The Answer You Need May Be Hiding in Plain Sight

By mid-morning on Saturday, the fire hall’s back wall was covered in sheets of paper. We had just run the personal histories exercise.
In this exercise, everyone writes down a few things about themselves: their first job, a person who shaped them, their best holiday ever, and their bucket-list place to go.
The sheets go up on the wall, and people wander along it with a coffee, reading. I was doing exactly that when one line stopped me cold.
Someone in that room had traveled alone from Canada and trekked into the high Himalayas, higher than most people will ever stand. It was written as a single line under “best holiday ever,” as casually as if it were a week at the lake.
I looked around the room.
Twenty volunteer firefighters, a small department, a Saturday. Nobody had mentioned it all morning. The further I read along the wall, the clearer it became that it wasn’t the only surprise in the room.

The room was full of experts

Early that afternoon, the pagers went off. Someone had reported smoke and was worried it was the start of another wildfire.
The duty officer and one of their drone pilots stepped out, and they were back in what felt like minutes. He launched a drone, spotted two people running a controlled burn with hoses, and saved a crew from spending an hour driving back roads looking for it.
Until then, he had been one of the quieter people in the room. It turns out he is one of the most accomplished drone pilots I have ever met, in a department whose drone, remote-vehicle, and ATV capabilities would make organizations ten times its size envious.

People are more than an employee

Before we had even started that morning, another member came up to me holding the workbook. He had spotted a graphic of the Gordian knot and asked whether I would be open to him sharing his background in Greek history with the group.
I asked for the Coles Notes version. He nailed it. When we reached that part of the day, he stood up and told the story of Alexander better than I do, comfortable in his own skin and with no hint of “look at me.” His day job has nothing to do with ancient history.
Then there was the rest of the people represented on the wall:
  • A senior leader in a related emergency field, responsible for hundreds of people.
  • A supervisor who manages around twenty staff in a day job unrelated to fire.
  • A lifelong student of de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats.
  • Someone who had worked inside an organization that used Lencioni’s Five
  • Dysfunctions of a Team as its operating manual.
  • An engineering student.
  • A member with decades of service sat beside two people who had been there a fortnight, spending the day asking what firefighting will need five years from now, without ever holding the floor.
None of that is on a roster.
None of it shows up on an org chart.
And I would never have learned most of it if we hadn’t asked questions that had nothing to do with firefighting.

Why expertise goes quiet

Most expertise doesn’t announce itself.
Some of that is humility, and in the fire service, policing, and many other similar industries I’ve worked with, showing off doesn’t advance your career.
Part of it is that people quietly assume their life outside the job doesn’t count inside it.
But some of it is the leader/supervisor.

We hire a firefighter, a clerk, a technician, and stop seeing the person and start seeing the role.

Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham gave us a simple way to see this back in 1955 with the Johari Window. One of its four panes is the hidden area: the things you know about yourself that the people around you don’t.
Every team has a hidden pane.
Most leaders never look in it, then go outside to find expertise sitting three chairs away.
Liz Wiseman’s Multipliers takes it a step further. She describes leaders who assume their people are smart and go looking for proof, and leaders who assume they need to have the answers themselves. The first group gets dramatically more capability from the same people.
The difference isn’t talent. It’s attention.

How to find the experts on your team

Which brings me back to the knot. Alexander didn’t find a cleverer way to untie it. He looked at the problem differently and found an answer. A lot of stubborn team problems are like that.
The answer is already in the room, but nobody asked.
Here are three suggestions as to how you can find the experts on your team:
1. Ask questions that have nothing to do with the job. Best holiday? Your first job, or maybe something you taught yourself?
The wall we built that Saturday took mere minutes, but it told me more about that team than a year of meetings would. The
work question gets you the work answer. The human question gets you the person.
2. Invite people to teach. Hand over ten minutes of your next team meeting to someone who knows something you don’t. The Gordian knot moment happened because someone saw an opening and asked. I used that story again last week and had another brilliant teacher put his hand up and hold the attention of 30 peers for five minutes of fantastic history. Some people will put their hand up like
that. Your job is to make room for them and look for the ones who never will.
3. Keep a quiet inventory. Not a skills database. Just a running note in your journal(you do keep a journal, don’t you?) of what your people know, have done, and care about. Before you call a consultant, form a committee, or decide something is beyond the team, check it first.

This week’s challenge

Pick one person on your team you think you know well. Ask them one question you have never asked before. Not about their workload. About them.
Then listen for the expertise hiding in the answer.
Ask yourself:
If your team put their sheets up on the wall tomorrow, how many of their responses would surprise you?
I drove home on Saturday thinking about how close I came to never knowing any of it.
Twenty extraordinary people, most sitting quietly, each carrying something that could help their team solve its next hard problem.