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“Who am I to tell them how to make decisions?”
This anxiety-induced thought played like a broken record in my head as my first leadership training event approached in my new role as a training director. Talking in front of 40 leaders, most of whom were older than my ripe old age of 30 at the time, felt like the perfect opportunity for them to see right through my lack of expertise and expose me as the fraud I was.
Years ago, while working at a regional bank, I was promoted from trainer to leading a training team in another department. My prior roles as a sales trainer and human resources consultant allowed me to build a company-wide reputation as an expert on complicated sales processes and navigating employee benefits and hiring processes.
This new role pushed me out of the payment division into the retail branch banking side. In other words, it was way out of my comfort zone. And at this first training event, I could no longer rely on my expertise to help me feel safe, trusted, or relevant.
The Sky Parted
That first event was tough. Afterward, I admitted to my manager, “Who am I to tell them what to do? I’ve been a manager for about five minutes, and most of these leaders have been managers for 15 years.”
The question she posed to me next transformed my relationship with expertise for a lifetime. She asked, “What if your job is not to be the expert up there, but to facilitate the expertise in the room?”
It was like the sky parted and the sun emerged. Of course, that was the answer. Because I had been promoted throughout my career due to my level of expertise, it was natural for me to assume that in my new role, expertise was the only way I could add value.
Instead of being the expert, I had to rebrand myself as a leader who could facilitate, promote, and grow the expertise around her, whether it be in a training room, on my team, or even now leading my own coaching and speaking practice. Managers looking to break their identity as the expert and the go-to can benefit from undertaking a similar rebranding campaign.
People will likely continue to reach out to you, hoping for you to provide quick answers or jump in to help them fix an issue the way you used to. But it’s critical that you teach others how to see and use you in a new way so that you can advance to more strategic levels of leadership. This is easier said than done. After all, people have grown accustomed to your old ways of working.
Here are some common situations that can keep your stuck in the expert identity trap and some strategies to consider to avoid it.
THE GUILT TRAP
Moving into a new leadership role can sometimes unsettle colleagues accustomed to our old ways of working. They may (intentionally or not) attempt to elicit guilt, saying things like, “You used to do this for me” or “People are going to be upset about this change.”
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James' World 2 
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