Getty Images for Unsplash+
Before I stepped into this role, a Chief I respect shared a book and some advice. She told me, "You need to know a little about a lot." I nodded. It sounded right, and because she had more experience in the role I assumed she was correct. But looking back, I didn't really get it.
Everything I had built before that moment told me the opposite was true. For fifteen years, I ran a business where expertise was the entire game. Clients hired us because we knew things they didn't. The deeper we went, the more valuable we became. Specialization was, quite literally, the strategy.
So when she said that, I filed it away and kept going. It took being in the role for a little while to understand what she meant and to fully appreciate the astute knowledge bomb she dropped on me.
Every career has phases. In the early ones, expertise works. You learn, you get good then you get rewarded. People seek you out because of what you know and then trust, responsibility and money follow. So naturally, it's easy to conclude: more expertise equals more value. So you keep doing the thing that keeps working.
Until it doesn't.
I'm surrounded by people who have spent decades mastering their domains. Legal, finance, technology, operations, risk. People who know things I will never know at the level they know them. The instinct that I actively override everyday is the need to catch up. Old Jill would over prepare, become fluent enough to hold her own, prove she belonged in the room and most of all—avoid the embarrassment of not knowing something.
That instinct has now become the trap. All it does is rob you of the time you should be spending doing the actual job: surrendering expertise for observation. Every hour spent trying to become the expert is an hour spent competing with the allies you're meant to multiply.
We're here to ensure expertise moves. We are the connectors, aligners, prioritizers. We translate across domains so the SMEs can make progress together. That's a completely different kind of value. It’s less visible and less comfortable, especially for someone who used to know exactly what they brought to the table.
Expertise, when you're building it, is linear. You learn the thing, you apply the thing, you get better at the thing. In my world it was a design package that either got approved or not. We got clean feedback showing visible progress. It was seductive to feel yourself getting sharper.
This role doesn't work that way. The patterns here are between people, and people aren't blueprints. The CEO reads a situation differently than the CFO, the CFO differently than the CHRO, and all of them are different on a Tuesday after a hard board meeting than they are on a Friday afternoon. That observation never stops and the calibration never finishes. There's no approved package tied in a bow at the end.
That's the part my friend was warning me about—that the evidence of progress is so much quieter.
What I’m now realizing is that, that only works if you stop treating expertise as the product. The moment you're chasing depth in someone else's domain rather than helping the whole system move, you’re wasting everyone’s time including your own.
I used to know exactly what I was worth. That clarity was comforting and I miss it sometimes. But it was also the reason I had to leave. I knew the answer and that made the game a lot less fun. The new lessons are not easy, and the biggest lesson so far is that the discomfort of not being the expert is actually the job. It’s me sitting with that while staying useful anyway. Now, the part I really enjoy is watching the people in the room to carry what only they can carry.
So whenever I walk out of a meeting frustrated that I couldn't contribute more, I’ve started asking myself what I’m actually trying to contribute... momentum or proof?
Because those are very different jobs and only one of them is ours.
The expertise trap isn't that you got too good. It's that you stayed too attached to the version of yourself that got rewarded for it.
Affiliate Link Disclaimer: Some of the links in this email are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you.