How Not To Act Like An Expert

I've been offering business insight to help experts achieve higher financial performance, manage people better, staff appropriately, and provide services that their clients value. In the last 20+ years of doing this, I've observed a few practices that contradict expertise. Here are some things that I notice experts doing that seem to contradict how they want us to see them.

• Be Too Busy to Articulate Thought Leadership There are all sorts of reasons why experts don't write and speak, but none of them are legitimate. If you don't have the time, you aren't making enough money. If you don't know what to say, you aren't an expert. If you don't know how to say it, you haven't practiced enough. If you find too many audiences when directing your writing, you haven't focused enough. Aside from the content itself, having the time to write it sends just as powerful a message.
• Be Immediately Accessible to the Client Whether misguided or not, developed cultures prefer that their experts be largely inaccessible. The more familiar they are, the more they seem like "one of us" and not deserving of any extra attention. In an agency, for example, an account planner, who bounces in and out of the relationship, has more status and impact than the account executive that the client interacts with every day. Diners pay special attention when the waiter leads the head chef to their table. In a lawsuit, you'll interact with lawyers, clerks, and assistants, but the judge will rarely be seen, and always raised up on a pedastal and behind a large piece of furniture. When we can't isolate these experts and they must mix with the unwashed masses, we put uniforms on them to preserve that distinction: "There goes the flight crew. They must be headed to their next flight." Imagine the perception issues if you looked out the aircraft window, when late in pushing back from the gate, only to see the pilot, in uniform, helping to load the baggage. We feel more comfortable when our experts are special. So resist the tempation to take a call or meet with a prospect any time and anywhere. But keep in mind that people will want to work with you, too, so drop any "expert" attitude or condescension that might ooze from your conversation. Be an expert but don't be an asshole.
• Ask for Work Sociologically, our understanding is that experts are so good that they are always in demand. In fact, it might take weeks to get an appointment with them, but it's worth it. So it's hard to reconcile this notion we have with seeing an expert beg for work or play the part of supplicant. Begging for work screams one thing: "there aren't many people who want my opinion or advice. How about you? Anything I can help you with?"
• Be Widely Relevant I do think that we need balanced humans who are world citizens who can have intelligent conversations about many things, but being a deep SME (subject matter expert) flies in the face of being able to speak intelligently about anything. That's not an expert--that's a know it all. When you say on your website that you can do all these things for all these kinds of clients in all these settings, you really just want someone to hire you. If you tell prospects what they shouldn't hire you for, they'll find it easier to believe what they should hire you for.
• Have Primarily Local Clients If your expertise practice is located in Des Moines, you won't last unless you attract national clients. There just aren't enough in that marketplace. But if, say, you are in Atlanta and most of your clients are in Atlanta, your positioning is too broad. It should be narrowed so that only one-quarter of your clients are within fifty miles. I've heard people say that "experts travel" and I agree with them. Your expertise should be in such high demand that prospective clients will search high and low for it.
• Use Superlatives and -ly Adverbs in Describing Themselves It's not likely that I am "The Leader in Providing Business Insight to Experts." I might be "A Leader" but that's not the same thing. I don't know. I know I'm really good and that I'm an expert, but that's probably where I should leave it. The marketplace can decide things from there. And by the way, using "Guru" to describe yourself is an automatic diqualifier! Experts definitely don't use that word, especially when describing themselves.
• Spray Thoughtish Generic Content I say "thoughtish" because it's not thoughless but it's not thoughtful, either. We are just past the high point of content marketing, but we are still flooded with content because everybody is telling everybody to produce it. Just a few years back, producing good content was enough to stand out. Not now, though, because content is everywhere. I can come back and visit my Linkedin account and in just a few hours I see that "Robert Somebody published five new posts..." I don't find that I need that content--what I really need is brief, well-written insight that changes my personal or business life in significant ways. In this mass of content, I'll gravitate to a dozen key thought leaders who have consistently delivered on that promise and the rest of you are, well, I feel like I'm drinking with a straw and the internet is a fire hose.

Don't work so hard to not be an expert! Be friendly and kind and grateful for opportunities, but not so desperate for so many of them.