How to Be Seen as a Knowledge Expert Instantly — Using the “Email Flood Technique”
Being perceived as a Knowledge Expert is a quick and efficient way to boost your technical career.
Companies often try to veer you into management by making you feel that your career is stagnate if you don’t move up.
The little known fact is that Knowledge Experts have a fun technical career and often times earn as much as their boss, with minimal people management.
As a software engineer who chose to stay on a technical track, I am going to show you how you can instantly position yourself as an expert and stop people telling you what to do using the Email Flood technique.
While most of the advice out there is all about how one must become a manager, I show you a path that keeps you on the creative, enjoyable side of development.
The Email Flood technique helps you stay focused on the technical parts of your job, and it is also a great way to automatically gain more recognition for you, regardless of where you are in your career.
The Email Flood technique is a simple way to:
- Be perceived as a Knowledge Expert
- Gain respect, rewards and authority
- Be excluded from intra-office political games
- Spend less than 10% of your time per week on non-technical duties
- Focus on what you enjoy: Be able to write code, with minimal people managing
- Advance your career, get more responsibility and have more impact
Let’s face it. Technical minded people enjoy doing work that really matters, not figuring out the self-promotional stuff.
Why coding your way to the top does not work?
Managers have a tendency to equate expert status to the visibility of the person.
Visibility means hearing about results and being in meetings / phone calls with an individual.
Visibility has very little to do with technical skills, and therefore technical minded people need a way to work around this.
I remember working at a place where some software engineers couldn’t write a single line of code, and recognition boiled down to “beating your own drums” (the exact term used by the company).
This is usually the point where technical people end up deciding for management positions, even though they may not even really want it.
The Email Flood technique for positioning yourself as a Knowledge Expert
The Email Flood technique takes care of expert status, and makes it unnecessary to move into management.
Below you find the most common techniques that I saw people using successfully.
All techniques described here come with email samples you can instantly use.
I encourage you to try the techniques and find out which works best for your situation.
Technique 1: Updates about your own status
Aim for sending out at least 3–5 status update emails per week.
You should do this even if you feel there is no real update.
You are always working on something, therefore your manager wants to know how things are going, even if you are stuck.
Send this email to your boss, and when appropriate, include your colleagues as well.
Example:
“Hi Manager, just a quick update that I am still on track with activity XY” — this need not to be long or elaborate.
“Hi Team, today I fixed an issue that broke feature XY. Use the latest version and you will have the feature enabled and working fine again” — this you can send to your boss and colleagues.
Technique 2: Updates about your team’s progress
Even if you are not the team lead / project manager, keep your manager updated about the team’s progress as well.
This shows that you are person with broad vision, and that you can keep an overview of how your activity fits into your team’s activity.
Make sure to always CC your whole team, and never make it look like that you single handedly made the delivery (some people do it and it really just backfires sooner or later).
Example:
“Hi Manager, thanks to the efforts of the team, product version XY is now released.”
Technique 3: Recognizing others’ achievements
Sometimes a team member has a major contribution to the project, but they are too humble to share this with others.
You can help them getting the recognition they deserve by making sure all relevant parties are notified. At the same time, it makes them feel good about you as a person.
Experts tend to recognize others’ achievement vs. talking about their own success all the time, therefore it is an authentic way to gain you expert status.
Example:
“Hey Team, I am impressed about the contribution of XY. Thank you XY for putting your hard work into this project”
Technique 4: Probing questions and suggestions about someone else’s ideas
When someone introduces a new feature or tool, share your opinion about it, or follow up with probing questions.
The idea is to get a conversation going, and show that you can help develop the idea further.
Probing questions can ensure that the ideas are feasible, as they should drive the conversation towards a more tangible, practical solution.
Example:
“I really like this idea. How do you think it will affect the overall CPU load?”
“Great suggestion. I think it fits very well our current framework.”
Technique 5: Recommending trainings or events
People who are experts in their field are continuously developing their skills.
From time to time, share an event or training related to the project or the profile of the company.
It is even better if your are somehow related to the event, like giving a workshop or having a presentation, but it is not necessary.
If you also attend the event, you can follow up with a short summary of what you have learned and how it can be useful for the project.
If it is a lot of information, follow up the event with a short meeting where you describe the lessons learned and the key takeaways from the event.
Example:
“I noticed there is a free half day workshop by Google in our city, who would like to join?”
“It was a great event and the key takeaways relevant to our projects are:
- Takeaway #1
- Takeaway #2
- Takeaway #3
“
Technique 6: Recommending relevant training material
Nowadays the internet is flooded by free training material.
The only problem is that there is so much material out there that it is hard to see which one is relevant.
If you take your time to complete a training course that you find useful, share it with your colleagues.
It can be as simple as sending a link to an article or video-course, with a short description of why you think it is worth their time to do this training.
Example:
”Guys, here is a link to an on-line course I completed last week. I found the following especially useful:
- Benefit #1
- Benefit #2
- Benefit #3
”
Time to position yourself as a Knowledge Expert
Now you have seen a handful of techniques that you can use to position yourself as a Knowledge Expert.
They might sound too easy or trivial to do, but they have an impact on your career in the long run.
Use the techniques described here and see which ones are most effective for your situation.
Share your success stories in the comment box below, I would love to hear if you found these techniques helpful!