When should you defer to others? Who is the expert here?
A couple of my clients are struggling with situations where they are experts in their domain, but also want to stay humble and open to other perspectives. When people tell them things that don’t make sense, they hold an open mind and stay curious about what they might be missing.
The problem is they are often deferring to people who don’t actually know what they’re talking about – this is the phenomenon that Paul Graham discussed in his “founder mode” essay where founders were deferring to executives who didn’t understand their particular business, or investors and board members who had money but not expertise.
Ray Dalio shared the concept of believability to decide whether you should listen to somebody. His criteria were:
1) Has the person repeatedly and successfully achieved the thing in question?
2) Can they explain how their actions led to those results? If they can’t explain the cause-effect relationship, they were likely just lucky.
What is interesting about 2) is that it underscores the importance of communication in developing credibility. There are lots of underappreciated experts in the world who believe that “if I do good work, that’s enough”, expecting that other people will find their way to their expertise.
But people can’t find them, because other less knowledgeable people are taking the spotlight. These self-proclaimed experts get more attention because they are visible thanks to constantly sharing how great they are. You can’t find the real experts through the noise.
If you are feeling underappreciated and resentful of the overrated people who are getting that attention, start communicating your expertise clearly and concisely. Develop your story so you become believable as an expert.
Privilege check: A friend pointed out that it’s easier for me to say this as a white-passing man than it would be for a woman or person of color who might get punished for their audacity to speak up on their own behalf due to prejudice. Those who are biased (both consciously and unconsciously) may expect women to stay quiet and submissive, or others to “know their place”. I do think it’s worth the experiment of speaking up once to test whether the people at the organization are biased in that way, but, absolutely, don’t keep doing it if it is leading to bad results, and instead, look for another organization that will value your expertise.