Creating subject matters experts in your team

It is always important for a team to have diversity of skills and competences. This way, team members complement each other well and together they form a great force able to win. One way to take this to another level is by having Subject Matter Experts (SMEs).

This is most valuable when you have SMEs covering the different critical parts of what your team does rather than when you have many duplicated SMEs in the same fields—except in very specialised areas where you necessarily need more than a single SME for them to collaborate and share ideas at a deeper level.

First, you need to recognise the importance of having the SMEs. If it is an IT department, you want to have an expert for security side, an expert for software development, database systems and expert on troubleshooting and solving complex problems and so on.

In marketing too, you will have your areas where you need experts and the same in sales, human resources and several other departments, sections or teams even if not formed in terms of work departments.

The next question regards how you can create the SMEs. This reminds me of my postgraduate studies superviser at the University of Oxford some 15 years ago or so. Professor David Edwards was the leader of the Communications Engineering Lab at Oxford, leading a team of five or so professors and some 20 doctoral students.

He was pretty aware that for the Communications Lab team to excel, there was need for some experts within the team. First, he made sure that among the professors, each one of them had his own speciality area and that each of the area was complementing the other.

There was a professor specialised in optical communications, another for super-conducting materials and he himself was a specialist in microwave communications and so on.

Next was the need to have the students also assigned expertise areas. What Professor Edwards did was simple. If he found a student showing a little interest in something, he would publicly pronounce the student as an expert in that area. Immediately, that made the student to work hard and master the assigned expertise area.

I remember that one day, I was working on some lab equipment that most students used in the research known as the Vector Network Analyser (VNA). At the weekly tea on a Friday, Professor Edwards announced that I was a new expert on VNA and that any student who has any problem with VNA, needed to consult me. From then onwards, I spent a lot of hours to read the manuals of VNA and to practise using the VNA to a level where within weeks, I became an expert in VNA. He later assigned me two more areas of expertise. He did the same with every student member of the Communications Lab.

This way, our lab was full of experts. This means that we never had a problem that was difficult to solve because when one struggled with anything, Professor Edwards would direct the student to the expert for that problem. I found his approach in creating experts useful and practical.

By pronouncing someone as an expert even before one had become one, he motivated the student to immediately become one. Motivation can be so powerful. Motivation can make you do things that you would ordinarily not do.

If you are a team leader, you too can now create many SMEs using the technique of Prof Edwards.

If you are a team member, you can volunteer to become an SME for any of the sections or areas that is critical for your team’s success. Good luck as you create or become one of the SMEs for your team. This way, your team will rise and shine! n