Key insight: Technical experts are mission critical to most organizations

Few senior leaders realize how critical SMEs are to the success of their organization.

Most medium to large organizations employ plenty of subject matter experts (SMEs). You’ll find them in IT, data, legal, finance, engineering, marketing, science – you name any department where deep technical expertise is needed, and you’ll find SMEs. Three facts might surprise you.

Firstly, there are typically far more SMEs in the organization than most senior leaders believe (on average about 20% of the employee population, but in specialist market segments like government, technology, science, and engineering far more than this).

Secondly, many senior leaders believe that experts trend to play the role of “keeping the lights on” or that they provide “enabling services:” that allow others in the organization do the real work. Both of these things are true, but what gets missed is that typically experts are at the heart of organizational transformation reducing costs, creating efficiencies, finding new ways to add value to customers and citizens.

Thirdly, a scary insight –any recruitment team will tell you that subject matter expert positions are most expensive, time-consuming and difficult positions to fill. Which is why organizations are beginning to really focus on SME retention, particularly since COVID.

Our firm is dedicated to help SMEs around the globe re-energize and upskill, so they can focus on game-changing, strategic, fulfilling work. Making the difference most SMEs know they can. Their organizations benefit is many ways – greater retention, greater value-add, more rounded business savvy, super-collaborative expert teams, and the creation of greater customer and citizen value.

Our clients tell us that the return on investment and the return on effort of expertship initiatives surpasses almost every other skills development they invest in.

Getting strategic with top technical talent approaches

Most organisations take a very strategic approach, and invest heavily, in the development of a pipeline of leaders.

Most of our clients are now taking the same approach to the development and retention of their top technical talent – their experts. The strong business case is multi-faceted:

• Shaping coherent career plans for high-potential technical staff and other experts, who often have no interest in climbing the people management ladder, transforms retention, engagement, and elevated impact of subject matter experts.

• By investing in the capability growth of very bright experts who may be trapped in a cycle of high workloads and repetitive problem solving (with little recognition), enables organizations to keep these technical stars motivated and engaged. It avoids long tenure experts from defaulting to cynical and negative behavior.

• Many experts have become ‘single point of failure’ risks for organizations, where only that single overloaded expert knows how to solve a problem. Building mentoring and coaching capabilities among top experts building broader team capability and frees up the top expert to focus on more valuable strategic work.

• Losing key technical talent can take a year or more to replace. Using growth initiatives to plan for succession of top experts talent avoids the advent of expertise gaps at critical times.

• Investing in the development of technical experts significantly reduces the danger of flight risk among overworked, unappreciated, or unchallenged experts.

• Any reasonable analysis of successful innovation in most organizations will uncover a group of awesome experts working together collaboratively at the center of the project. Investing in expert development ensures innovation projects achieve their full business potential.

Getting started with expertship initiatives

Part of our value-add to clients is the tools and frameworks which we have built that enable organizations to quickly and inexpensively pivot to address talent pipelines among their SMEs very effectively. We call this pivot organisational expertship and have free to download primers available here.

But the usual, and very successful, starting point for most organizations is to identify and begin to develop the expertship capabilities of mission critical subject matter experts. For example, our Mastering Expertship program has graduated over 3,000 SMEs, based in 16 different countries, from organisations in government, financial services, science, technology, space, utilities, health and manufacturing. It consistently receives rave reviews from technical experts in a wide range of expert disciplines. The program focuses on building the enterprise skills of experts to complement their existing technical skills.

Another starting point is deploying the Expertship360, a multi-rater assessment specifically designed to assist experts understand how they are currently experienced as an expert by their stakeholders.

Interested in learning more?

We are happy to provide an obligation-free briefing to any head of technical department or organizational development professional about how they might begin to shape an expertship strategy in their organization.

We are also comfortable have a short one-to-one session with an expert who wishes to develop their expertship skills. We can connect you to an accredited expertship coach who operates in your time zone. Note there are a variety of no-cost, low-cost development tools individual SMEs can access immediately, listed here. You might want to check out www.expertship.com as well.

Please use the contact form below.