When Your Team Knows More Than You Do

The counterintuitive thing I said that built trust with my team of technical experts

If you’ve been reading since Issue #1, you might remember a question I mentioned that spiraled in my head during my first management assignment: “If I’m not a technical expert in the room, how can I be of help to this team?” During that particular time, I had a lot of complicated feelings about this question and no answers. As you’ll read below, I eventually figured out an answer and it’s way simpler than I expected:

Your job as a manager isn’t being the technical expert.

That’s all. That’s the whole thing. It seems obvious, but I’ll explain why it was tough for me to figure out.

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When I transitioned into my first management assignment, I arrived to a team of engineers and techs whose experience in their technical domains was longer than I’d been an engineer…and longer than I’d been in engineering school before that. My first instinct (the wrong one, it turns out) was to work to close the knowledge gap. I started learning the details of every project within the team’s scope. I made a goal to get to a point where I could follow every conversation in every meeting. I was putting in the work but, without realizing it, I was chasing the wrong target. I was trying to rebuild credibility in a space that wasn’t mine to own anymore. While I was busy doing that, I was missing out what my team actually needed from me.

Fortunately, along the way I discovered that I had already set the right tone to lead this group of awesome, smart humans in my first week without even being conscious I did so. Months into that assignment one of the senior engineers on my team brought up a positive story in a 1:1. He told me that something I’d said very early on had made a real impact on how the team received me as their new manager. At the time, I tried (and failed) to remember what it was. Even after he told me I had zero memory of saying it. Those first weeks as a manager were a blur of learning, at speed, from every angle at the time. What I’d apparently told them was: