Why the behaviours that make someone an outstanding expert are not the ones that make a leader, and how managers widen the ways they create value once a team depends on them.
People often become managers because they stood out as experts. They know their craft, they resolve the problems in front of them, they deliver the results and colleagues know they can be counted on.
Then the promotion arrives.
A paradox surfaces at that point: the behaviours that allowed someone to succeed as an expert are not necessarily the ones that will allow them to succeed as a leader.
The challenge is not to abandon expertise. It is to learn to stop treating expertise as the only way of creating value.
Expert, Manager and Leader: Three Ways of Creating Value
An expert creates value primarily through what they know and what they are able to resolve.
A manager now has to make sure the work gets done effectively by the team, which means setting priorities, coordinating, delegating, clarifying expectations and following up on results.
A leader, for their part, looks to create the conditions in which others can succeed. A leader gives the work meaning, develops judgment, builds accountability, encourages autonomy and mobilizes people.
In short:
- The expert develops expertise.
- The manager develops performance.
- The leader develops the capacity of others to perform.
As responsibilities grow, our value therefore rests increasingly on what we make it possible for others to accomplish.
The Expert-Manager Trap
When the pressure rises, many managers return instinctively to what they master best.
“It is simpler if I do it myself.”
“I will give them the answer, it will be faster that way.”
“I delegate, but I still want to check how they plan to go about it.”
In the short term this works. The problem is resolved quickly.
Over a longer horizon, though, these reflexes can produce an overloaded manager, a dependent team, reduced initiative and little development of autonomy.
A cycle can even set in: a problem arises, it is escalated to the manager, the manager supplies the answer, dependence deepens and still more problems are escalated in turn.
A leader therefore has to resist, at least some of the time, the urge to be the one who holds the answer, and become instead the one who helps others develop their own judgment.
A useful question to sit with: if you took two weeks of vacation and your team ran very well without you, would that be bad news, or perhaps evidence of your leadership?
A Title Confers Authority, Not Necessarily Influence
There is also an important difference between formal and informal leadership.
Formal leadership comes from the role the organization assigns. The title carries certain responsibilities and certain decision-making powers.
Informal leadership rests on influence instead.
In most organizations, some people hold no management title at all, yet their opinion carries considerable weight. Colleagues consult them. Colleagues watch their reaction. They can ease acceptance of a decision, or amplify the resistance to it.
Why? Because an organization can give you a leadership position, but it cannot oblige other people to recognize you as a leader.
Which raises a question worth sitting with: if your title were removed tomorrow, why would people continue to follow you?
The Four Levers of Influence
Durable influence is built, among other things, around four levers.
Competence: do I believe in your judgment? Our expertise and the quality of our judgment give weight to what we say.
Relationship: can I trust you? Influencing generally requires listening and understanding before seeking to convince.
Clarity: do I understand where you want to take me, and why? People need to understand the direction, the expectations and the reasoning behind a decision.
Consistency: do your actions match your words? Our behaviour has to support the messages we send.
Credibility is built largely through the repetition of these behaviours. It works somewhat like a bank account: each commitment honoured, each fair decision and each mistake acknowledged is a deposit. A broken promise, an avoided problem or a gap between our words and our actions is a withdrawal.
Credibility is built slowly, and it can sometimes be weakened very quickly.
In Leadership, Intention Does Not Always Match Impact
A leader can hold an excellent intention and produce precisely the opposite effect.
I want to ensure quality, so I check the work constantly, and the team hears “He does not trust me.”
I want to be available, so I resolve all the problems, and the team learns “When I have a problem, my manager will hand me the solution.”
I want to be efficient, so I issue my instructions quickly, and the team concludes “My opinion is not really being sought.”
Our intention belongs to us. Our impact is experienced by other people.
That is why feedback remains one of the most powerful tools available for developing your own leadership.
Moving From Expertise to Impact
Becoming a leader does not mean renouncing expertise. It means widening the ways in which you contribute.
Sometimes our team needs our expertise. Sometimes it needs us to organize, to decide and to clarify. And sometimes our largest contribution is to hold back the immediate answer, so that someone else can think it through, decide, learn and succeed.
A title can confer authority. Expertise can confer credibility. Durable influence, nevertheless, is built in the way other people experience our leadership from one day to the next.
If a single question were to remain after this reading, it might be this one: what do the people around me experience when they experience my leadership?
When Does External Support Add Value?
Many managers make this transition without external support, working through it with observation, feedback from their team and accumulated experience. An outside perspective generally becomes useful when expert reflexes persist despite a real intention to change, or when the gap between intention and perceived impact keeps repeating from one team to the next.
In engagements of this kind, our role is to structure the reflection, name the observable gaps and help the manager choose their own adjustments. The decisions, the behaviours and the results remain entirely theirs.
Widen the Ways Your Leaders Create Value
Are you supporting experts who are moving into management roles, or working through that transition yourself? Levasseur Warren can design a coaching or leadership development engagement suited to your managers, your organizational context, and the behaviours you want to see evolve.
Discuss your leadership development objectives with us: