Underrated CEO Skill: Knowing an Expert When You See One
Great CEOs go from being the expert in the room to being the person who puts experts in the room. Here are the five signs to look for.
Would Einstein have made a good CEO?
We can’t say of course, but I think he probably would have been a disaster. Not because he wasn’t an elite-level intelligence, but because elite-level intelligence does not a great CEO make.
Einstein was unmatched as a theoretical physicist and scientific groundbreaker. His mind changed the world. But his deep expertise and the ability to sustain work on one seemingly impossible problem are just about the opposite of what the CEO job demands.
As a CEO, you need breadth over depth, delegation over mastery, judgment exercised through other people rather than applied directly to the work.
The trap so many CEOs fall into is thinking that their demonstrated expertise and intelligence—factors that made them such standout leaders in their career—will translate once their business card says “Chief Executive Officer.”
I see this often with executives who rise through a particular function. A great sales leader becomes CEO and continues to spend an outsized amount of time on sales. Because this is the area where he has the most expertise, he feels comfortable jumping into deals, directing the sales team, and second-guessing the sales executive. Before long, the organization is out of balance. Sales gets tremendous (though often unwanted) attention, while the other business functions are neglected. As I repeat on this SubStack so often: The CEO’s responsibility is to the whole business, including the competing interests of customers, employees, and shareholders. Choose one over the others and failure will soon be at your door.
The CEO job is a tightrope walk. A constant balancing act. Your expertise can, ironically, tip you over the side of the rope.
The real leverage of the CEO comes not from being the expert, but from being a practiced curator of expertise. The best CEOs I have seen are surrounded by experts who are genuinely better than they are at finance, at product, at selling, at customer behavior, and so on. These CEOs are not threatened by that fact. And even in the areas where they do have genuine expertise, they still delegate daily running of that sector of the business to a capable executive.
This frees the CEO to do their real work, which is to be a balancing layer on top of the whole organization.
The natural next question is: How do I know who’s an expert?
One of the more difficult facets of the CEO job is that you have to evaluate knowledge and competence in fields where you may have little expertise yourself. It’s kind of like trying to pick the finest pinot noir when you’re used to Diet Coke. Learning to recognize real expertise is therefore an important skill for any CEO.
Here are some general recommendations for identifying the real experts.
They can tell you in detail how they would handle a situation. I remember interviewing a public relations person once and saying, “I don’t know anything about PR. If you were me, what question would you ask to find out whether somebody was good at PR?” She said, “Well, I’d ask them what they’d go do.” So I asked, “Okay, what would you go do?” She then spent the next five minutes giving me a very detailed, almost hour-by-hour description of the hundred things she was going to do the first day on the job. I hired her.
They can simplify. That PR person turned out to be a great hire, and one of the signals was that I could understand her. She didn’t hide behind publicity and media jargon. She could explain who she needed to reach, what she was going to say to them, and what she hoped would happen as a result. There was plenty of sophistication behind her plan, but she could communicate it in plain English. The pretender often reaches for jargon and complexity. When someone makes a complicated topic clear, it’s a good sign. When someone makes a simple topic more complicated, pay a different kind of attention.
They can predict. A good expert has a working model of how things in their field are likely to play out. A strong sales executive, for example, should have a reasonable sense of which deals will close, when they will close, and why. No one predicts the future perfectly, but if someone routinely gets even small-scale predictions wrong within their domain of expertise, there may be a few missing pieces in their model of the field.
They know their limits. Ask a real expert something just outside their domain and they’ll tell you precisely where their certainty ends. “I don’t know” from an expert is often a good sign. It shows intellectual humility and a willingness to work with fellow experts on the leadership team. The person who has a confident answer for everything probably isn’t a real expert.
They have the respect of the right people. I often ask people I trust, “Who do you know who’s the best ever at [insert the expertise I need]?” A referral from a person who knows what they are talking about holds far more weight than self-promotion. That signal is very hard to fake.
Great CEOs go from being the expert in the room to being the person who puts experts in the room. They don’t try to pull all the strings, and they don’t just hire impressive-sounding people. They put a premium on orchestrating a group of genuinely talented, exceptional people who care about the future of the company.
There are some high-profile semi-exceptions. Steve Jobs brought extraordinary product instincts to Apple, and Elon Musk has applied deep technical knowledge to the companies he runs. Most CEOs are not Jobs or Musk, though, and trying to imitate the degree to which they personally drive work is more likely to create problems than success. It is also worth remembering that both surrounded themselves with exceptional people and knew expertise when they saw it.
The more common failure mode is the CEO who thinks the job is to be the supreme doer for the organization. It isn’t. The CEO has to assemble the talent, balance the competing needs of the business, and make sure the experts are all working toward the same goals.