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The desire for expertise
Dieter Weisshaar • December 20, 2022
Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash
New Leadership skills are not good enough
Every single day, when you read on Social Media, you got told that there are New Work
and new leadership skills.
It is indisputable that leadership has changed from decades ago and that is rightly so. In the light of the new resignation
and war for talent, great leadership skills are fundamental for every company. But we should not miss out Expertise
as a skill.
FutureSkills and values like Learnability, Empathy, Trust, Giving Purpose, Communication, Teaming, Diversity are mandatory to become a good leader in the modern world but they are not good enough. We all can agree that a leader does not need to be the best expert in the company, it can be even blocking the person away from being a great leader. We should have great expertise in our teams to develop our business.
If you lead a company and your role is the development of a vision, purpose and a strategy with your leadership team, it can be questioned if that is as authentic
(which is a FutureSkill) if you neither understand the market, the product or the service well enough to be seen from your team as a thoughtful leader or you even take wrong decisions. A certain level of Expertise
is a must and it is highly undervalued in the current discussion. The same is true for Experience
which is helping a leader to draw conclusions based on the experience she or he gained throughout the career path. It is not about the past and should not hinder innovation but expertise and experience can help to drive good decisions with your teams faster, gain more trust from your employees and that makes you as a person and your company more resilient
because it reduces stress and failure in critical times.
We don't need look to much into the past for great technical expertise
to drive the greatest innovations
of our time such as the PC, Mouse, Smartphone, Internet, IoT, Electric Cars, Metaverse and the people who had mastered this. The responsible leaders may have failed on FutureSkills in the one or other dimension but they had passion, communication skills, could build an unparalleled purpose and most of their team members had trust to their leadership based on a great expertise and vision.
The bold statement 'we are hiring for potential' and the rest can be teached, may be true for the lower levels of the organization where your career path is ahead of you and you have time to learn. Some expertise takes years to gain and understand at least the necessary leadership levels such as cyber security, AI, construction, architecture, defense, pharma and healthcare just to name a few. If you are put to the board room without the right leadership skills and expertise at this level, your chance to fail is much higher same for the company risk.
We all have seen management failing if they could not get across that they understand the market, product, services or businesses to create a great future for the company and vision. At some point in time employees and customers stop to follow and move away.
Yes, we need all these FutureSkills
in modern businesses but without expertise
and experience
it is not good enough for the board room.
Growing the business is on the agenda of almost very board room. Expectations are high, a business plan can be created quickly but achieving growth isn't as easy. To gain market share your company needs to beat market growth but how can this be done.
On our famous online book store you find far over 60.000 books on strategy but only a good 4.000 on strategy execution or implementation. There are far more universities that offer marketing and only a few on sales as a major. Creating the ambition, the project goals, the strategy is a cool thing and requires great thinkers. Taking the things to daily execution requires an additional skill which is rare, may be perceived as boring but is the key success factor for every company.
You receive a new project and on the first view it looks complex and you need to get your arms around it. How can you structure a complex situation to discover various perspectives and approaches. At C-Level you may not even have all the information or expertise to resolve it on your own. Some ideas that worked for me.
You may have seen the rise of tech companies at the end of 90th of last century. Web Content, eCommerce and startups were the exciting topics, til the point when the dotcom bubble burst. It was the time when salaries went crazy in this sector, the company evaluations and stock markets were on all time high and venture capital market was overheated.
Marketing budgets are always a discussion topic. What can a CEO expect if a percentage of revenue is spent for corporate marketing? Have the goals been defined and expectations aligned. Marketing can not meet expectations if the ecosystem is not supportive. Let's have a deeper look in the B2B sector and the dependencies.
Investors and shareholders ask their board members to scale up the business - grow faster than market and create value. That is a fair expectation. Let's have a look on some key success factors and considerations.
This is probably one of the hardest questions to answer. How much do I need to spend to win a customer and close a deal. This varies highly by market, product, target group, persona - let's have a look at the IT B2B market.
Cloud businesses achieve far higher company evaluations than traditional software companies. Rightly so, as their growth capability will out perform traditional software licenses and support business models.
Warum scheitert die Energiewende? Die Politik kann oder will nicht nachrechnen. Es liegt an einer kleinen Zahl um es vereinfacht darzustellen: Der Wirkfaktor (Wirkungsgrad etc.) der Wärmepumpe. Unser Strom ist viel zu teuer.
Hiring a top manager or executive should be driven by best fit to the role, not by age, gender, ethnic etc., something almost everyone can agree on in the modern world. Is this really true for the age? Age is not experience. Experience is gained by the time being in relevant positions or exposed to challenges but you need to be a couple of years in business to be experienced. Digital natives, self-motivation, energy and drive may be more present in younger generations.