Overcoming Knowledge Gaps

I’ve mentioned over and over through this process that I’ve never felt like I was overly talented in any given area. Before I move on, I need to stress that I’m not sharing that - yet again - to diminish the value I know I’m capable of adding today; I need you to understand that every step we’ve worked through is applicable for you and you should expect at achieve results that are at least as good, assuming you’re willing to consistently apply the same level of work ethic. Even though I didn’t feel all that talented, my ego early on prevented me from acknowledging my limits. Once that was in check, asking the right questions and pouring myself into applying each of the insights I learned from so many experts fell right in line with that work ethic. But the further I progressed and the greater the opportunities we were faced with, the more I realized that I’d always be overcoming knowledge gaps.

While I’ve had to navigate knowledge gaps throughout my entire career (and life, for that matter), how I’ve gone about that has changed significantly since starting our business. Working for someone else, be that in a small family-owned business or in a large organization that operated globally, I had access to experts either within the company or on some sort of retainer who could provide most of the support I needed. As we started out, those resources weren’t always at our fingertips and often included a cost that we couldn’t afford.

During conversations with clients or potential partners, Cindy and I are frequently asked about the size of our team. That’s usually tied to the larger events we host locally, but we occasionally get that question when discussing books we’ve written, programs we’ve developed, our social media reach, or even the traffic across the 1,000+ pages on our website. For the first full decade we were in business for ourselves, that team was us: just me and Cindy. Some of that was a direct result of operating on a shoestring budget and constantly working to dig back out of the hole created when we were prohibited from doing the work that paid us for most of 2020 and nearly half of 2021, but I won’t pretend that my ego hasn’t stood in the way a bit too.

We don’t have any employees. Make no mistake, though, we have been blessed with support - some volunteers, some we’ve traded services with, and some we’ve paid when we could afford it. That said, Cindy and I have taken on tasks that neither of us ever imagined we could do. And while being willing to learn a diverse range of skills has served us well, developing enough competency to complete a task is a far cry from mastering that task. Regardless of where the necessary support would come from, I’ve struggled with asking for it - or even accepting it when experts have offered their support at no cost.

In our personal life, the biggest ah-ha moment I can point to is accepting the fact that while our yard must be mowed, there’s no law saying that I have to be in the mower seat. Allowing someone else (one of my best friends, who happened to be my roommate when Cindy and I met) to provide that service for us has helped me focus on the things only I can do. As our business has grown, and evolved, we’ve needed to apply the same approach to many of the tasks we’ve done ourselves over the years. What was good enough early on now requires a level of expertise that we’ll never be able to develop in the time we have available. Knowing who knows what we don’t has been essential in those areas.

Building a knowledge network has definitely helped us hone our own skills, but it’s also played a key role in helping us stay in our calling. We’ll touch more on the intentionality required to develop that kind of network later on as we work through a strategic framework for leveraging leadership growth. For now, just know that asking for and accepting the help we’ll each need to overcome our knowledge gaps requires humility and sustaining a learning mindset. Before we dig into what that learning mindset looks like, I’ll challenge you to identify one difficult task you could use help with - and ask an expert for that help.

Sustaining a Learning Mindset

It’s one thing to be humble enough to seek help in the areas we struggle with yet are required to produce great results - or at least stay in compliance - but practicing that same approach with the things we rarely deal with isn’t always as simple. We can’t overcome a knowledge gap we don’t know we have. We’ve all seen organizations become stagnant because they’re locked in on doing something the way they’ve always done it, and the world moves on without them. While that may at times be based on a mandate from an owner or executive attempting to protect a proprietary process they believe is best-in-class, all too often this happens because breaking that rhythm is hard. We’ve all heard the saying, “If we always do what we’ve always done, we’ll always get what we’ve always got.” Unfortunately, that’s just not true. Doing what we’ve always done often won’t even allow us to keep pace as our competition (and the rest of the world around us) progresses.

Sustaining a learning mindset allows us to not only ask the right questions around the weak spots we deal with daily, it provides us with the opportunity to recognize limits we may have never known we had otherwise. Don’t misunderstand me here: I’m not suggesting this will ever be easy. And it will rarely happen organically. But to ensure it’s part of our routine, we must build time for it into our schedules, define the behaviors we’ll need to practice, and commit to execution.

As we’ve looked at each aspect of how leveraging leadership growth gives us a chance at capitalizing on great professional relationships, I’ve shared repeatedly how blessed I am by the mentors in my life. While several of those have added value to me for decades, there have been some that only mentored me for short seasons. With several, the need - and our relationship around that need - was very specific to a particular issue or time frame, but some of those relationships were shorter because the mentor’s expertise had a ceiling; a ceiling they weren’t working to go beyond.

At every stage of our careers, Cindy and I have actively searched for the people who were ahead of us so we could learn from their experience. In many cases, that was specific to the field we were in at the time, but just as often we looked for people who had done things we had never considered. As we started our business, we added to our collective toolbox by working through several certification processes. Through all that, we met some amazing people, many of whom are still close friends today. Early on, we were often starstruck by a bunch of the folks we were developing friendships with. They were all extremely successful in their careers or businesses. That said, not all of them have sustained the learning mindset that got them to that point.

My vagueness here is very intentional. I love and respect each person who’s mentored me over the years, regardless of when that was or how long it lasted. With that in mind, and at the risk of conveying some arrogance, I’ll share that we’ve surpassed where many of those friends were when we met them, and even what they’re doing today; not because we’re better than them or smarter than them, but because we did something they didn’t. I’ve used some form of the word consistent around two dozen times to this point, none of which have been accidental. 

More than any other thing, Cindy and I have been incredibly consistent in how we’ve approached our personal and professional growth. That served us well in each job we held and it’s been the foundation for building our own business. That consistency applied to a continuous learning mindset has driven our leadership evolution more than we could have imagined. A key part of taking full advantage of what we learn, though, lies in sharing the wisdom we acquire so we still need to tie this look at knowing who knows what you don’t by working through steps we can each take in doing that. Before doing that, I’ll challenge you to commit to identifying and learning from one new expert at least quarterly (maybe even monthly). With all the resources we have available today, this should be as simple as you making the decision to do it.

Sharing Acquired Wisdom

As we closed our look at “The Strength of Humility,” earning “Influence Over Authority,” and the importance of “Knowing Our Worth,” I stressed the idea of creating a legacy that lives well beyond what we do individually. More than any other thing I’ve experienced, that’s how we can best leverage leadership growth. By acknowledging our limits and asking the right questions, we can indeed overcome our own knowledge gaps, but the real strength we develop through great professional relationships will shine as we become intentional about sharing the wisdom we acquire through a sustained learning mindset. Developing others serves as a path to leadership, and paying forward the expert insights we learn along the way builds our leadership legacy.

Today, Cindy and I have the privilege of coaching dozens of high-level managers, executives, and business owners. One of the most common issues we work through with them is succession planning; not just tied to when they inevitably retire, but how they (and their entire organization) can be prepared for any key contributor hitting the lottery - or being hit by a bus… Like developing or sustaining our own learning mindset, this never happens automatically. Training someone on anything, even when that’s an absolutely necessary part of the onboarding process for new team members, requires time from our schedule that few leaders have to spare. When sharing acquired wisdom is a lofty idea that’s nice to have rather than something that must happen to keep all of our plates spinning, it nearly always gets pushed aside for any number of more urgent things demanding our time.

Acknowledging our limits opens the door for identifying the experts we’ll need to learn from. Sharing the wisdom we acquire brings it full circle. But that won’t happen if we fail to master the art of responsiveness so we’ll cover that in detail next. Until then, I’ll leave with a challenge to teach just one colleague something you’ve learned. For good measure, pick a colleague you wouldn’t normally be required to provide training for. And do it to build a lasting legacy, not just because you have to.