Investing in Expertise

I’ve mentioned barely graduating high school several times to this point. I also shared that neither Cindy or I had graduated college when we started our leadership journey (and still haven’t). While my less than stellar performance in high school was more a factor of me being bored, our lack of college degrees - at least early on - was tied to finances. Neither of us had the finances to be full time students; we didn’t have interest in taking on the amount of debt that would have piled up and had both been working since our early teens. When we built a home and paid for a wedding within a short period of time, we found ourselves stretched far too thin for even an occasional class. That said, we were still very intentional about investing into seeking and developing the expertise we’d need in order to be successful in each role we held as well as the future roles we were working toward.

Acknowledging your limits isn’t that difficult when they’re hitting you in the face, and mine definitely were as soon as I moved into that first position where I was expected to get people to change how they did their jobs but had no positional authority backing me. Identifying the key experts I would need to learn from and being willing to ask the right questions made an impact right away. But even those most willing to share their wisdom wouldn’t have continued had I not been willing to invest in the process. While our finances were tight back then, we were able to invest a tremendous amount of time into seeking out knowledge from those experts and we invested significant energy into applying everything they taught us - which we’ll circle back to soon.

Earlier, I shared how I audited Terry’s session on “The ABCs of Behavioral Analysis” weekly for close to two years. That only scratches the surface of the time investment I made into studying the folks I realized that I’d need to learn from, many of whom began mentoring me directly through the process. While doing all I could to be around these experts in person, Cindy and I were working through every book and audio lesson we could afford to buy or that we could convince someone to loan us. All that helped us build a foundation so the questions we did ask were more specific to our situations rather than being something general or something we could get from a few clicks on Google today.

Even then, had I only been a face in the crowd, rather than deliberately nurturing relationships with each expert I studied, I doubt I would have gotten much (if any) of their attention. And if I would have asked the same questions time and time again with no results to show for it, any attention I did receive would have been short lived. For more than a decade, we’ve challenged every group we’ve trained, spoken with, or coached to identify at least one specific action step they could apply from what we shared. More than anything else, the energy we’ve invested into applying what we’ve learned from the experts we’ve had access to has helped us leverage leadership growth and build great professional relationships. Before we work through the importance of application in more detail, I’ll challenge you to identify (and schedule) a time where you can invest in learning from someone who has knowledge that you don’t.