Build Relationships & Trust by Tapping Into Others' Expertise

Source: Noam Galai
Copyright: 2015 Getty Images

Jennifer Hyman co-founded Rent The Runway and currently serves as the CEO. Recently, she spoke to Stanford University students about her experiences as an entrepreneur and leader. Hyman described a critical meeting when she was first beginning to conceive her idea for the business. She landed a meeting with fashion-giant Diane Von Furstenberg.   During that meeting, Hyman asked for feedback about her idea, and she tried to learn as much as possible about the fashion business.   She asked many questions and listened actively.   Hyman explains the lesson she takes away from that remarkable encounter: 

Now also in that meeting, I asked her, “Hey, could you introduce me to a few of your friends, and I’d love to meet with them and talk about this idea,” because every meeting has to get you to like three other meetings. And so never leave a meeting with someone without asking them for that introduction. Now those other meetings led us to other people in the fashion industry, some of which were designers, some of which were publicists, but people that actually could give us real feedback on this idea and people that could see that like we were interested in listening. It was helping to build trust in an industry where we had no experience, where you go in and you actually allow someone else to give you feedback, like “How does that work?”

What ends up happening in a situation where I sit with you and I ask you questions and I ask you for your advice, you end up walking out of that conversation feeling awesome. You end up liking me in that conversation. Like whenever you make someone else into the expert, like that builds a relationship right away. And we needed desperately at the beginning of the business to build trust so that anyone would actually trust us to like take their currencies and inventory and not cannibalize their business.

Hyman highlights two key lessons here. First, don't leave a meeting such as this one without soliciting an introduction to others who may be helpful to you.   Second, people love being put in the position of expert sharing wisdom with others.  They want to help, provided you demonstrate respect for their expertise, come extremely prepared, ask great questions, and listen actively.   Treating someone else as the expert sets the tone for a productive conversation.   You don't have to grovel or patronize others; you simply have to acknowledge what you do not know and point out how they can help.   Very often, others will find the time to share their wisdom with you, even if they have a very busy schedule.  I've certainly found that to be the case in my career as well.  

Tiger and Federer, and the Case for Generalists

Source: Bleacher Report

David Epstein has published a terrific new book titled, "Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World." He makes the case for not specializing too early in life, but instead, taking advantage of a period of sampling and discovery. He makes a strong case for why generalists tend to innovate more effectively. In fact, he offers an interesting contrast in the book between Tiger Woods and Roger Federer. Tiger specialized at a remarkably young age. Federer did not. He argues that we seem to be favoring the specialists such as Tiger, and extolling the virtues of intense focus, and failing to recognize the value of generalists. Here's an excerpt:

I found more and more evidence that it takes time to develop personal and professional range—and that it is worth it. I dived into work showing that highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident—a dangerous combination. And I was stunned by an enormous body of work demonstrating that learning is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks a lot like falling behind.

The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization. While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger's precocity and clarity of purpose, we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.

I wholeheartedly agree. I've argued that we need more polymaths, more Renaissance men and women, because they often can connect intriguing ideas and concepts from disparate fields in ways that lead to creative breakthroughs. Moreover, specialists can become closed-minded and dogmatic as their expertise deepens in a particular field. Of course, we need specialists in our organizations, but we must take great care to nurture the inquisitive, curious generalists who just might help us develop our next groundbreaking new product or service.  Sometimes, these generalists may seem as though they don't add as much immediate value. Sometimes, their minds might wander.  They may tinker a bit too much, at least according to the typical ways that executives might evaluate their performance.  We just might want to tolerate a bit of that unorthodox thinking though if we want new ideas to flourish. 

Experts and Innovation

Stanford Professor Riitta Katila describes the role experts should and should not play on a team when it comes to developing breakthrough innovations. Check out the video clip below, in which she describes lessons from her research:

Closed-minded Experts

Experts can be quite closed-minded at times. They exhibit overconfidence and a bias toward the status quo. Victor Ottati and his colleagues have documented evidence of what they call the “Earned Dogmatism Effect.” The scholars argue that social norms about novices versus experts play a key role in how people perceive new ideas.   Here's how they explain this effect: 

“Consider, for example, a seminar pertaining to cancer. Within this situation, some individuals may occupy the role of “novice” (e.g., a layperson) whereas others may occupy the role of “expert” (e.g., a cancer researcher). Because novices possess limited knowledge, social norms dictate that they should listen and learn in an open-minded fashion. The expert possess extensive knowledge, and therefore is entitled to adopt a more dogmatic or forceful orientation. Dogmatic statements are more likely to be tolerated when the “expert” speaks than when a “novice” speaks. Novices possess limited knowledge, and as such, are expected to adopt a more humble and open-minded orientation.”

The researchers conducted a series of experiments to explore this effect.  In their studies, they demonstrate that even simply the self-perception of expertise can lead to closed-minded behavior.  In  one experiment they provided people false feedback on a simple test, leading some individuals to believe that they had a great deal of expertise, while others felt that they were not knowledgeable at all relative to most others in the study.   The individuals who were made to feel as though they were experts exhibited closed-mindedness in a subsequent aspect of the study.   That effect is pretty incredible, given that the individuals were not ACTUALLY experts.  The feedback that they received was MADE UP!  

How Expertise Can Become a Liability

Andras Tilcsik and Juan Almandoz published an interesting article in the Rotman Business School's management magazine this year titled, "When Expertise Becomes a Liability."  They studied over 1,300 banks during the 1996-2012 time period.  124 of those banks failed (slightly less than 10%).  In conditions of decision uncertainty, having more domain experts on the board of the bank meant a higher probability of failure.  They argue that having some domain experts is important and essential,  but there can be too much of a good thing.  Having a few people with expertise in other domains can be quite beneficial.  

Why the liability of expertise?  They argue that a high proportion of domain experts on a board leads to three problems.  First, domain experts can be very entrenched in their views, and they may be unwilling to look at issues in new ways as the environment changes.   Second, domain experts may exhibit high degrees of overconfidence in terms of their ability to make projections and forecasts.  Finally, a high proportion of domain experts might be associated with a lack of constructive conflict and debate within the board.  Why?  Non-experts may be unwilling to challenge conventional wisdom, ask tough questions, or offer dissenting views if they are greatly outnumbered by domain experts on the board.  

Fewer Experts, More Innovation?

Riitta Katila, Sruthi Thatchenkery, Michael Christensen, and Stefanos Zenios have conducted some fascinating new research about the role of experts during the innovation process.  They studied over 200 surgical instrument ventures.  The scholars examined the role that physicians played during the growth and development of these new ventures.  Here's what they concluded:

To be sure, entrepreneurs in highly specialized and technical industries need the knowledge that only users (doctors, lawyers, engineers, and the like) can provide. Doctors understand what other doctors will value in a new product; lawyers know what other lawyers need. But you can have too much of a good thing — including input from such experts. In fact, my colleagues and I have found that innovation thrives when expert users make up about 40% of an invention team. Any less and the company will lose sight of what its customers need; any more and the group will tend to converge on old ideas.

The researchers found that having a doctor serve as CEO of the new venture served as a key impediment to innovation.  Why is the presence of many experts a liability for these ventures?  Remember that experts provide important knowledge about the use of products, the problems with existing products, and the opportunities for improvement.  However, experts also are very entrenched in the existing ways of working.  They often cling to conventional wisdom and find it difficult to shake loose from certain long-held assumptions and beliefs.   Katila explains the particular liabilities that emerge when a doctor serves as CEO:

Why do firms led by doctors tend to lag behind in innovation? In part, we think it’s because expert users have spent lots of time getting comfortable with existing tools and methods. As a result, they’re invested in their field’s status quo and may have trouble seeing the value in a novel idea. We found that although expert users excelled at refining existing products, they couldn’t always recognize a potential breakthrough innovation when they saw one. As one physician CEO we interviewed for our study confessed, “If you show me a prototype, I can say, ‘Well, you could do this better.’ … I know very well how to help a company optimize its product … but I don’t know how to invent something that was never invented before.”

Do Technical Experts Make Better Leaders? Part 2

Someone read yesterday's blog post about technical experts as leaders, and they asked me if I had done a similar analysis for NFL coaches.   In yesterday's blog post, I showed that most NBA championships have been won either by non-players or players who never made an All-Star team.   That finding stood in contrast to a scholarly study that showed former All-Stars achieving a higher winning percentage than non-stars or non-players.  The scholars used those findings to argue that technical experts thrive as leaders, contrary to conventional wisdom.  My results regarding championships didn't fully support their conclusion. 

What about the NFL?  What do the data show there? I reviewed the list of Super Bowl winning coaches from 1966-2016.   32 coaches have won the 51 Super Bowls (several coaches have earned multiple championships, including Bill Belichick and Chuck Noll, who both won 4 times).  Of those coaches, only 1 man made the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a player (Mike Ditka).  Only two men earned Pro Bowl status as players (Mike Ditka and his mentor, Tom Landry, who made it to one Pro Bowl as a punter for the New York Giants in the 1950s).   None of the other Super Bowl winning coaches earned Pro Bowl status as a player.   Thus, in football, it appears that the findings are even more pronounced.  Championships are generally not won by coaches who were formerly superstar players.  

Does Expertise Make Us Close-Minded?

The British Psychological Society reports on a new study by Ottati, Price, Wilson, and Sumaktoyo.  The article, "When self-perceptions of expertise increase closed-minded cognition: The earned dogmatism effect," was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.   The research consisted of a series of six experiments.  In the research, people were made to feel like they were either experts or novices in a particular knowledge domain.   The scholars found that those who felt as though they were experts tended to act in a more close-minded fashion in subsequent parts of the study.  Hmmm... perhaps all of us at universities should look in the mirror.  Does the level of perceived expertise in academia contribute to a close-mindedness that inhibits the type of learning, exploration, and open dialogue that should be occurring in our classrooms?  Similarly, in a business context, does expertise close managers and technical experts off to new possibilities and make them more vulnerable to disruptive innovation? 

How Experts Can Train Novices More Effectively

Novices in many fields look to those with experience for mentorship, advice, and training.  It's quite natural for them to do so.  Unfortunately, the experts do not always make great teachers.   They can't empathize with the novices, and they sometimes have a hard time explaining how they learned to do what they do.   Scholars call this phenomenon the "curse of knowledge."  Think about the challenges some superstar athletes face when they try to coach others upon retirement.  Examples of those who struggled in this regard include Magic Johnson, Ted Williams, and Isaiah Thomas. 

Harvard doctoral candidate Ting Zhang has been conducting interesting research on how experts can break the "curse of knowledge."  She has focused on two strategies that could help.   First, experts can document their learning process while they are novices, and then look back on their notes when asked to provide coaching and advice to others.  Second, experts can "rediscover inexperience" by acting like a beginner again. 

In one study she asked undergraduates to record notes about their summer internships, and she collected the diaries.   Months later, they were asked to provide advice to others pursuing internships.  She gave one half of the experts access to their old notes, while the other half did not receive the diaries to review.   The new interns gave higher evaluations to the advice given by those who had reviewed their diaries. 

In a second study, she asked musicians to record themselves playing guitar.   One half of them could play as they wished. The other half were directed to play with their non-dominant hand.   Those in this second group felt more like beginners again, empathized more effectively with novices, and they gave more concrete and effective advice to beginners as well.