What makes expertise

Career Development. Key takeaways An SME is an authority on a specific area, practice, process, technical method or piece of equipment. An SME may be used by a variety of industries to help solve problems or create new processes. An SME continues to gain knowledge through continuing education and experience to stay current in their area of expertise. What is a subject matter expert? Duties of a subject matter expert. Analyzing company activities to ensure resources are used efficiently Providing documentation and communication regarding specialized organizational processes Taking a technical concept and making it easier to understand Creating and editing processes to help businesses perform tasks consistently Supporting leadership in aligning company and personal values with a strategic vision Making recommendations for technology infrastructure, software and equipment Assisting in sales growth and account management when needed.

How to become a subject matter expert. Gain knowledge on a subject. Seek continuing education opportunities. Test and test again. Be an authority. Prioritize authenticity. Example SME scenarios. Taylor provides expert consultation on network activity. He can help American Fashion Co. Eleanor is a search engine optimization SEO consultant. The Corner Donut Shoppe hired her to help them with their website, including setting up SEO and raising organic search results.

Maxwell is an expert on leadership. When a board of directors calls him to interact with their team, he recommends major organizational changes by offering leadership insight and new strategies. Kiara works for Flack Soda Brand. She is the platform expert who handles customer experience through the company's customer relationship management CRM tool.

Jonathan works for a digital company pairing consumers with credit card partners. They are repositories of images, documents, and routines: external data that people can view and interpret as they try to solve a problem or make a decision. There are no shortcuts to gaining true expertise. Skill in some fields, such as sports, is easy to measure. Competitions are standardized so that everyone competes in a similar environment.

All competitors have the same start and finish lines, so that everyone can agree on who came in first. In the early days of Wal-Mart, for instance, Sam Walton arranged competitions among store managers to identify those whose stores had the highest profitability.

Each store in the Nordstrom clothing chain posts rankings of its salespeople, based on their sales per hour, for each pay period. Nonetheless, it often can be difficult to measure expert performance—for example, in projects that take months or even years to complete and to which dozens of individuals may contribute. Expert leadership is similarly difficult to assess.

Most leadership challenges are highly complex and specific to a given company, which makes it hard to compare performance across companies and situations.

One methodology we use to deal with these challenges is to take a representative situation and reproduce it in the laboratory. For example, we present emergency room nurses with scenarios that simulate life-threatening situations.

Testing methodologies can be devised for creative professions such as art and writing, too. Researchers have studied differences among individual visual artists, for instance, by having them produce drawings of the same set of objects.

Other researchers have designed objective tasks to measure the superior perceptual skills of artists without the help of judges. To people who have never reached a national or international level of competition, it may appear that excellence is simply the result of practicing daily for years or even decades.

However, living in a cave does not make you a geologist. Not all practice makes perfect. You need a particular kind of practice— deliberate practice —to develop expertise. When most people practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do. Deliberate practice is different. In the early phases, you try to understand the basic strokes and focus on avoiding gross mistakes like driving the ball into another player.

You practice on the putting green, hit balls at a driving range, and play rounds with others who are most likely novices like you. In a surprisingly short time perhaps 50 hours , you will develop better control and your game will improve. Your golf game now is a social outing, in which you occasionally concentrate on your shot. From this point on, additional time on the course will not substantially improve your performance, which may remain at the same level for decades.

Why does this happen? If you were allowed to take five to ten shots from the exact same location on the course, you would get more feedback on your technique and start to adjust your playing style to improve your control.

In fact, professionals often take multiple shots from the same location when they train and when they check out a course before a tournament. This kind of deliberate practice can be adapted to developing business and leadership expertise. The classic example is the case method taught by many business schools, which presents students with real-life situations that require action. Because the eventual outcomes of those situations are known, the students can immediately judge the merits of their proposed solutions.

In this way, they can practice making decisions ten to 20 times a week. War games serve a similar training function at military academies. Such mock military operations sharpen leadership skills with deliberate practice that lets trainees explore uncharted areas.

You often hear that a key element of leadership and management is charisma, which is true. Being a leader frequently requires standing in front of your employees, your peers, or your board of directors and attempting to convince them of one thing or another, especially in times of crisis.

A surprising number of executives believe that charisma is innate and cannot be learned. Yet if they were acting in a play with the help of a director and a coach, most of them would be able to come across as considerably more charismatic, especially over time. In fact, working with a leading drama school, we have developed a set of acting exercises for managers and leaders that are designed to increase their powers of charm and persuasion.

Executives who do these exercises have shown remarkable improvement. So charisma can be learned through deliberate practice.

Bear in mind that even Winston Churchill, one of the most charismatic figures of the twentieth century, practiced his oratory style in front of a mirror.

Genuine experts not only practice deliberately but also think deliberately. I never just walk up and hit the ball. We actually track this kind of thought process in our research. We present expert performers with a scenario and ask them to think aloud as they work their way through it. Chess players, for example, will describe how they spend five to ten minutes exploring all the possibilities for their next move, thinking through the consequences of each and planning out the sequence of moves that might follow it.

They continually work to eliminate their weaknesses. Deliberate practice involves two kinds of learning: improving the skills you already have and extending the reach and range of your skills. The enormous concentration required to undertake these twin tasks limits the amount of time you can spend doing them. If you practice with your fingers, no amount is enough. If you practice with your head, two hours is plenty. It is interesting to note that across a wide range of experts, including athletes, novelists, and musicians, very few appear to be able to engage in more than four or five hours of high concentration and deliberate practice at a time.

In fact, most expert teachers and scientists set aside only a couple of hours a day, typically in the morning, for their most demanding mental activities, such as writing about new ideas. While this may seem like a relatively small investment, it is two hours a day more than most executives and managers devote to building their skills, since the majority of their time is consumed by meetings and day-to-day concerns. This difference adds up to some hours more a year, or about 7, hours more a decade.

Think about what you could accomplish if you devoted two hours a day to deliberate practice. Experts who reach a high level of performance often find themselves responding automatically to specific situations and may come to rely exclusively on their intuition.

Experts may not recognize this creeping intuition bias, of course, because there is no penalty until they encounter a situation in which a habitual response fails and maybe even causes damage. Research has shown that musicians over 60 years old who continue deliberate practice for about ten hours a week can match the speed and technical skills of year-old expert musicians when tested on their ability to play a piece of unfamiliar music.

Snead, who died in , held the record for winning the most PGA Tour events and was famous for having one of the most beautiful swings in the sport. Deliberate practice was a key to his success. By now it will be clear that it takes time to become an expert. Our research shows that even the most gifted performers need a minimum of ten years or 10, hours of intense training before they win international competitions. I just wanted everyone to be honest about what the goal was.

If it was for practice, I may have viewed it more as an opportunity to learn something new instead of trying to impress my boss. A talented team see below! Marketing is different than construction , which is different than manufacturing. You need a team with the right skills to see the project all the way through—from strategy to execution. How will they get anything done? There was too much confusion and indecision. I firmly believe that the most meaningful projects have the full backing of management.

That, of course, means that the team has to trust management and respect their vision. That goes back to focus and clarity of vision. We even touched on a few of them above:. All of those factors combined will help you have more successful projects with a productive team. By the way, want to know what happened with the marketing strategy I put together? We executed on the parts that we could and let the rest die on the vine. So we did get some things done. Good question. Actually, great question.

Clear Project Goals This success metric could also be self-evident, but when held up closely it can get lost in the shuffle.