How to Earn Credibility and Trust When You Are The Least Qualified Person In The Room

One of the most counterintuitive lessons I’ve learned from leading special projects in a global organization is the need to be comfortable being the least qualified person in the room.

It can be an anxiety inducing thought to consider.

But it is a necessary one — as it is a situation that leaders find themselves in time and time again, particularly those leading projects that involve numerous stakeholders and subject matter experts who have spent years developing their specific expertise and craft.

I was fortunate enough to have to face this ‘least qualified’ milestone early on in my career.

The Challenge:

An organization-wide central business application for mobile had been causing headaches and pain for a number of different teams that were involved in its rollout.

Things were at somewhat of an impasse — but this was to be no deterrence for my youthful exuberance — and to my surprise, after volunteering, I was given responsibility for the delivery and execution of what had long been considered an unenviable task.

It is worth clarifying a number of important facts at this point:

I was not (and am not) a technologist.

I was not (and still am not) a mobile security expert.

I had never, before this project, gone through our organization’s entire application approval process.

These 3 conclusions left me needing to find the answer for what was, at the time, an intimidatingly clear cut question:

How do you drive execution and results when you don’t have enough of an understanding of the topic at hand?

The following were the 4 most important lessons I learned from my somewhat improbable role leading a group of subject matter experts early on in my career:

1. The first step in building credibility is to understand the context that you’re operating in.

An established baseline of work had been previously undertaken on this project.

This gave me a perspective on who had been consulted, what worked and what didn’t work so far.

I had the opportunity to learn from those who tried before me, and I was able to utilize this data to make sure I adopted a different, untried approach — with the benefit of hindsight.

Taking stock at the start of the project to assess these varying factors — while timely — really stood to me in the long run.

2. When not an expert, it’s important to identify your knowledge gaps.

Next, I knew that while I would not reach a level of expertise in the timeframe available to me, I had to get smarter about the problem itself.

A previous mentor once told me to get deep into the weeds of a problem and understand all its components, before then elevating the view to arrive at a higher-level solution.

He had said it was the way he — and in turn how he felt I — would best understand things.

It took some years for me to understand what he meant, but his advice seemed tailor made (or rather a necessity) for this particular situation.

So I rolled up my sleeves, and got to work understanding every single facet of the problem I had been assigned.

For the next week I studied information security, talking to any expert who would take my call, and researching my organization’s approval processes.

By the end of the week I knew enough to be dangerous, to ask the right questions, and to know when to bring in a subject matter expert.

More importantly, developing this foundational knowledge base helped give me credibility when facilitating proposed solutions from experts with a much deeper domain of expertise than I had.

3. Leadership is about showing vulnerability.

At this point I had a pretty decent understanding of the complexity of the problem at hand, but I was still overwhelmed by the amount of unanswered questions I had.

My research had shown me all that I didn’t know yet, and overwhelm was a real and potential challenge.

I had to be humble enough to have the courage to ask the seemingly “basic” questions — so I surrounded myself with experts, didn’t shy away from asking any questions for my own clarity, and steered the conversations so that the experts themselves were troubleshooting the hurdles we were facing.

4. Leadership is about facilitating the best outcome, not ego: align teams to a common vision above all else.

These conversations were a turning point for the project.

They went a long way in helping me understand the subject matter, and my willingness to show vulnerability made the experts feel less threatened by my agenda and showed I was here to facilitate their expertise as opposed to imposing my will over them.

Critically, I made sure to position the experts as those bringing the solution to our senior stakeholders — which drove both buy-in and credibility of our proposed outcome.

With support from the various departments building, and with subject matter experts feeling real ownership of our developing solution — things started to move more seamlessly and, without going into too much detail, I can proudly say that we eventually reached consensus.

Conclusion:

This was a massive learning experience for me.

The reality of the matter is that, as a leader, you will often find yourself in situations where you are not the subject matter expert and yet you will still be required to drive results, influence others, and get things done.

With the need to understand and solve technical challenges that have real-life business impacts becoming more and more prevalent, this skill set is going to be more important than ever for leaders going forward, particularly with the technical knowledge required to enable actionable insights from often disparate data sources.

But by understanding the context of your problem, getting deep into the weeds of the challenge at hand, being humble enough to ask the simple questions, and by speaking through other leaders to convey your message, you will find that you’ll have the skills necessary to quickly earn credibility and trust as a leader.

As a leader, how do you handle being the least qualified person in the room?