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Subject Matter Expert
Something that you’ll probably run across during your career that can be incredibly powerful is finding an opportunity to set yourself aside as a subject matter expert, as someone who has a really deep reservoir of knowledge about a certain topic or area that’s important to your company or to the industry that you’re in. A lot of times, you’ll find individuals who are generalists and then there’s others who are specialists. Very early in your career, you want to be as specialized as possible. You want to be an expert; you want to master your craft so that you are that trusted resource. You’re someone who more senior leaders can go to. They know you’re going to have the information. You’re going to be able to produce it on a fairly quick timeline and it’s going to be accurate and that’s what they need. But then you’ll find, as you continue to increase in levels of seniority, as your level of leadership rises within an organization, that you have to also become a generalist.
You have to maintain that level of having subject matter expertise. But then you also need to be able to think more broadly about the challenges facing your organization or the institution you’re a part of. So you always want to strive to cultivate both elements, but especially early in your career, being a subject matter expert is incredibly important. There’s a few ways you can do that. You have to be very, I think, conscious and deliberate about the choices you make. It’s a proactive step to becoming an expert. You need to read deeply on the topic in which you’re involved. Learn from those around you, increase your network by reaching out to people who’ve walked that path and asking their opinion — asking not only what they learned, but how did they learn it? Did they maybe have a technique that was impactful to them that you could incorporate as part of your own learning rubric? And then you can share that information with your institution. And every time you’re doing that, as you’re stepping into a role, it may be a role that someone in your network has had five, ten years prior. Now you can reach out to them and that’ll help you continue to grow and learn as you change the level you’re at within the organization you’re a part of.
The Murder Board Process
If you really want to test your medal and see just how good you are as a subject matter expert, I would encourage you to try a technique that we used at TOPGUN. It’s called the murder board process. So one of the things I thought TOPGUN was really good about was having an incredibly high bar that everyone — regardless of what you did specifically for the staff or for the institution — had to meet that bar. And so each instructor is assigned to be a subject matter expert for the US Navy and Marine Corps in some area. So I was assigned to be the expert on air to air mission planning. That meant that I needed to have a very intimate understanding of the capabilities of other nation’s aircraft and their weapons systems, as well as our own. And then how do you reconcile those to get to success?
So it’s a six month period to assess what the previous instructor had done with that area of expertise. What are the changes that have occurred in the last few years? How do you apply those changes? And then you put together a slide presentation that you’re going to give, initially to the staff members. And then once you’ve successfully passed your murder board, now you’re going to give these to all the men and women of the US Navy and Marine Corps. And so that murder board process is intense, absolutely intense. You have to go through eight pre-boards, which are basically practice murder boards, and then you go through your actual murder board itself. But what is really interesting with that process is when you look at it day one, when you’ve been assigned your field of expertise and you start this process, you know, in my case, I remember thinking, “There’s no way I’m going to pull this off.” And so one of the top instructors pulled me aside and said, “Look, first off, remember, we’ve all gone through the process. We made it. So can you so just have confidence in yourself.”
And then the second part of that is just break it down into bite size chunks. So take the first part of your first part, become proficient. Once you’ve done that, now start to expand yourself more and more outward until you’ve got the entire bit of material covered and you make an analysis of, “Okay, well, here’s where I am today. And this is where I want to be tomorrow. What do I need to do to get there?” Find those members in your network who are willing to give their time and ask them to challenge you. Let them know you’d like to set up a mock interview where they have the level of expertise where they can challenge your own knowledge base, determine how much you know. Even more importantly, it’s not about succeeding or failing in that moment in time, it’s about identifying the areas where maybe you’re deficient, where you’re lacking some knowledge that you can expound. So it’s going to do two things for you. It’s going to highlight the areas you can continue to learn and grow, but it’s also going to allow you to gain perspective from them. Like, what do they find to be important? What are the elements that they see as critical to know that maybe you did not realize were important as they really were?