How to lead your technical experts brilliantly?
This is a Resource Center for people who lead teams of technical specialists: engineers, economists, data scientists, software developers, researchers, medical technicians, and other complex roles.
The Expertship Institute has coached leaders to run specialist teams since 2018. This resource center summarizes the top level of what we’ve learned helping leaders lead expert teams, and all the information in this primer is free to access.
Primers
What are enterprise skills, and why are they important for technical experts? This article provides you with a roadmap for developing your very technical experts to the next level of impact and influence.
What business skills do technical experts and individual contributors need to be effective? What business skills would be most useful for your deeply technical experts to acquire, and how can you help them do it?
How to use Expertship self-assessment to coach your technical team to develop their business skills? Use our free assessment tool to help you and your expert work out where they excel and where there is an opportunity for them to have more impact.
How can technical teams quickly master organizational commercials and strategy? Your best experts can’t innovate if they are stuck in their technical bubble. How can you rapidly help them understand, embrace, and act upon strategy and the commercial and funding realities in your organization?
How can technical specialists more effectively influence stakeholders? Do you have an expert who is technically brilliant, but just can’t influence non-technical people. Here’s why and here’s what you can do about it.
How do you coach a technical specialist who doesn’t want to be coached? For your team members who are most stuck in the Expert Trap, you’ll need wonderful coaching skills. Dominic Johnson, Master Coach, provides some practical tips.
Article: Leading teams of experts: The Invisible Scary Truth
New to leading technical experts?
If you’re new to leading a team of experts or you’re a non-technical manager, there’s an article specifically for you: How do you lead a team of technical specialists when you’re not an expert yourself?
There are also additional resources included as downloadable tools, free chapters of our book Master Expert: How to achieve peak performance, seniority and influence in a technical role, and full-sized versions of the diagrams you’ll see throughout our articles. You can download each of these using the form on each page.