Identifying Key Experts

Earlier as we looked at maximizing the return on investment in relationships, I stressed the importance of choosing them wisely and nurturing those relationships to ensure everyone involved had ample opportunity for growth. While identifying the key experts we’ll need in our lives in order to compensate for the limits we recognize in ourselves will certainly involve folks we interact with directly, we won’t have the luxury of doing so only with those who will block time for us any time we reach out; definitely not when we start out and maybe not ever.

I was certainly blessed to work directly with some great mentors, and still have the opportunity to learn from a bunch of amazing leaders today. If not for Terry, Rod, Kevin, Chris, and so many others who are willing to respond to text messages and answer my calls, I’d hate to think about how different my life would be - and I’m sure any impact I could make on others would be drastically reduced. But if I would have relied solely on experts I could reach out to directly, even mentorship from these men (and so many others) would have hit a ceiling. Not only did they each have heavy demands on their time, keeping any one of them from being by my side continuously, much of what I needed to know was already available to me - even before I had 24/7 access to resources like Google or AI. I just had to learn how to find what other experts had made available.

I often share how Cindy and I gave up going to concerts (and nearly any other type of leisure activity) for more than the first decade we were married. Neither of us had graduated college, which was another limit we each had to acknowledge whether we liked it or not, and our discretionary income was limited. Honestly, it was almost nonexistent! Although I frequently talk about the discipline we developed to study any resource we could get our hands on that would help us learn more about communicating effectively or earning influence with our coworkers, I rarely go into the specifics of how we did that. For the first several years of our marriage, I drove the 1994 Dodge Dakota pickup that I bought just before I graduated from high school. It had a ton of miles and I won’t pretend that I had followed even modest routine maintenance suggestions. One of the many issues I never bothered to address was the broken air conditioner. No big deal, though, because I didn’t have to worry about the power window controls failing; the crank always worked. When it came to hearing the radio, I just turned up the volume. That said, the CD player was also broken. As we dug into any audio lesson we could find, I was limited to listening to cassette tapes from a Walkman-size player with an external speaker that devoured AA batteries. Also not a big deal in cooler weather, but summertime meant holding it up to my ear with one hand and steering with the other since it wasn’t loud enough to hear with the windows rolled down. And still not a big deal until I had to change gears… 

Enough of whining, you get the point. Through all that, I listened to hundreds of audio books and thousands of other lessons from experts I never would have had access to any other way. Not only did that allow me to gain insight from sources I had no other way of connecting with back then, it provided me with a foundation for getting even more value from the time I had with the folks who were mentoring me directly. Although I didn’t have to search for those resources on microfiche, it was still a bit more challenging to find all that I needed back then than it is today; praise God for search engines like Google and all we can find in just a few clicks on YouTube! 

The moral of the story is that pinpointing experts who can help us overcome (or at least compensate for) our limits accelerates our personal and professional growth. And when we put what we learn into practice, the teams we’re part of will grow too. As we use the resources we have access to where we are, we’ll have the opportunity to start building a knowledge network. Before we look at how, I’ll challenge you to identify at least one expert you can consult on a gap you’ve identified. Remember, this doesn’t have to be a conversation you have in person…