Have you ever been faced with this scenario: you have a technical expert or professional in your organisation, accomplished and thriving in their role, so you take the decision to promote them into a leadership position. However, when faced with this new role, they simply flounder as if in quicksand, where much of what is familiar is seemingly left behind and they struggle to survive.

In their struggle as leaders they grab onto whatever they are comfortable with, which can result in resorting to fixing the technical issues themselves instead of delegating or micro-managing team members to retain some level of control. The inevitable result is a drop in performance and motivation of both the team and the new leader.

People need to be experts in their fields to become accountants, lawyers, architects, engineers, programmers etc. But becoming a leader requires them to adapt their approach and learn new skills to enable them to deal effectively with people, to have vision and provide clear direction. Their success will no longer be gauged on their technical expertise, but on how well they get the best from their team.

Transitioning into leadership

Organisations are increasingly developing routes into ‘technical’ leadership and management for technical experts, but this is still the exception, not the norm, within businesses. So how do you achieve an effective transition for your technical experts? How do you harness and develop the qualities you originally saw worthy of promotion whilst at the same time working with them to apply their honed technical expertise in different ways?

Jean Caton, a transition coach cites 5 skills a technical expert must acquire to ease themselves into a leadership role:

1. Don’t go it alone. Seek help from individuals you admire and trust both within and outside of the organisation. Be open to receiving honest and developmental feedback.
2. Build strategic relationships.  Build alliances across the organisation to get others to know, trust and respect you.
3. Communicate up, down, and across the organization. ‘Get out of the weeds and focus on jargon-free, bottom-line messages’. Observe your boss and communicate in their preferred style. Build your skills if they are lacking.
4. Develop presence. Looking and acting like a leader communicates the perception of a capable leader. If you have leadership ability but are not perceived by others as a strong leader you need to close that gap and adopt real, tangible leadership behaviours.
5. Don’t take it personally. Take calculated risks and be willing to fail. If you never step out of your comfort zone you will not accomplish what is expected of successful leaders. Be resilient. Don’t allow your inner-critic or harsh judgment of others to stop you.

Filling the support gap for new leaders

In HR Magazine, a Penna survey found that less than 20% of organisations had a robust transition process for current experts to enable them to become leaders. When promoting experts, your organisation has a responsibility and opportunity to support their transition. There are several key ways that this can be done and considered:

• From the outset, help them realise that their role requirements will shift. A different set of behaviours and language will be required. Set expectations around achieving with and through their people, not through what they have achieved by themselves previously. Ensure they recognise that holding on to being a technical expert will hold them back from leading the people in their team.
• Provide appropriate development to support the shift in their behaviours. This could be formal management development supported by a ‘transition coach’ focusing on both new behaviours and mindsets of an effective leader.
• Assign them time with people who are strong in the areas of strategy, performance, people management, operations and finance. These people don’t have to be experts in their field, but should exhibit positive attributes in these areas.
• Identify someone who has gone through a similar process to be a mentor for them.
• Work with the new leader to see how they can use their former technical skills in different ways – could they become a coach or mentor for others?
• Carry out a simple SWOT analysis of their skills to highlight what attributes they do bring to the role and the opportunities they present.
• How might they be able to transfer their passion for their technical area into becoming an expert in people and performance?
• Recognise how their existing skills will serve them well in their new roles, allowing them to bring out the best in others.
• Encourage them to see the bigger picture and not the detail, they don’t need to have all the facts.
• Explore with them how they will stay out of the ‘technical arena’.

The transition from expert or professional roles into leadership and management needn’t be stressful or fraught with issues. It requires a conscious effort on your behalf to assign sufficient time and help from others to support and manage a smooth process.