We may find comfort in being experts in our fields, but what does it take to grow more and become a spanning leader?

Dr. Wanda T. Wallace is a managing partner of Leadership Forum. She coaches, facilitates, and speaks on improving leadership through better conversations. She hosts the weekly radio show and podcast “Out of the Comfort Zone” and is the author of You Can’t Know It All: Leading in the Age of Deep Expertise.

In this episode, Wanda shares the difference between E-Leadership from S-Leadership. She also talks about how you can influence more people by adding more value to your workplace by growing into an S-Leader.

What you will learn from this episode:

  • Understand what are the three differences between being an E-Leader and an S-Leader
  • Find out how can you discover your value and be confident about bringing it to the workplace
  • Learn what the three powerful and life-changing core questions you should ask yourself 

 

“As an expert leader, I can do the work of anybody on my team. That means I can double-check the work. As a spanning leader, I cannot do the work of my team. I do have to trust them to do the job.”

– Wanda T. Wallace

 

Topics Covered:

01:24 – Wanda shares what she does and how she helps her clients

02:23 – What is the difference between E-Leaders and S-Leaders

04:50 – What are the differences in competency or skills between the two roles, the E-Leadership, and the S-Leaderships

06:41 – Wanda talks about what you can do to become a Spanning Leader if you are more of an Expert Leader

08:06 – What can you do to externally validate the value you intend to add to your work

10:25 – How can you be confident about the value that you are adding to your work and team

11:39 – Why is it often hard for women to transition from E-Leadership to S-Leadership

12:39 – Wanda shares the importance of learning how to delegate work instead of ditching and deserting

13:58 – How can you influence change in your workplace by persuading your senior-most leaders?

15:47 – What can companies do to ease that leadership transition for women

17:29 – What are the three powerful core questions you should ask yourself

18:27 – Q: How do you work through the nervousness, the anxiety, and the fears that are there? A: One is to start to recognize the emotion that you’re feeling. Name that emotion. Write about that emotion.

Key Takeaways:

“As a Spanning Leader, I cannot do the work of my team. I do have to trust them to do the job.” – Wanda Wallace

“Understanding that value is the number one thing that you’ve got to do.” – Wanda Wallace

“If you have aspirations to step at a higher level, have a bigger impact, then you have to learn to let somebody else step into the expertise spot, and you do a bit more of the spanning spot.” – Wanda Wallace

“You’ve got to learn to delegate. You have to learn to focus on what really matters. Where’s the high-value, high-impact work that I’m going to do? I’m not going to let that flail or go off the rails.” – Wanda Wallace

“Anybody can learn it. It’s not a matter of being promoted past your level of competence. It’s a matter of being promoted past your level of expertise, and now needing different leadership skills.” – Wanda Wallace

“When you move out of your comfort zone, if you are a normal adult, you will have a sense of imposter syndrome. You’re doing something you haven’t yet mastered. You’re going to feel very nervous about that. That nervous energy is normal. So stop feeling like there’s something wrong with you. It’s normal! It’s a growth step.” – Wanda Wallace

“Planning helps get the brain into proactive performed frontal cortex activity. Taking a deep breath, and calming down the nervous system is another way, and focusing again on how you add value lets you bring that confidence back into play.” – Wanda Wallace

Ways to Connect with Wanda T. Wallace:

Ways to Connect with Sarah E. Brown:

 

Full Episode Transcript:

Wanda T. Wallace  00:00  

As an expert leader, I can do the work of anybody on my team. That means I can double-check the work. That means I can be sure everybody’s doing the right thing. As a spanning leader, I cannot do the work of my team.

Sarah E. Brown  00:18  

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women, where we talk about the challenges senior female leaders face in being happy and successful at work. I’m your host, Dr. Sarah E. Brown. 

Sarah E. Brown  00:37  

My guest today is Dr. Wanda T. Wallace. She is a managing partner of Leadership Forum. She coaches, facilitates, and speaks on improving leadership through better conversations. She hosts the weekly radio show and podcast, “Out of the Comfort Zone,” and is the author of You Can’t Know It All: Leading in the Age of Deep Expertise. And that is what we’re going to be talking about today. Welcome, Wanda! Thank you for being here.

Wanda Wallace  01:09  

Thanks for the invitation! Looking forward to the conversation, too.

Sarah E. Brown  01:12  

As am I! So please tell my listeners a little bit more about your business, like who your clients are, how they get to you, and what kind of problem they have, just so they have a little bit of sense of your day job.

Wanda Wallace  01:24  

I work with large global companies, and a lot of different industries, especially, seems more increasingly, in professional services industries. And I work literally around the globe. So I have clients in Asia, Europe, the US, and a little bit in South America, as well. And I work with men and women. But there’s a little bit of a specialty in helping women get up the curve, stick, and thrive because it’s no good getting that job if you can’t thrive in it while you’re there. And that is really what my work is all about.

Sarah E. Brown  01:56  

And so what we’re going to talk about today is a concept that you describe in your book, Leading in the Age of Deep Expertise, around E-leaders, which are expert leaders, versus S-leaders, which you call Spanners. And how women can go from one to the other, or make that transition. So let’s start with describing what an E-leader and a spanner are, and what the distinction is. 

Wanda Wallace  02:23  

All right. So if you’re sitting in the UK, Spanner means a tool, so I am very clear about using the language Spanning Leadership so that my UK listeners aren’t laughing at me all the way through. So just a heads up on that one! E-Leadership, we think of experts as individual contributors, but that is not what I have been seeing in the last many years, 10 or more years. 

We have leaders who are deep experts in an area and some of them all the way up to the C-suite. So I’m thinking about a woman that I’ve been working with who is Chief Internal Auditor, or somebody who’s the Chief Human Resources Compliance Officer. They’re very senior-level positions, and they have large teams that they’re managing. So they’re leaders in every right except that they lead because they fundamentally know more than the rest of the team. And it’s a great zone of comfort for women, particularly, because it means, “I know everything that’s going on. I can double-check everything. I can make sure we’ve got perfection and quality, and risk is under control. And all that stuff. And my credibility is derived by my expertise.” Okay? 

In contrast, the Spanning Leadership role is when you’re going to span across domains of knowledge, a couple of which you might know, but most of which you do not know in depth. Now, you can’t be naive about them. You can’t know nothing, but you’re going to know just a little bit. You’ve got to get a little bit of depth, but your value is in the breadth. Your ability to join the dots together, to get the team coordinated to lead, and your leadership is not derived from your content knowledge. It’s derived from something else.

That’s the difference between the two. For most people, in most organizations, it is a combination of Expertise Leadership and Spanning Leadership. And the question really is, which hat do I need to wear at this moment in time? You’re constantly switching between the two. 

Sarah E. Brown  04:23  

So my experience has been an awful lot of women get recognized and are promoted because of that expertise. They’re date knowledge, the internal auditor person that you were describing. And the transition to managing across a breadth of different disciplines is a challenging one. So what do you see as the difference in competency or skills that are required in the two roles?

Wanda Wallace  04:50  

There are a lot of differences between the two. So the way you lead fundamentally changes between the two but there are three core areas. As an Expert, I know what my value is, and it’s very tangible. It’s the content knowledge I bring. It’s perfection. It’s the control of quality. As a Spanning Leader, knowing what my value is is very elusive. I tap my network. I coach my team. I ask questions. I get people to think. The value there is hard to see. But that’s the fundamental difference between the two. 

The second difference is the work. As an Expert Leader, I can do the work of anybody on my team, which means I can double-check the work, which means I can be sure everybody’s doing the right thing. As a Spanning Leader, I cannot do the work of my team. I do have to trust them to do the job. And that is scary. 

The final piece is the relationships, the nature of the interactions, the conversations change. As an Expert Leader, I’m going to rely on the facts, the figures, the details, the depth of knowledge. That’s what my interactions will be about. So if there’s a conflict, I’m going to dig into the depth. As a Spanning Leader, though, my relationships are not going to be about the facts. “I have to have some facts, but I’m not going to lean on the details, I’m going to lean on the quality of the relationship. I’m going to lean on my understanding of the political dynamics of people’s self-interest. I’m going to lean in the emotional categories.” And my influence strategies change as a result of that. So three fundamentally different things happen– the value that I’m adding, the work that I’m doing, and the way I’m relating to people.

Sarah E. Brown  06:28  

So if I’m currently an E-Leader, and I want to position myself to be a Spanning Leader, for example, what should I focus on learning and developing?

Wanda Wallace  06:41  

Alright, the number one thing you have got to get clear to be an effective Spanning Leader, and you cannot move past this until you get it clear, is understanding the value that you’re adding. So you know what your value is as an Expert Leader. Now, you got to say what is my value to the team and to the organization in my Spanning Leadership capacity. So is my value being able to integrate the team and get them to talk through problems with each other? Is my value being able to tap larger networks outside my team to bring information or resources? Is my value being able to speak and influence the organization so I can persuade people to move forward? Is my value– what is it? What’s the value that I’m bringing? Is it my ability to drive change? 

One of the senior women that I worked with, in the very beginning of the book, and it was featured in the book is she learned early that her real value add was to drive change, and she was in a financial CFO role. In her job, she said to her team, “My job is not to know the depth of the financial analysis– that’s your job. You don’t need me to spend time on it. My job is to help us transform to be more efficient, more data-driven, more up to speed, more partnering with our business– that’s what I’m here to do.” And understanding that value is the number one thing that you’ve got to do.

Sarah E. Brown  08:06  

So it’s important to validate that outside of yourself?

Wanda Wallace  08:10  

I think it’s always important to validate. I think it’s good to go and test. Now, your manager is a good obvious place to test but your manager may have a vested interest in your remaining in that expertise space. So yes, check with your manager, but go talk to your manager’s manager, because they probably have a better line of sight. Talk to your mentors that are outside of your command chain of command or any sponsors that you have and say, “Here’s what I’m thinking I’m doing to add value. What do you see?” 

Sarah E. Brown  08:12  

That’s great. And how often do you find that we’re deluded in what we see?

Wanda Wallace  08:43  

I find 90% of the time we struggle to understand the real value that we add.

Sarah E. Brown  08:50  

Ah, and do you think it gets adjusted by these people when you’re going to test, and then we start getting clarity or do we have to put something out there and then start refining it?

Wanda Wallace  09:01  

The smart advisors, the more senior advisors, know what value they’re looking for from you. They’re sometimes quite articulate about it. Not everybody is. So you got to go work at it. And it feels very scary to say, “I don’t know what my value is.” It’s very hard to do.

Sarah E. Brown  09:22  

Hi, this is Sarah Brown, again, the host of the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women. I hope you are enjoying this episode, and gaining some tips and inspiration on how you can be happier, more successful, and experience less stress at work. If you would like to learn more about how you can empower the women in your organization to do the same, simply click on the show notes to see how you can connect with me. As an added bonus for my podcast guests, you will see how you can book 30 minutes with me to explore how you can implement a scalable, self-coaching program for the women in your organization. Simply visit bookachatwithsarahebrown.com. Now back to this informative episode.

Sarah E. Brown  10:19  

Very cool. And then once you’ve got it, then do you practice saying it over and over again until you believe it?

Wanda Wallace  10:25  

Practicing is certainly not a bad strategy and practicing that to your team and get comfortable saying, “I’m adding value in one way. I don’t have to know everything and add value in a hundred other ways.” And I’ll give you an example, I’m working with a woman at the moment, who is being challenged by her very savvy boss to step out of her deep expertise role and take a much larger enterprise-wide view and has given her a project to do that is going to help her achieve that. Okay? And her tendency, though, is she knows absolutely everything in her area of expertise, and she would typically dig into the details and say to the team, “Well, let’s do not this thing, but this and this and this and this, and this while we’re at it because we can do it all and drive that perfection”. What she’s having to learn to do today is to say, “No, there are three or four things I’m going to focus on that will really matter. And I will drive deeply on those. The rest, I’m going to let go.” 

Sarah E. Brown  11:27  

Got it. You talk about this transition from E- to S-Leadership being particularly difficult for women. Why do you think that’s the case?

Wanda Wallace  11:39  

Because I think our comfort zone is letting our work speak for itself. It’s true for men too. It’s not exclusively for women. But if I feel like a minority and an outsider in the dominant group that’s in the organization, the safest way to have my space is to have an area that I own and know better than anybody else. And then it’s so easy to just keep doing that thing. And they call on me because they need me to do that thing. That’s great, fantastic! And that’s fine if that’s where you want to sit for the rest of your life in your career. But if you have aspirations to step at a higher level, and have a bigger impact, then you have to learn to let somebody else step into the expertise spot, and you do a bit more of the spanning spot.

Sarah E. Brown  12:29  

Okay, so I can see myself in that. That was the trap that I personally got into. What is your number one piece of advice for women to get over that? 

Wanda Wallace  12:39  

Okay. All right. So the first piece is I’ve talked about how you add value. The second piece is that you got to get over the “I can’t delegate a story”. Because you’ve got to learn to delegate. You have to learn to focus on what really matters. Where’s the high-value, high-impact work that I’m going to do I’m not going to let that flail or go off the rails. And the rest is stuff that happens. Do you learn to let your team delegate? 

The problem with delegating is most of us believe that to delegate I hand it over to you, and I look away and say, “Oh, I hope you handle that really well.” And then I come back whatever time later, and I’m deeply disappointed at the quality of the outcome, or it went off the rails, or it didn’t happen, or whatever. That is ditching and deserting. It’s not delegating. 

Delegating is learning to break something into pieces, to have them ask questions so that you get the person to think for themselves about the step and you’re guiding that, not telling, but guiding with questions. And then it gives you a place to touch base along the journey, so you don’t lose control of it. It’s not abandoned, and it’s not micromanaged. Learning to delegate well is the next piece, and it’s fundamentally coaching. 

Sarah E. Brown  13:56  

Got it. Okay, anything else?

Wanda Wallace  13:58  

Well, those are the two big ones. The third one I was going to say is what I seem to be dealing with a lot at the moment is I’m seeing too many people in the mid and upper levels of the organization who really don’t understand how their senior-most teams think and operate. And so, therefore, they’re not making smart decisions about how to influence those people around change. And I’m surprised, you would think that we would have seen enough of this, maybe it’s just the COVID pandemic, maybe it’s the busyness– I don’t know. But I’m seeing way too many people who don’t understand how to persuade senior-most leaders to do something differently. That’s a skill you really have to get to and one of the cores there is learning to lean into the emotion. 

So to think about the emotional reaction of this senior leader, not just the facts and logic, to think about what that leader has to gain and what they have to lose by making this change. Thinking about who else in that group supports? And who’s opposed? And what are the consequences for that, for you and for another senior leader? So it’s leaning into the relationship dynamics and the emotions that are really I find essential for this influence up. A skill you got to work on. Yeah.

Sarah E. Brown  15:17  

It goes back to the relationship thing you brought up at the very beginning. So that’s what women can do for themselves. I tend not to emphasize this kind of thing because I’m really into 100% responsibility. We need to take responsibility for our own development and our own advancement. But I’m just curious, have you noted anything in your research that companies can do to actually ease the transition for women? Or anybody for that matter?

Wanda Wallace  15:47  

Yeah, I’m going to start with managers, because I really think managers can do a better job of describing the nature of the transition. So instead of saying, “Here’s this job. I want you to try it.” And she’s looking at it going, “I don’t know how to do that job. I like my expertise. I’m comfortable here.” We need to talk to her about how you move from being the Expert to being the Spanning. What are the skills? And how do you begin developing some of those skills along the way? When managers have that language, they do a much better job of getting her prepared for the transition. So I think that’s really important. 

And I think we default way too many times to if you’re smart, you’ll figure it out. But she’s been an Expert Leader and an effective leader for 10, 15, sometimes 20 years, and she’s got it. This is a change in how you lead. And that takes a transition. So we need to talk about that transition. Okay? Anybody can learn it. It’s not a matter of being promoted past your level of competence. It’s a matter of being promoted past your level of expertise, and now needing different leadership skills. 

So I think managers can talk about it. I think HR and leadership programs can talk about it. I think women can talk with each other about it. I think senior women can be better coaches and mentors about how they took these risky moves and how they dealt with some of the complexities of those moves.

Sarah E. Brown  17:10  

Mm-hmm. All right. I got it! So as we’re looking at this transition, you talk a lot about comfort zone. And this is clearly getting out of our comfort zone as we make this transition. And you reference three core questions we should ask ourselves, what are they?

Wanda Wallace  17:29  

Okay, we’ve already been talking about them. They are, “How am I going to add value to this workspace?” Number two, “What’s the work that uniquely I need to be doing, my work, as opposed to my team’s work?” Right, because that helps you focus. And then the third one is, “How am I now interacting with people to tap into that emotional content, to deal with the ambiguity, to be more strategic, and visionary, and all those things that we talk about with executive presence?” So it’s three questions. How do I need to be relating to people? 

Sarah E. Brown  18:05  

So that’s probably a very good summary of this conversation. How do I add value? What’s my unique work? And how do I need to be interacting with others, which is the relationship component? So, Wanda, is there any question that I should have asked you that I didn’t that will help my listeners understand this challenge and what they could do about it?

Wanda Wallace  18:28  

Yes, one question you didn’t ask me, and it has to do with the imposter syndrome. Hey, because when you move out of your comfort zone, if you are a normal adult, you will have a sense of imposter syndrome. You’re doing something you haven’t yet mastered. You’re going to feel very nervous about that. That nervous energy is normal. So stop feeling like there’s something wrong with you. It’s normal! It’s a growth step. And it is your brain’s default to make sure you don’t make changes because when you make changes, you could be unsafe. So that’s the brain’s mechanism of keeping us in a stable spot. So, therefore, it’s normal. 

So then the question is, how do you work through the nervousness, the anxiety, the fears that are there? And there’s a host of ways to do it. I’ll hit a couple of my favorite ones. 

One is to start to recognize the emotion that you’re feeling. Name that emotion. Write about that emotion. Rather than going, “Oh my gosh, I can’t do it.” “No, I’m nervous. What’s that about? Why am I nervous?” Contingency plans. “Okay, so if I don’t know this thing, what am I going to do about it? If this goes wrong, what am I going to do about it?”

Planning helps get the brain into proactive pre-formed frontal cortex activity. That helps. Taking a deep breath, and calming down the nervous system is another way, and focusing again on how you add value lets you bring that confidence back into play. And we could go on! There are many of these tips, but, fundamentally, those are the base techniques for dealing with the anxiety you have when you’re doing something new.

Sarah E. Brown  20:06  

What a great way to wind up! Wanda, where can my listeners find you?

Wanda Wallace  20:09  

You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook included. The best way is to go to my website at leadership-forum.com. There are all sorts of resources there. Subscribe to our newsletter. You can also check out my personal page, which is wandawallace.com.

Sarah E. Brown  20:28  

And all of that will be in the show notes. So Wanda, thank you so much for being here today!

Wanda Wallace  20:33  

Thank you for the invitation and the conversation. Good questions!

Sarah E. Brown  20:36  

It was great talking with you. 

Sarah E. Brown  20:39  

Thanks for listening to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women. If you like what you’re hearing, please go to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave a review. And if you would like more information on how we can help women in your organization to thrive, then go to www.sarahebrown.com. You can sign up for our newsletter, read show notes and learn more about our podcast guests, read my blog, browse through the books, or contact us for a chat. Goodbye for now!

Sarah E. Brown
Sarah E. Brown

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