"If you are the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room."
The eighth behavior Google identified can feel intimidating at first: possess key technical skills to help advise your team. It raises an anxious question every leader eventually asks — do I know enough to lead people who are experts in their own fields?
Let's reframe the question. At any given moment, you only know what you know. So the more useful questions are: Do I know what I don't know? And do I know how to close the gap between where I am and where I want to be? Here's how great leaders answer them.
Be Self-Aware and Work on Your Knowledge Gaps
The best leaders prize self-awareness. Start by naming your gaps honestly, then build a plan to fill them — through reading and research, an online course, a class, or regular conversations with a mentor. Even your suppliers and industry contacts may point you toward people who can help you grow.
Consider networking groups, too. For nearly every niche, there's a professional organization. If you're not part of one, join. As Harvey Mackay's classic book title advises, Build Your Well Before You're Thirsty — start building your knowledge network today, before you need it.
Know Your Team and Develop Leaders From Within
Just as you need to know your own strengths and gaps, you need to know each team member's. There's wisdom in the old line: train your people well enough that they could leave, and treat them well enough that they don't want to.
The starting point is the Golden Question: "What do I need to do to help you become more successful?" Your job as a leader is to give your people opportunities to learn from their own knowledge gaps — and when you can't teach them something yourself, to connect them with someone who can. One of a leader's most important jobs is to create other leaders, and the easiest way to do that is to move knowledge back and forth freely. So don't hesitate to tap your team's expertise: "What do you see that I'm not seeing?"
It Starts With Yourself
To lead others well, first lead yourself well — and that means never stopping learning. Even elite athletes and performers keep hiring coaches to stay sharp. We often draw a simple diagram for clients: a box labeled Learning, a box above it labeled Doing, and arrows running between them, because you can't have one without the other. Learning without doing is theory; doing without learning is stagnation. At the very top, we draw one more box: Becoming. The goal of all this learning and doing is to become the best version of yourself as a leader.
That doesn't happen overnight. Mastery takes time and repetition. So don't rush it — and never stop learning.
A Place to Start
The next time you're tempted to hide a gap in your knowledge, try leading with it instead — from a place of both strength and honesty: "Here's what I know. There may be something I'm missing. Can we talk it through?" That single move builds more credibility than pretending to have every answer ever could.