Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) provide invaluable specialized talent that, when leveraged effectively, drive business objectives and support cross-functional initiatives. But if you are an SME, you may know what it’s like to be asked for expert guidance and walk away committed to an entirely new task list in addition to a full workload – sometimes without a clear picture of your role or time commitment. Unfortunately, this happens across organizations and industries, and results in SMEs having a harder time than other colleagues balancing priorities and maintaining a sustainable, predictable work cadence.
One of the major human resources trends in the always-evolving landscape of how and where work is performed is an emphasis on internal mobility. For SMEs, this may look like a promotion on their current team, taking a role adjacent to their specific subject matter expertise, or becoming trained in a completely new skill set. Despite the trajectory, the nature of internal mobility means that some SME roles are not well-defined or scoped.
This is particularly true when SMEs are responsible for providing time and expertise to external stakeholders (e.g., customers, clients, government partners) and internal colleagues. For many organizations, external stakeholders take precedence; but in the instance of SMEs, internal demands are often made so that other colleagues can deliver for their external stakeholders. This becomes even more complex when we acknowledge the various functions that SMEs play across tactical and strategic levels – being an advisor, enabler, and doer for projects and tasks related to their area of expertise. This complexity results in SMEs experiencing greater opportunity for confusion related to prioritization.
Through our Organizational Diagnostic tool, we’ve collected data from more than 50,000 individuals across hundreds of cross-industry teams.
Our analysis shows that individual contributors and first-level manager SMEs have a harder time maintaining a predictable work cadence and balancing priorities than their generalist counterparts. We see this happen most frequently for two reasons.
- The organization does not have enough access to the SME expertise, so they overwhelm a select few individuals or teams.
- The SME(s) do not have enough role clarity to prioritize requests from colleagues with their existing workload.
Why is this relevant? It’s already hard to find the specialized talent needed to meet business goals, so once the right SMEs have been on-boarded in their role, leaders and SMEs must work together to ensure the talent is being engaged and leveraged strategically by the organization.
What can you (the SME) do?
Step 1: Connect With Leadership on the Organization’s Needs
SMEs receiving consistent requests for support can be a good indicator that the organization is operating in a highly networked way – with leaders and peers across the enterprise understanding when they need to pull in cross-functional SMEs to enhance their work. This is good. But when this is happening to the point of overwhelm, it’s incumbent upon SMEs to inform their leader(s) with actionable inputs.
SME decisions around workload prioritization must be informed by a clear understanding of the organization’s goals and strategy, as some requests and projects will advance the strategy more than others. If you can catalog the types of requests and needs the organization has shared with you and articulate them to your senior leaders, then you can arm your senior leaders with the information they need to make appropriate strategic decisions related to resourcing and prioritization for the organization. One option might be to hire additional SMEs or provide necessary technical training and education to existing employees; but if that is not possible, or if the requests received do not help drive the strategy, then senior leaders must advise the organization on when and how to leverage SMEs more effectively.
In 2022, McChrystal Group partnered with a team of SMEs at a pharmaceutical company to help them reach their potential by collaborating as a collective rather than highly skilled individual operators. The SMEs each believed that they were critical to the delivery of an inspiring mission, and believed in that mission, but they lacked the guidance and infrastructure necessary to enable them to be effective together. Upon initial assessment, 74% of colleagues agreed that the organization had an inspiring mission, and 57% felt their work was important to the success/failure of the organization, but only 19% agreed that they understood how their team's goals aligned with the organization's goals.
Further, only 38% agreed that their manager had provided role clarity. One colleague noted, “It's hard to even say what the strategies are. There are descriptions of things that we'd like to do and broad slogans about how we should be working, but there is next to no tangible, actionable statements saying 'We are trying to achieve X and we are going to do it by doing Y.'” Without a clear understanding of how the strategy influenced tangible action and prioritization at the individual contributor level, the organization struggled to deliver business targets, despite an incredible collection of talent and subject matter expertise.
McChrystal Group partnered with this organization to close the gap between strategy and action through a series of alignment and prioritization activities. In addition to the steps outlined in this article, we re-oriented and optimized the organization’s internal operating rhythm to better support solution delivery, expertise development, and organizational learning. This provided space for leaders to model and champion the decision-making culture needed for agility and empowerment – including decision guardrails around what projects and products were most important for SMEs to support. It also provided a forum for real-time conversations around workload and resource-sharing amongst SMEs, which lessened the pressure on each individual SME to intake and execute colleague requests in a silo.
Leverage the following SME Needs Assessment to assess the types of questions and requests you receive most frequently. Then set time with your leader to discuss their perspective on your prioritization.
SME Needs Assessment
- Think of 5-10 recent requests for support you have received.
- Which requests did you complete and in what order?
- Can you explain why? Does your reasoning have to do with driving broader organizational strategy?
- What type of support were you providing?
- Advisor: Providing insight, asking probing questions, listening to a problem set and brainstorming solutions.
- Enabler: Providing critical information or limited task completion to accelerate a project that someone else owns and is responsible for.
- Doer: Completing projects or tasks related to your area of expertise. Can look like a technical request, leveraging a skillset (and possibly software) that only you have.
- How long did each request take you? How much time do you think you should have spent on that request, based on its relevance to the strategy?
- Did you have to make tradeoffs to accomplish any of these requests? What were they?
- Were these requests reflective of the type of support often needed from you?
These questions should help you formulate and articulate a recommendation. For example, “I feel my talent is best used in an advisory and enabling capacity for these types of requests. I should only prioritize ‘doing’ the work if the request meets these criteria (e.g., is an external stakeholder request, can exclusively be accomplished using my technical expertise, and will take less than 10 hours). Otherwise, the request may not be worth completing right now, at all, or in this way (perhaps someone else can still achieve the objective in a different way).” This is an actionable recommendation that leaders can leverage to create decision guardrails for you and others.
Step 2: Define Your Role
While individual contributors and first-level managers must create role clarity in partnership with their leader(s), there are still ways to independently focus on what matters by reviewing measures of success and bandwidth.
1. Identify what success looks like in your role. Consider:
- Key performance indicators and metrics for you and your position.
- Your growth priorities and goals.
- How your unique value is connected to the organizational/team strategy.
2. Conduct a decisions and tasks audit. Review the various decisions, projects, and tasks you own. Answer these questions. If the answer to any of these questions is no, consider how you can broker a relationship between colleagues, empower those making the request to take on more of the project, or work with them to reprioritize the request in alignment with your priorities and their deadlines.
- Does your formal role require that you make this decision or complete this task?
- Does your unique skills, knowledge, or experience require you to make the decision or complete the task?
- Do you have a desire to make the decision or complete the task?
- Does this task drive organizational/team strategy?
Step 3: Broker Relationships
Identify colleagues who have similar expertise, experience, or perspectives as you. While there may be regulatory or technical reasons why some decisions and tasks must remain with you or your team, there are likely colleagues who understand enough to be an enabler for the rest of the organization, meaning they can still accelerate the requesting colleague’s project.
When you receive requests where colleagues in your network could be a value add, make a direct connection between the two parties. This may be a transition for SMEs who have become the go-to resource for their functional, systems, or process expertise. It may feel threatening or risky to release control over projects or tasks closely aligned with your expertise. However, this brokering will help lighten the number of enabling and doing tasks on your plate, create space for you to focus on what matters most, and grow the network within the enterprise.
Step 4: Build Your Brand
Reinforce the type of projects and tasks that you are best situated to support by building your brand.
- Generate internal FAQs and resources related to your expertise. Consider frequent questions you receive from various parts of the organization and create resources that offer your high-level expertise in a more expedited or automated way. This expertise can be shared via Community Resource Groups, Learning Communities, and team meetings. It may not answer all questions, but it can enable colleagues to understand if, how and when to leverage you. This can weed out initial questions or calls for requests and narrow your focus to highly specialized needs, without limiting the organization’s access to your expertise.
- Schedule 1:1s with cross-functional peers and leaders to talk about their needs and identify ways you can best leverage your expertise to drive enterprise initiatives.
- Write articles or posts (LinkedIn, internal information-sharing platforms) describing connections between your area of expertise and cutting-edge opportunities, current events, and ways of thinking. These can help you drive growth priority progress and breakthrough goals.
In today’s complex environment, individual contributors and first-level manager SMEs play an essential role in an organization’s ability to operate in an agile and networked way. While SME expertise may be in high demand, your energy and time are finite. To ensure you are leveraging your talents in alignment with the overarching team and organization strategy, assess the needs of your peers and cross-functional partners, define your role with your leader, amplify your expertise by brokering relationships between colleagues, and build your brand across the organization.
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