Being an outstanding technical expert is no guarantee of becoming an effective leader. When a specialist takes on managerial responsibility, they often have to give up the very thing that made them successful until then: being the one who knows the answer, solves the problems and masters their field better than anyone.
This article explores that essential shift in stance and shows why technical expertise, valuable as it is, can sometimes become an obstacle when it gets in the way of delegating, taking a broader view or developing other people.
Drawing on the lessons of Kevin Mitchell, PhD, head of talent development and organisational development at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, it sets out four concrete levers for building an effective technical leadership development programme: using assessments, demonstrating return on investment, starting from the reality technical leaders face, and grounding the work in science.
For organisations committed to a talent management, assessment and development, or skills development strategy, the stakes are high: helping technical experts turn individual expertise into collective performance capability.
Many technical experts are promoted into managerial roles as a reward for excellent performance, then run into difficulty almost immediately. The skills that made them recognised individual contributors do not automatically carry across into leadership roles. For these profiles, leadership development can make all the difference between success and failure.
Episode 142 of the podcast The Science of Personality looked at how to support technical experts moving into leadership roles. Co-hosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp were joined by Kevin Mitchell, PhD, who heads talent development and organisational development at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
The conversation sheds light on the shift in stance that can be particularly hard for leaders coming out of technical roles, on why expertise is no longer necessarily an advantage in their new position, and on four concrete strategies for building an effective technical leadership development programme.
Technical experts hold deep specialist knowledge and have often built their reputation on an ability to solve problems. But once they move into a leadership role, the very nature of their job changes.
They are no longer the ones who have to solve problems directly. They become facilitators of problem-solving, and coaches.
"It is a considerable shift to go from 'I have to supply the answer' to 'I have to build other people's capacity to solve problems'," Kevin Mitchell explains.
These new leaders have to pick up a whole set of new skills and behaviours quickly, and they have to do it in full view of others.
"You are learning new skills and a new way of approaching situations in front of other people, at the very moment those people are relying on you to succeed," Kevin Mitchell says.
Some leaders can therefore find it hard to accept that they no longer hold all the answers or all the solutions.
Organisations, for their part, do not always set out clearly the skills and learning experiences needed to make this transition into leadership work. Many promotions instead carry an implicit message that prizes technical expertise even more highly.
Kevin Mitchell sums it up with some humour: "Congratulations, you are the best at your job, so now you are a leader. You are clever. You will work out how to do it."
Behind the joke, though, lies a genuine risk. New managers may conclude that they should carry on relying mainly on their technical knowledge and on the methods that made them successful as individual contributors.
And technical expertise is not the same thing as expertise in leadership.
Technical expertise is an indispensable foundation for professional success in a great many fields. Experts earn the respect of their peers by carrying out research, delivering quality care or solving complex problems.
Expertise is also often deeply bound up with a person's professional identity. It is entirely understandable, then, that a technical expert should carry on seeing their specialist skills as the main value they bring to their organisation.
Unfortunately, once that expert becomes a leader, the same expertise can turn into an obstacle in several ways:
During the transition into a leadership role, a structured development programme can help a technical expert build a new professional identity and become effective in the role more quickly.
That work also strengthens both their confidence and their skills.
Leadership development among technical profiles works all the better for starting early.
"Investing deliberately in leadership development at the earliest stages will, in time, produce substantial benefits for the organisation," Kevin Mitchell points out.
Part of that work involves understanding the informal leadership development already going on in the organisation.
People will develop leadership behaviours one way or another. The real question is whether that development happens by design and in a structured way, or simply by default.
"If your development system focuses only on the officially designated leaders, you are missing a significant part of the culture and the developmental environment feeding that system," Kevin Mitchell adds.
He recommends four strategies for encouraging leadership development among technical experts:
Kevin Mitchell recommends in particular using 360-degree assessments focused on needs matched to the technical leader's level of managerial responsibility.
Pairing those 360-degree assessments with personality assessment produces a far more complete picture of a leader's strengths and their development areas.
The most effective development programmes then push participants to put those lessons to concrete use in building specific leadership skills.
Over time, as organisations accumulate data from these assessments, they can better understand their leaders' strengths, their derailers and their values.
That information can then shape internal communication, talent development, recognition and incentive schemes, and the organisational culture as a whole.
Personality assessment thus becomes far more than an individual tool: properly embedded in a talent management approach, it can help inform a broader HR strategy.
Before putting a leadership development programme for technical experts in place, it is essential to carry out a genuine needs analysis, Kevin Mitchell explains.
That analysis can draw on in-depth interviews and focus groups bringing together leaders at various levels of the organisation.
From there, it becomes possible to define indicators for assessing the programme's impact.
Broadly speaking, the most useful indicators for measuring return on investment try to establish whether development work improves retention or engagement.
Kevin Mitchell gives a very concrete example:
"Suppose the cost attached to a nurse leaving is 40,000 dollars. If you reduce turnover by even a few points through better leadership practices, you already have a considerable reduction in costs, without even counting the positive human impact that comes with it."
Leadership development should therefore not be seen merely as a training initiative. It can have a measurable impact on organisational performance, on talent retention and, more broadly, on the company's capacity to build lasting performance.
Coaching and conflict management skills can be fairly new to technical experts. They rarely come naturally in any case, including to other leaders.
Development activities that build confidence gradually therefore play an essential part.
Simulations and coaching circles, for instance, create a safe environment in which technical leaders can explore and practise new skills.
Trying a leadership skill first in a lower-stakes setting, through role play for example, can make it easier to use later in a real situation, in front of one's team.
Cohort-based development can bring additional benefits.
Participants can be asked, for instance, to try a practice between two sessions, then to open the following meeting with a collective debrief:
"What worked? What did not work? Let us share our experiences among peers and use them as a starting point for further progress," Kevin Mitchell explains.
Learning within a community also makes the shift in stance technical leaders need easier: they have gradually to stop trying to get the work done on their own and learn to deliver results through their team.
This evolution is a central component of developing leadership potential, and it gradually changes how an expert views their own contribution to collective success.
Leadership development programmes have to rest on scientific foundations and take a rigorous approach to how they are run.
Being able to explain the precision and scientific reliability of assessment tools matters especially when a programme is aimed at technical leaders.
Technical experts, after all, attach great importance to objective, demonstrable data.
Put simply, they will probably be more persuaded by an assessment with demonstrated scientific validity than by a tool built on types, colours, numbers or roles.
"Whatever assessment is used, I have to be reasonably sure I can defend it convincingly to scientists," Kevin Mitchell explains.
This demand for robustness is an essential point for any organisation wanting to place its assessment and development, its coaching or its talent management strategy on credible and durable foundations.
The transition from technical expertise to leadership is not simply a matter of adding a few managerial skills to those an expert already has. It calls for a genuine transformation in how they create value.
Where the expert succeeded through their own capacity to analyse, decide and solve problems, the leader now has to build those capacities in others.
This is precisely why personality assessment, paired with structured skills development, can play a strategic part. It helps leaders understand their strengths, their derailers and their motivations, while giving them reference points for adjusting their behaviour in the face of new responsibilities.
For organisations, this investment reaches well beyond individual development. A coherent talent management approach strengthens leadership potential, supports team transformation and moves organisational culture towards more sustainable management.
Developing good technical leaders ultimately means letting expertise change scale: no longer producing performance through one individual, but creating the conditions in which a whole team can progress, innovate and succeed over the long term.
At Authentic Talent, we believe that objective assessment of talent and potential within organisations is a decisive factor in their future success. If you would like to discuss it with us, let's talk!
This article draws on an article published on the Hogan Assessments website: Strategies for Technical Leadership Development
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