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If y'all're a manager in a knowledge-driven industry, chances are you're an practiced in the area you manage. Try to imagine a leader without this expertise doing your chore. You'll probably conclude information technology couldn't be done. But every bit your career advances, at some point you will be promoted into a job which includes responsibility for areas outside your specialty. Your subordinates will inquire questions that you cannot answer and may non even understand. How tin can yous lead them when they know a lot more nearly their piece of work than you do? Welcome to reality: Y'all are at present the leader without expertise—and this is where you, possibly for the get-go fourth dimension in your career, find yourself failing. You feel frustrated, tired and disoriented, fifty-fifty angry. This is the point where careers can derail. If you lot go to this indicate, or run across yourself headed in this direction, what tin can you do?

First, you demand to resist your natural inclination, which is to put your caput downwards and piece of work harder to main the state of affairs. Leaders who come up an expertise track almost e'er derail here because they react to the challenge by relying on their core strengths: high intelligence and the chapters for hard work. They frame the challenge this fashion: "I need to principal this subject. Okay, no problem, I'm smart. I can acquire." And so they buckle downward, and dive into the mastering the details and so they can be an expert once more. This is the road to disaster.

It is a disaster considering if it took x or twenty years to master your specialty you are not going to accomplish a similar mastery in a new domain in the first 90 days—and 90 days may be all you lot have before you accept to show results. Your staff, who know a lot more than about their domain than you do, won't respect you, your lack of conviction in the details will show when you talk to top management, and your attempt to piece of work twice equally difficult as you lot already are will vesture you down.

So what should you exercise instead? To succeed in this situation, you must larn and do a new leadership style. Your old style of management, which I telephone call "specialist management", depended on expertise. You lot need to put that behind you and adopt a new style of management: the generalist style. Based on my work with leaders who have successfully made the transition, here are the four key skills to develop and practice:

one) Focus on relationships, non facts
One of the profound differences betwixt the two managerial styles is that the specialist leader focuses on facts, whereas the generalist leader focuses on relationships. A specialist director knows what to do; the generalist manager knows who to call. The specialist leader tells her staff the answer, the generalist brings them together to collectively find the answer.

How to focus on relationships: The unmarried all-time tip for building relationships is to recall about how yous build relationships with clients and apply those aforementioned skills to colleagues. Spend a lot of time, confront to face, getting to know people every bit individuals. In the generalist style you are constantly adapting your approach to the individual and the situation and that means knowing people very, very well. Flying overseas only to have dinner with an of import colleague is not a waste material of time—any more than it would be a waste of time to do then for a key client.

2) Add value by enabling things to happen, not past doing the work
As the expert leader information technology was like shooting fish in a barrel to come across your contribution: you were making decisions based on your unique cognition. Every bit a generalist you cannot do the work straight, but yous can enable things to happen. A big part of enabling things to happen when you are not the skilful involves knowing when to leave things alone and when to intervene. This isn't easy considering you have a wide array of responsibilities and y'all need to exist able to tell at a glance where trouble lurks.

How to know where to intervene: How practice you know where trouble lurks? 1 useful tactic is to sit in on a meeting betwixt a direct report and his subordinates. If the conversation is two-way, that's a good sign. If the manager does all the talking and the subordinates are passive, that'southward a bad sign and you demand to dig more securely. Notice that you don't need any expertise on the subject they are discussing; yous just demand to decide if the conversation is good for you.

Another tactic is to become feedback from your network—a network which exists because in the generalist style you focus on relationships. If your network says one of your teams isn't delivering, just the squad leader insists everything is on track, and then y'all know there is a trouble. Detect that if both the team leader and your network agree things are on track then you probably don't need to arbitrate—the squad leader will inquire for your help if she needs it.

iii) Exercise seeing the bigger picture, not mastering the details
As a generalist leader much of your value comes from your ability to see the big motion picture better than others effectually y'all. Y'all might think of the specialist leader as heads-downward, deep in concentration, plotting a detailed form on a map, while the generalist is heads-upward, looking around and noticing what is going on.

How to develop a generalist perspective: A useful tactic from consultant Rob Kaiser is to accept the problem you are focusing on and see how it is affecting the people 2 levels below you. And then call up how the problem is affecting people two levels above you. It's a uncomplicated tactic to describe, but it really challenges you to think deeply, and you lot can develop a perspective that volition brand a real departure to the organization. Having a perspective that makes a deviation is the value generalist leaders bring to the organization and one that may exist noticeably absent in heads-down specialist leaders.

4) Rely on "executive presence" to projection confidence, non on having all the facts or answers
When yous make a presentation in your area of expertise you are confident in the facts and the facts speak for themselves. Only what is information technology that "speaks" when the facts can't do it for themselves? Where does the confidence come from when you lot are outside your expanse of expertise? Every bit a generalist you must draw on that elusive quality of "executive presence" to inspire confidence in others.

How to develop executive presence: Executive presence isn't a mystery whatever more than project planning is; it is a skill y'all develop. The most useful affair you lot tin can exercise is pay attending to presence. When someone who has presence walks into a coming together discover how they wearing apparel, how they speak, how they stand—these are not personality traits, they are skills. Watch some videos of world leaders on the World Economical Forum website. The specialist manager in you volition desire to pay attention to what they are saying, but the generalist should want to see how they are creating executive presence. Notice the relaxed body opinion, the calmness in their vocalism, how their sentences are crisp and to the point. Notice how they connect to the audience through sincere emotion. Detect the behaviors, practice them, and get feedback—that'south the path to executive presence.

The transition to generalist management can bespeak the end for successful specialist managers. But if you realize that yous no longer have to be, or even should be, the expert, this can be the most fulfilling and satisfying moment in your career. Your role as a leader is to bring out the all-time in others, even when they know more than you. The adept news is that the tactics described above have helped many leaders beyond this treacherous gap, and they can work for you too.