What got you here won’t get you there

Influencing as a new leader means winning over a sceptical stakeholder, bring a cross-functional group with you, and get a roomful of people who don’t report to you to act on your recommendation. And the strange thing is, the very expertise that got you here can start working against you.

The expertise trap

I see this pattern constantly, and the people it affects are often baffled by it. They are, by any measure, brilliant. So when their ideas stall, or they get passed over, or they watch a colleague carry the room, the natural conclusion is that they need to get even better at the technical thing. They go back to the well for more data, to build a more airtight case. It feels logical because depth of expertise is what has always paid off before.

This is the trap, because the problem was never their quality of thinking. It’s that being right and being influential are two completely different skills.

Why influence matters more the higher you go

The research has been pointing this way for a long time. Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence, for all the debate it has attracted, made the case decades ago that as you move up an organisation, the technical competencies that distinguished you early on matter less and less to your effectiveness, while the relational ones matter more and more. Whether or not you accept his exact figures, the direction of travel is hard to argue with. The higher you go, the more your impact depends on other people, and the less it depends on what you personally know.

What’s changed recently is the urgency. As artificial intelligence absorbs more and more of the purely technical work, the premium on raw expertise is starting to soften. When analysis becomes faster and cheaper for everyone, being the person with the answer is worth a little less, and being the person who can align others around what to do about it is worth a great deal more.

The differentiator is shifting from knowing things to mobilising people, and it’s happening faster than most development programmes have caught up with.

Why more technical training won’t close the gap

This matters enormously if you’re responsible for developing technical talent, because the instinct in most organisations is to keep investing in the expertise. But while certifications, specialist training and technical pathways are highly valuable, none touch on the actual skill gap. You can send someone on every technical course going and they will still lose the meeting if they can’t read the room, handle a challenge without getting defensive, or make a case in terms that land with someone who doesn’t share their perspective.

Influencing as a new leader is a learnable skill

The good news is that the missing skills aren’t a personality trait you’re born with or without. This is the bit people get wrong because they assume that influence is charisma, that some people simply have presence and others don’t, and that there’s nothing much to be done about it. In my experience, that’s almost entirely false. The ability to influence is built from specific, observable, learnable behaviours: knowing when to push and when to listen; how to frame a recommendation around what the other person actually cares about; how to disagree with a senior stakeholder without it becoming a confrontation; and how to hold your position under pressure without digging in.

All these can be taught, practised, and improved, in the same deliberate way your experts once learned their craft. What gets in the way, sometimes, is snobbery, often from the experts themselves.

Influence skills can feel soft, even a little manipulative, to people whose whole identity is built on logic and evidence. Learning to attend to how a message lands, not just whether it’s correct, can feel like a betrayal of the rigour they’re proud of. So they resist the very thing that would unlock everything else they’re capable of.

If you’ve got brilliant people whose impact doesn’t match their ability, it’s worth asking what you’re actually offering them. Another layer of technical depth they probably don’t need, or the influence skills that would finally let all that expertise count for something.

The hard truth, and the hopeful one, is the same. The thing holding your best people back isn’t a lack of knowledge, but that nobody ever taught them the other half of their job.