Keep up! The evolving value of a leader.

This will come as no surprise to those who have worked for me, but at times I had very little idea what my teams were doing from one moment to the next.

Back when I first started managing, leaders were expected to know every technical detail, to be the ultimate expert who could fix any problem - and be great at people management too. 

Today, that picture has changed. Your team members likely possess deeper, more specialised technical knowledge than you in their specific areas. And here's the powerful truth: this isn't a weakness; it's your greatest strength. It means your value as a leader has evolved, giving you a greater impact and influence. How you wield this value is critical. 

You do not know everything

Modern work environments are built on deep specialisation, whether it’s in a practical, people or knowledge-based sphere. The theory goes that when tasks are divided and people focus on what they do best, the entire organisation becomes more efficient.

Structured well, in multi-disciplinary problem-solving groups, teams are formed precisely to harness this distributed expertise. The essence of a great multi-disciplinary team is to create incredibly deep collective knowledge, shifting from individual heroes to collaborative strength. Collaboration forms new links and innovative approaches. Or rather, it can - this is where you come in.

As a leader, you can’t hope to rival the collective expertise of your team across all those disciplines. Nor should you. Focusing too much on deep technical knowledge can create a mindset where everyone feels they have to see the problem through your, inevitably narrow, lens. Diversity of thought suffers. The benefits of having all those different experts in the room disappear. 

This is why it’s so important that you let go of the notion that you know more, or know better, than your team. I’d go so far as to recommend that you let go of any hope of even knowing what they are all up to. 

Your place in the value chain

To help illustrate this, let’s use the concept of a value chain. Think about how your organisation creates value at different points on a journey from an idea to its implementation. When something new and valuable is added at each step of the journey, the end result is that you’ve gone further than you ever could alone. 

Each link on a value chain can be put into three broad categories:

• The tasks: the ‘doing’ part of the chain where the activities that deliver your end product take place.

• The support: all those essential activities that make sure the tasks can get done, from research and development to HR to operational or project management. 

• The third category is the most relevant to you. It’s the flow of knowledge. You are the one who makes sure this flow keeps moving and that all its swirling currents get directed to the right place. 

  
  

This isn’t easy, by the way. Try watching a river flowing past and imagine trying to control it. Fortunately, there are ways your seemingly impossible task can be broken down into smaller, manageable steps. 

The culture of knowledge

Knowledge activities include deeply skilled things like identifying what information is important, getting it to the right place, adding insight and analysis, and making sure that nothing crucial has been missed. You might be the person making sure that the team has thought about long-term global trends, or gathered all the essential information from product users. 

In a knowledge-based world, you think strategically about how to organise and leverage the information you control and the insight you bring. How your organisation manages this ‘knowledge capital’ is a big signal for how efficient and successful it is going to be. How you manage it will likely determine the success or failure of your team. 

Let’s deep dive into what this means (I use the phrase ‘deep dive’ metaphorically - please do not dive into any flowing rivers). 

You’ll know that modern leadership theories emphasise approaches that empower teams and foster environments where mastery can thrive alongside collaboration. Sure, you can write SOPs or processes that tell people what to say to whom and when, but a better approach is to use your leadership to create a culture of authenticity, curiosity, diversity and innovation.

You are not perfect

Repeat after me: leadership is not about being perfect, or right all the time, or the hero who saves the day.

Be real, honest and consistent. Listen to others, continue learning, think hard about the purpose of what you and your team are doing, and always act ethically. Create a culture of authenticity, curiosity, diversity and innovation.

I am a big fan of self-reflection so I recommend that you spend a bit of time reflecting on your leadership style and actions. You can use the questions below to guide this reflection, or to structure a discussion with your team. This is all context-specific so there is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ score to give, only a baseline to grow from.

Score each question on a scale from 0 (not at all) to 10 (always or completely). 

Authenticity

1. Are you clear and transparent about your values and beliefs? 

2. Do you set out a clear vision and direction for your team’s work?

3. How often does your team tell you about small obstacles to their work before they become major?

Curiosity

4. Do you challenge assumptions (especially the ‘we’ve always done it this way’ one)?

5.  Do you admit when you don’t know something?

6. How often do you talk to your team about the value of innovation and creativity?

Diversity

7. Do you make decisions that someone in your team is better placed to make?

8. Does your team see growth and learning as a core part of their job?

9. Do you see growth and learning as a core part of your job?

Ethics

10. Do you consistently act in line with your values and beliefs?

11. Can you point to any data that forms the evidence for your scores?

The inevitable mention of AI

If you are anything like me, you can’t keep up with AI. I suspect that its rapid pace of development is such that individual leaders will never be able to compete with collective knowledge. What to do? Well, you and your colleagues around the leadership table could start by agreeing a structured and strategic risk framework for the use of AI, and then let your teams get on with it (within legal, ethical and financial guardrails). 

Adapting to AI, or any rapid and seismic contextual shift, requires organisational agility and continuous learning. At a leadership level, you cannot possess all the technical answers or move at the required speed, but you can create the conditions and the culture for your teams to learn, experiment and integrate new solutions to changing environments.  

Practical actions for the modern leader

Once you accept that your teams will be doing things you do not understand, you can shift your focus to creating the best flow of knowledge for collective expertise to achieve your strategic goals.

Here are practical ways you can do this:

• Set and explain the strategic direction: Paint the big picture and set the vision and roadmap for projects, ensuring they align with your organisation’s overall goals. Make sure you understand each project's place within the larger organisational strategy and that someone is checking for dependencies and resource conflicts. Gather the data you need to consider the long-term implications of decisions and how your organisation can best exploit them. 

• Take the tough decisions on resource allocation: Ask your teams what resources, tools and capabilities they need to perform their best work, and (with your fellow leaders) prioritise. If you can’t resource everything your organisation wants to do, don’t do it all at the same time. Remember that there may be tools out there that can improve efficiency and allow your teams to achieve things that were impossible in your day. I am a huge fan of automating workflows, for example, to free specialists up for more in-depth work.

• Communicate to collaborate: If I hear the phrase ‘break down silos’ one more time… Regrettably, the reason I hear it so much is because it rarely actually happens. Start at the top: talk to your colleagues and be transparent about your team’s work, its successes and its failures. Use meetings that add value rather than take up time. Encourage your teams to share everything with the whole organisation, from idea to implementation. Bring different groups together to share ideas and solve issues. 

• Learn about obstacles: Make time to discuss even the smallest-sounding issues or obstacles, then do something to remove them. If they are too big to remove, start the conversation about what that means for the project.

• Grow knowledge: There are so many aspects to this it is hard to know where to start. Give your teams permission to spend time learning new skills or going deep into existing ones. Listen to their concerns. Give regular, specific and constructive feedback. Be explicit about psychological safety when things go wrong, and take responsibility for your own mistakes. 

  
  

Accept that you do not always know what your teams are doing

This is a strength, not a weakness. Your place on the value chain is not in the detail of the tasks but in the knowledge flow. From setting the culture to creating time and space for sharing learning, as a leader you make a critical contribution to a dynamic landscape. You simply need to accept that you are not the only one contributing to it, and respect the expertise of everyone in your team who knows more about something than you do.