First, You have to decide what “weight” of subject matter versus process-oriented expertise you are looking to develop. Management consultants for example, have a good command of subject matter but they have to be process experts to be able to work with various problems that clients from different industries may present. In this case it’s a matter of developing analytical prowess and discernment (of signal among noise when given overwhelming information).
This part of your development as an expert is actually the simple part because it is relatively straight-forward. You identify the domains of knowledge you want to work, give yourself goals of mastery, and have the discipline to execute on these goals.
Then, You have to decide what “brand” of expert you want to be. Before your eyes glaze over or roll back at the word “brand”, I’m not using this word to mean some artificial pretentious things you do with “social media” or use big empty words that make you sound more important than you are.
What I mean for you to get specific about the profile of persons you want to engage with, solve problems for, and be recognized by.
For example, do you want to be known as the person who knows the obscure facts about your field that no one else knows about? That’s a brand. Are you going to be the person who makes your field more accessible to the public when other experts talk in tongues and alienate the public because their jargon is inaccessible to a wider audience? That’s a brand.
In my recent venture as a pharmaceutical consultant specializing in field-medical affairs (medical science liaisons), I was very deliberate about the constituents I represent. I was going to be the person who will bring to the open the critical, underlying ethical issues that management won’t touch, even though the employees were talking amongst themselves about their concerns.
So I became an expert in what the individual contributors in the “trenches” interacting with the companies’ stakeholders and customers were confronted with. It did help that I had worked in the profession for several years before starting my consultancy, but that was not enough to differentiate me as “an expert”.
Finally, Your “expertise” status is usually conferred by others. I know there are people who are comfortable calling themselves “experts” or “gurus”. I’m agreeable to sharing other people’s attribution of this status to me (especially when enough people share the same opinion, and it’s a necessary part of gaining confidence in people whom I can help, when they read their peers’ testimonials or feedback about my work), but I am less comfortable pointing to myself as “an expert”.
Even in the field that I’ve dedicated a significant amount of my professional years doing, learning, thinking, writing, speaking, and day-dreaming about, I do still feel surprised and humbled when people contact me because they saw me as “an expert”. This is because I know more of what I don’t know than what others can see.
I hope I will never see the day when someone suggests I’m an “expert” and I think, “well, of course!” This is when arrogance sets in and I’m back to being an amateur.
Exercise: Take 15 minutes and write down the “brand” of subject matter and/or process expert you aspire to be. Share what you come up with by commenting below, or by emailing me directly!
