The most valuable people in any organization have deep smarts — business-critical expertise built up through years of experience which helps them make wise, swift decisions. If you wish to become this go-to person in your company, but don’t have the time or opportunity to accumulate all the experience of your predecessors, acquire the knowledge in a different way — by consciously thinking about how the experts around you operate and deliberately learning from them. Of course, you shouldn’t aim to become a carbon copy of another person. Deeply smart people are a unique product of their particular mind-set, education, and experience. But you should be able to identify the elements of their knowledge and behavior that make them so valuable to the organization.
Adapted from “Make Yourself an Expert” by Dorothy Leonard, Gavin Barton, and Michelle Barton.
