How to manage team members who think they know more than they do

Ellie, a tech CEO colleague, recently called a meeting with her management team to discuss disturbing behaviors starting to arise within the company. Newer employees were not respecting the expertise of more senior team members. This was not just unproductive, but also disruptive, causing friction between teams, breaking down decision-making, and slowing progress.

Another colleague, George (an L&D director) knew that each budget season he was forced to justify paying contracted subject-matter experts to work on online courses even though the company had a team of in-house instructional designers. His company had high turnover in the C-suite and on the finance team, which is why these questions came up every year. And though George generally got the budget approved in the end, there was a lot of time wasted convincing new decision-makers that course creation required different people with specific expertise.

Much has been written about the “curse of knowledge” or the “expert blind spot” which describes how, as expertise develops, we move through various stages ending in a somewhat “risky” state of “unconscious competence.” It’s risky because as expertise develops, we become less aware of what we know and don’t know and this can negatively impact interactions with others on the more novice end of the spectrum. For example, the expert blind spot can cause leaders to overestimate what their employees already know and underestimate the learning curve novices face. This happens because it all seems so obvious to the expert.

This blind spot isn’t the only pitfall associated with expertise. Another is the potential for novice team members to not acknowledge or respect the expertise of other more experienced employees. This mindset can lead to bad decision-making, low productivity, and poor team dynamics.

What leads to this lack of respect for expertise? There are three (connected) factors:

Experts make things look easy

The more we see someone do something that looks easy, the more we convince ourselves that we can do those things just as well. Take, for example, “instructional” videos like those on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. Watching someone effortlessly paint a watercolor flower, or fluidly play a guitar solo, can lead us to believe it would be just as easy for us to do it—with no real training or practice.

Novices Are not Good at Judging Their Own Competence

A novice Excel user, for example, is unlikely to know where on the continuum of Excel expertise they fall, because they don’t know what true expertise looks like. As a result, they may fail to recognize their lack of skill and judge their basic ability to perform simple Excel functions, for example, as representing a more sophisticated skill level than it actually does. The flipside of this coin is novices are also often bad at recognizing the genuine skill and competence levels of other people.

A Little Knowledge Can Be Dangerous

Some amount of knowledge can lead people to believe that they have mastered all there is to know. For example, Ellie said new members of the sales team would completely disregard the senior product manager’s evidence-based protocols and practices for having sales conversations, stating “how hard could it be to talk to a customer?” On the other hand, it is less common for a new salesperson to question a Python programmer about whether or not they’ve got the most succinct code, because programming knowledge is not part of the salesperson’s world.

Putting these three things together helps us understand the gap between perception and reality that can lead to disruptive behaviors within an organization.

To address the challenge of disrespect for expertise within a team, leaders like Ellie and George must adopt a proactive and educational approach aimed at reshaping understanding of expertise.

Here are some strategies that can help:

Demystify the learning process

Unpack how the mind works and how expertise is developed. In my work as a learning design consultant, I devote a lot of time to helping people understand conditions necessary for expertise to develop. Why? Because without it, it’s easy to think that mastery is effortless success. And if we follow that logic, that it’s easy for others to quickly develop that same expertise. Some leaders have gone as far as allocating professional development time and money for team training in how expertise develops, while others build in opportunities to discuss these ideas in meetings, or one-on-one discussions.

Provide continuous learning opportunities

If you give employees a “one off” training experience, you are sending a signal that you expect them to have learned what you want them to learn in one fell swoop. Investing in ongoing training conveys that developing skills takes time and also helps employees keep up with trends, and foster a growth mindset. And as your employees keep learning, they will start to realize there is so much more to being a great salesperson than they first thought.

Adopt objective performance metrics

Quantifiable metrics such as sales targets, new customer conversions, or client retention rates, allow people to compare their performance with peers and can counteract overestimation of ability. It’s a little harder to justify your oversize confidence if you see a more expert team member is achieving greater sales numbers than you are. Faced with this reality, novices may realize they have room to learn and grow after all.

Foster a strengths-based culture

Regularly and publicly acknowledge peoples’ skills and expertise and help all team members recognize their own strengths. When employees understand where organizational strengths (and limitations) lie, they can use that knowledge to better plan and accomplish their work. Help newer employees know to whom they can (and should) go to for guidance and advice. For example, “If you want to learn more about how to turn a no into a yes on your next sales call, you really need to talk to Simon. He has some great ideas, some unique strategies, and tons of experience in this area. He’s one of our top salespeople.”

Be careful about reinventing the wheel

Be open to new ideas and perspectives, but not at the expense of well-established knowledge. A diverse team with fresh perspectives can certainly spark innovation, but make sure that a new proposal doesn’t ignore a prior well-informed decision and end up wasting a lot of time only to eventually arrive at the same place.

Acknowledging, respecting, and leveraging collective expertise is key to organizational innovation, productivity, and success. Without it, leaders may find themselves and their team wasting time and resources addressing unproductive and disruptive dynamics. The strategies I presented above can help leaders curb, or prevent, the dismissal of expertise and also enrich your company’s intellectual ecosystem. At the end of the day an appreciation of expertise requires people to be self-aware of where they are on their own learning journey, motivated to practice and gain experience, as well as learn and benefit from the wisdom of others.