re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

24 Sep 2025 #career

Being the smartest in the room doesn’t mean you’re ready to lead it.

Doing a job well isn’t the same as leading others who do it. Being a soccer player isn’t the same as being the team coach. They need different skill sets.

Ibrahim Diallo makes a good point about leading a room full of experts. Here are three of his points and my reactions:

Technical credibility gives you a seat. But your social skills make you shine

In a room full of experts, your technical credibility gets you a seat at the table, but your social skills determine whether anything productive happens once you’re there.

I learned this lesson in meetings with the CEO and other executives at a past job.

It was at a small tech shop in my city. I was a Software Engineer I, first of five “ranks” in the company’s career ladder. My hard work gave me a seat on the table. I don’t recommend hard work anymore.

The CEO was a coder turned businessman. Sure, he understood a lot of jargon and technical details. But most of the time, he replied with “I don’t care” or “You’re insane” when we dropped technical terms.

By trial and error, I learned to translate technical language into business language.

Your goal is to find the right person for each task

Your value [as a leader] isn’t in having all the expertise. It’s in recognizing which expertise is needed when, and creating space for the right people to contribute their best work.

I’ve seen it all around me. A newly promoted coder who still acts like a rock star, doing all the work. Focusing on lines of code and pull requests instead of projects, milestones, and team dynamics. That’s a recipe for burnout for the leader and failure for the team.

The perfect example of good leadership and delegation comes from the movie Ocean’s 11 and its sequels.

In every movie, there’s an impossible item to steal. Of course, that’s never a solo job. It takes a team. The leader presents the challenge and a solution plan.

But each team member brings their expertise: the locksmith to open a vault, the social guy to extract valuable intel from a person of interest, the gymnastics guy to break into impenetrable rooms, and the explosives guy to create a distraction.

Follow the same idea from Ocean’s 11, but replace the robbery with a project and all specialties with the right ones.

Be comfortable not having all the answers

The more comfortable you become with not being the expert, the more effective you become as a leader.

A business book taught me: a good entrepreneur should manage and lead a team of people way smarter than themself. The same is true for teams in charge of knowledge work.

As a tech leader, learn to lead people smarter than you. Otherwise, you will always lead a team of junior people. A good leader finds the right person for the right job and makes them thrive.