclusions (and voicing them) within their familiar area of expertise.
👩💼 They don't have a framework for translating their expert insights into strategic language.
To be fair, in the other direction strategy is also very often not communicated in the language of those who need to be guided by it.
No one is at fault here. Everyone is just doing their best. Everyone wants to have an impact. Sometimes we miss each other though.
If you're on this journey I'd love to help you explore this challenge.
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