My greatest failure at being the Subject Matter Expert

Have you ever experienced being known as the only person who can get things done the right way in your job or business? And that everyone looked at you as the sole “expert” in that particular task?

I have. And back then, I thought that because I was the only one who can do it best, that I was the one who would get promoted first. Boy, was I wrong.

I thought it was the knowledge and skills that mattered. I tended to look down on people who got promoted who didn’t know anything about the process or didn’t know it as best as I did. I thought to myself that management made a mistake by promoting this other person who I thought was all talk but no substance, because I always beat him in terms of metrics and scorecards.

But then, it happened again, and again. Other people kept getting promoted. I still thought it was a wrong decision on the part of the management team, as I still believed I was a better performer.

Instead of promoting me, they kept assigning me to do the most difficult tasks. And when I fixed those issues and the fire died down, they moved me again.

I did product training when there was a heavy influx of new hires, I fixed customer escalations when there were complaints that reached the head office, I became the subject matter expert that everyone approached when they were experiencing issues that they can’t resolve, and I would go ahead and fix it for them

I did all that, but they still wouldn’t promote me.

A few years later with another company I became lucky, and finally got promoted as an individual contributor. I still got moved around to take care of issues here and there as I was once again the subject matter expert, but at least I was already in a supervisory position.

I fixed issues in quality, customer experience, language and communications, handling teams when the people manager resigns, among many others, and again got reassigned after I fix the issues or the fire dies down.

Until finally I found my niche in process improvement. And that is where I learned the importance of creating a Standard Operating Procedure.

Apparently, this was the secret as to why everyone else got promoted, and not me.

I failed to make myself redundant by documenting the way I did things and teaching this to my successors. I thought that if I was the best performer and the subject matter expert in what I did, that I would be the first to get promoted.

It was a tough lesson, and unfortunately, I learned it the hard way.

As the saying goes, give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, but teach a man how to fish and you feed him for life. And to add to that, you don’t keep having to catch fish for him to feed him every day! You can move on to teach others who are hungry as well.

I hope that by sharing this story, you, or anyone in your team would learn from my mistake.

I would like to help make the world a better place for you and your team, as well as your friends, and colleagues who you think can benefit from this by sharing exactly how you can create bulletproof procedures, and many more techniques.

I share the exact steps in Chapter 2 of my book The Business Optimization Blueprint, which, if you haven’t downloaded your copy yet, you can still get for FREE (for a limited time only) through the link below.

Enjoy, and make sure you implement what you learn immediately!

The Business Optimization Blueprint

RobbieAgustin.com

I help transform businesses and take them to the next level with my expertise in Agile, Lean Six Sigma, Operational Excellence, and Intelligent Automation. Author of The Business Optimization Blueprint.