How to Lead People Who Know More Than You (4 mins)
TLDR: Managing experts is about turning stars into constellations
A CEO I coach said, “My new Head of Marketing has twenty years in the field. I’ve never launched a campaign. How do I lead someone like that?”
This question comes up all the time in CEO coaching, especially with leaders who are building their first professional executive team. Think 35 year old founder hiring folks with decades of functional experience.
I see two default approaches:
Many CEOs believe they have to learn the job to lead the person. But that’s not leadership! No one running any large company could possibly be the expert in every function. And when you try, you end up driving yourself into the ground trying to “get smart”. But of course there’s no way you could possibly get “smarter” or more knowledgeable than someone who has decades of immersion in the function.
Others let the functional experts do what they want because “they’re the expert and I don’t know as much as they do about their function”. But this is abdicating oversight. By doing this, leaders allow functional heads to over invest in their areas. The Head of Marketing builds world-class systems that no one uses. Product polishes features no one asked for. Everyone’s working hard, but not together.
Here’s the better option: Your job isn’t to know more than your experts, but to make their expertise point in the same direction.
Your role is to
Give them a clear, shared picture of success, and then
Create the conditions so they can work together to get there
That’s what turns stars into a constellation: Still bright, and creating a beautiful picture together.
What to do: Try this in Your Next Leadership Meeting
Create a clear, shared picture of success:
Write down your team’s overall purpose and vision.
Keep it clear, compelling, and consequential (see Wageman et al). Clear enough to align people, meaningful enough to energize them, and big enough to matter.This should be a single sentence.
Example: “Become the most highly rated matcha café for Gen Alpha in our metro area with five stars across all rating platforms.”Name three to five must-win battles for the next two years.
These are the key efforts that must be true to meet your purpose. Work with the team to agree on these. For example:Create a menu Gen Alpha customers rave about.
Source authentic, sustainable ingredients at the right cost.
Design a customer journey and marketing program so that every visitor rates us a five.
Create the conditions for functions to work together
Form one cross-functional sub-team per battle.
Each sub-team should include the functions that are absolutely necessary for that battle.Identify initiatives.
Each group identifies the few initiatives that will truly shift that battle. This gets you away from purely functional initiatives, to initiatives that support the team’s purpose.
Pressure-test everything.
For each initiative, ask:Does this directly advance a must-win battle?
Are we building for impact, or just polishing our own function?
Deliverable:
A visible list of cross-functional initiatives that drive your shared purpose. Everyone’s rowing in the same direction.
Research Underpinnings
Teams perform best when everyone is clear on where they’re headed and why it matters.
Ruth Wageman calls this clear, compelling and consequential direction.
The idea of Must Win Battles comes from Thomas Malnight and Peter Killing at IMD. Their research shows that when leaders name a few decisive battles and put real cross-functional focus behind them, organizations move faster and build commitment at every level. It’s the difference between doing everything well and doing the right things together.
Heidi Gardner’s work on Smart Collaboration shows what happens when leaders make alignment explicit, experts stop optimizing for their own turf and start creating value across functions.
That’s why this move works. When direction is clear and shared, the whole team starts to move as one: not a collection of stars, but a constellation.