Knowing Who Knows What You Don’t: Acknowledging Your Limits

So much of what we do to leverage our leadership growth relies on building great professional relationships. Each facet we’ve worked through to this point plays a key role but to build on even the strongest qualifications, we’ll need to lean into all the humility we can muster by acknowledging our limits. We’ll need to focus on identifying exactly who knows what we don’t, and we’ll need to be very intentional to connect with them to limit our liabilities.

Earlier as we looked at why so many folks in leadership roles work to avoid feedback, I referenced the discomfort that comes with owning up to a weakness. It’s one thing to consider how that applies to leaders we’ve observed; it’s a far taller order to come to terms with our own weaknesses. Before we’ll be able to successfully identify the people to best support us, we absolutely must admit to our own limitations. I often joke that when I met Cindy, I was not an alcoholic; they go to meetings. I had never been to one of those meetings, therefore I was only a drunk. Had you asked me if that created any problems for me at that stage in my life, I would have answered emphatically that it most certainly did not. I had no problem whatsoever with drinking. In fact, I was quite good at it.

Just like drinking had the potential to limit the growth of personal relationships, especially in the quantities I did before Cindy and I met, I had to begrudgingly admit to more than a few limitations that were holding me back professionally. Before digging into those, though, I’ll share that with the exception of one Friday afternoon while spreading litter in the boss’s poultry houses, I never drank on the job. I also never remember missing work because of it, and I was almost always just hung over by the time my shift started.

I’ve repeatedly mentioned my extremely fast-paced and task-oriented behavioral style, and how I viewed that more as a survival mechanism early on. I’ve always been incredibly competitive in everything I’ve done, despite having very little natural talent. Keep in mind, I’ve held a full time job since my early teens so my lack of talent was more of an annoyance when it came to sports; I didn’t dedicate enough time to any particular sport for it to ever get me down. And while I could push myself hard enough to keep pace in most jobs that required physical effort, it didn’t take long in that first role off the manufacturing floor to realize brute force wouldn’t yield the same results with other people as I had learned to achieve when I was running a press or working on a construction crew. Recognizing, then admitting our limits is the first step we can take toward anything that remotely resembles effective leadership.

Once I realized that there were indeed roadblocks that I’d never be able to navigate by attempting to outwork the problem, I had to apply everything I knew about determination and work ethic into learning how to overcome them. I soon learned that I’d need to identify the key experts I could study in each of those areas. Before looking at that in more detail, I’ll challenge you to list at least three areas where you lack expertise. We can’t address a knowledge gap that we’re not willing to admit to! If I’m being completely honest, I can point to far more of my own limits now than I could have (or would have) thirty years ago.

Identifying Key Experts

Earlier as we looked at maximizing the return on investment in relationships, I stressed the importance of choosing them wisely and nurturing those relationships to ensure everyone involved had ample opportunity for growth. While identifying the key experts we’ll need in our lives in order to compensate for the limits we recognize in ourselves will certainly involve folks we interact with directly, we won’t have the luxury of doing so only with those who will block time for us any time we reach out; definitely not when we start out and maybe not ever.

I was certainly blessed to work directly with some great mentors, and still have the opportunity to learn from a bunch of amazing leaders today. If not for Terry, Rod, Kevin, Chris, and so many others who are willing to respond to text messages and answer my calls, I’d hate to think about how different my life would be - and I’m sure any impact I could make on others would be drastically reduced. But if I would have relied solely on experts I could reach out to directly, even mentorship from these men (and so many others) would have hit a ceiling. Not only did they each have heavy demands on their time, keeping any one of them from being by my side continuously, much of what I needed to know was already available to me - even before I had 24/7 access to resources like Google or AI. I just had to learn how to find the resources other experts had made available.

I often share how Cindy and I gave up going to concerts (and nearly any other type of leisure activity) for more than the first decade we were married. Neither of us had graduated college, which was another limit we each had to acknowledge whether we liked it or not, and our discretionary income was limited. Honestly, it was almost nonexistent! Although I frequently talk about the discipline we developed to study any resource we could get our hands on that would help us learn more about communicating effectively or earning influence with our coworkers, I rarely go into the specifics of how we did that. For the first several years of our marriage, I drove the 1994 Dodge Dakota pickup that I bought just before I graduated from high school. It had a ton of miles and I won’t pretend that I had followed even modest routine maintenance suggestions. One of the many issues I never bothered to address was the broken air conditioner. No big deal, though, because I didn’t have to worry about the power window controls failing; the crank always worked. When it came to hearing the radio, I just turned up the volume. That said, the CD player was also broken. As we dug into any audio lesson we could find, I was limited to listening to cassette tapes from a Walkman-size player with an external speaker that devoured AA batteries. Also not a big deal in cooler weather, but summertime meant holding it up to my ear with one hand and steering with the other since it wasn’t loud enough to hear with the windows rolled down. And still not a big deal until I had to change gears… 

Enough whining, you get the point. Through all that, I listened to hundreds of audio books and thousands of other lessons from experts I never would have had access to any other way. Not only did that allow me to gain insight from sources I had no other way of connecting with back then, it provided me with a foundation for getting even more value from the time I had with the folks who were mentoring me directly. Although I didn’t have to search for those resources on microfiche, it was still a bit more challenging to find all that I needed back then than it is today; praise God for search engines like Google and all we can find in just a few clicks on YouTube! 

The moral of the story is that pinpointing experts who can help us overcome (or at least compensate for) our limits accelerates our personal and professional growth. And when we put what we learn into practice, the teams we’re part of will grow too. As we use the resources we have access to where we are, we’ll have the opportunity to start building a knowledge network. Before we look at how, I’ll challenge you to identify at least one expert you can consult on a gap you’ve identified. Remember, this doesn’t have to be a conversation you have in person…

Building a Knowledge Network

As I transitioned from being a mediocre carpenter and operating a stamping pressing in a manufacturing facility to my first role with responsibility for getting results through people who had no reason to listen to me, there was no other option than to acknowledge my limits and begin identifying the key experts I’d need to study to have even the slightest chance of achieving the results necessary to remain employed. Prior to that, my work ethic had been the main thing that carried me - but I quickly found the ceiling for relying on work ethic alone.

I’ve referenced Terry, Rod, and Kevin so many times here that you’re either tired of hearing about them or you feel like you know them, so I won’t do that again here. But each of them have absolutely provided remarkable expertise around the many limitations I had to navigate. Aside from them, though, every other expert I studied early on was through the pages of a book, a lesson on a cassette tape, or any type of leadership seminar we could get to.

As Cindy and I devoured every resource we could get our hands on, we did everything we possibly could to apply what we were learning in our respective roles; our jobs depended on it. Over time, our results opened new doors - to new job opportunities and to even more key experts to learn from. But as we grew in our roles, we were able to interact with more and more of those experts in person; in large groups at first, and one-on-one over time. 

I can’t remember any specific earth shattering moment; building our knowledge network was very gradual. I can point to several interactions that stand out, times that felt almost surreal because we were face to face with the people who had written the books we’d been reading or seen speaking from stage in front of thousands of people. I’ve already mentioned the first interaction I had with Mark Cole. Not long after that, we had the chance to interview Daniel Pink. Then in March 2020, we found ourselves meeting with Carly Fiorina.

Had I never been willing to acknowledge my limits and identify the people I could study so I could improve on or even eliminate those limits - in person or from a distance - the outstanding knowledge network I’m blessed with today would have never grown to what it is, if it would have ever been in place at all. But even the best network of professional and leadership resources offers little value unless we’re asking the right questions. We’ll look at that next. First though, I’ll challenge you to identify and reach out to one expert you’ve never interacted with personally before.