The Challenge

Whilst experts are naturally the most informed people in their various areas of expertise, there is often considerable merit in their equipping others to exercise greater self-reliance and build their capabilities in doing so. This might include building the capabilities of others in their technical cohort from a risk-management or burden-sharing perspective. It might also include building the capabilities of other stakeholders outside of the technical cohort to be able to exercise greater self-reliance and be less dependent on the expert for every small request. Many experts report that they are often over-burdened by relatively low value requests that stakeholders might reasonably be expected to resolve for themselves – if properly equipped to do so.

Responding all day to lower-level requests often come at the expense of higher-order activities that would reflect a more effective use of their specialised talents. Being constantly dragged into responding to lower-order requests and making insufficient progress on higher-order (strategic) activities can be discouraging and can also result in those experts being seen as lower-level contributors. Equipping others to be more self-sufficient often results in less of a hold-up in moving things forward.

The challenge often is that the development of the skills to effectively engage others in taking greater ownership for learning the necessary skills – as well as ensuring that appropriate levels of skill are acquired – are skillsets that the experts themselves have not been trained to do effectively. With the best of intentions, they write training manuals that no one reads. Or they develop brown bag lunch sessions which few attend or describe as unengaging. Or they bombard people with complex content and wonder why little of it is assimilated and applied as a result.

This module conveys tools that assist experts in:

• Delegating – or negotiating the reasonable transfer of responsibility, authority, and knowhow with stakeholders

• Coaching skills – to assist others in exercising greater self-reliance, confidence, and capability (often informally) rather than accepting all the burden of responsibility themselves

Ask for a copy of our detailed curriculum with detailed descriptions of content and learning outcomes.