Does Expertise Equal Leadership?

By Joe Hungler on February 18th, 2008

The Question of Leadership claims that Leaders Don’t have to be Experts. I fully agree with Brad. Too often people are promoted because they are good at doing. I’ve talked before about my frustrations when I was a new supervisor and couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t work as hard as I did. I had no clue how to supervise. Because I was good at youth development, people assumed I would be a good manager of youth development professionals. Brad’s advice for developing leadership includes (my 2 cents is in italics):

Build leadership skills into your competency models early on. Don’t wait until someone becomes a leader to find out if they have the right stuff. We make an effort to let all of our Program Directors have leadership roles through special events and supervising part-timers, volunteers and interns. It not only develops their leadership skills, it gets the decision making closer to the action where it should be. It helps with retention as well since staff have more control over their own departments and therefore the success of their programs.
Recognize that leading and doing are two different things. Identify people who can rally and motivate teams. Use succession planning to give these people proper exposure to different parts of the organization. This will help them understand the details of what they manage. We build succession planning into our reviews and training plans. Our staff seem to appreciate that we are not only training them for their current job, but preparing them for their next job as well. They see that we are investing in them.
Create satisfying career paths and rewards for both expertise and management. Don’t build a single career path that provides rewards only for becoming a manager. Find ways to reward people who want to build deep functional and technical expertise. This is challenging in the non-profit world. It is important though, as I know many folks who are great at working with kids and continue to do so throughout their career. For most they take a financial hit to do so. I’d love to hear from organizations that have a good solution to this.
Get rid of leaders who can’t lead. This is critical to moral of the staff they lead as well as the other leaders who have to pick up the slack. Don’t fear the hard conversations. Firing people, especially good people, is hard. In the non-profit and youth development world, this is particularly difficult. We got into this business to help people, not to fire them. I try to focus on what is best for the organization and our kids when it comes time to make these decisions. It makes it much easier (the decision, not the conversation and feelings of guilt of firing someone who feeds their family). We also use progressive discipline, so it is rarely a surprise.