Once again this week, I’m tackling a topic that has been sent in by a subscriber and it’s one I suspect a lot of you will recognise:
“One of my key challenges as a manager is setting clear expectations, creating realistic goals and forecasts, and holding teams accountable when I am not a hands-on expert in their specific discipline. I’ve encountered this more frequently as I’ve progressed in my career.”
This also happens to be a topic that I feel very strongly about in that I don’t believe that in order to be an effective manager, that you also need to be an expert in a specific area. Yes, you need to know your stuff, but I think that there comes a point (especially when managing senior folks) that your leadership skills matter more.
Before we get into it, here’s a quick test for you.
Think of the person on your team whose work you understand least. Now imagine they tell you a piece of work will take three weeks.
Could you tell whether that’s a good estimate or not?
If the honest answer is “I’d just have to trust them”, you’re not alone. And it’s not a failure. It’s what happens when you get promoted. The further up you go, the more of your team does work you’ve never done yourself. Developers, designers, analysts, finance, legal. At some point, you stop being the best person in the room at the thing and start being the person responsible for it anyway.
The problem isn’t that you lack expertise. The problem is that most of us respond to that gap in one of two unhelpful ways which we’ll come to shortly.
This genuinely happened to me once as well. There was a day when I was managing a team of three people and they were having a conversation about a client problem. I listened in and I didn’t fully understand what they were saying or proposing – their technical ability had surpassed mine and I couldn’t actually say if their plan was solid or not.
I won’t lie – this scared me. I’d always been used to being not just their manager on paper, but also practically more experienced than them. This was the first time that I felt like I knew less than they did and it made me worry about my ability to manage them.
Why this is so hard (and why we get it wrong)
Most managers got where they are by being good at something. Your expertise was your credibility. People listened to you because you knew what you were talking about and you proved it with the work that you produced.
So when you’re managing work you can’t do yourself, it quietly threatens that sense of credibility. You worry that asking basic questions will expose you. You worry the specialist will think you don’t get it. You worry that if you challenge an estimate, you’ll be wrong and look silly.
That fear pushes managers into one of two traps.
The first is abdication
“You’re the expert, you tell me.”
You accept every estimate, every plan, every explanation for a delay, because you don’t feel qualified to question it. It feels respectful. It feels like trust. But it means expectations are set entirely by one side and accountability becomes impossible because you’ve got nothing to hold anyone to.
Not to mention that no matter how good some people are at their roles, some of them are very bad at scoping and estimating time.
The second is overcompensation
You can’t judge the substance, so you scrutinise what you can see. The formatting of the report. Which tool they used. How many hours they logged. You end up micromanaging the parts of the work that matter least, because they’re the only parts you understand.
There’s also something on the other side worth mentioning. Specialists often aren’t great at translating their work for non-specialists. Not because they’re being difficult, but because nobody’s ever asked them to. So they talk in jargon, give single-number estimates with no context and assume you’ll speak up if you need more. Which, as we’ve established, you won’t.
What it looks like when it’s going wrong
How do you know if you’ve fallen into these kinds of positions? The following are signals to look for.
The nodding dog
Someone gives you an update full of terms you don’t fully understand and you nod along. You leave the meeting with no clearer idea of whether things are on track than when you walked in. If you’ve ever repeated a specialist’s update to your own boss and hoped nobody asked a follow-up question, you’ve been here.
The moving finish line
Deadlines slip and each time there’s a reason. It might be a perfectly good reason or it might not be. The issue is you genuinely can’t tell the difference, so you accept every one. After the third slip, you start to feel frustrated, but you don’t have any grounds to push back on and may have backed yourself into a corner.
The surprising outcome
You only find out there’s a problem at the point of delivery. Not because anyone hid it, but because nobody agreed what “flagging a risk” looked like or when it should happen. Everything was “going fine” until the day it wasn’t – which can fall right at the deadline, meaning it’s too late to do anything about it.
The method meddler
You notice yourself giving detailed feedback on the bits you understand (the slide design, the email wording, the spreadsheet layout) while saying nothing about the substance. This is often the clearest sign you’ve drifted into overcompensation.
If any or all of these sound familiar, then here are some tactical ways to overcome them.
Five ways to set expectations and hold people accountable without being the expert
1. Own the “what” and “why”. Let them own the “how”
You don’t need to understand the method to be super clear on the outcome.
Your job is to define what the work is for, what success looks like in business terms (which you probably understand more than them) and what constraints matter (budget, deadline, risk appetite, client sensitivity). Their job is to work out how to get there.
So instead of “Can you build the new reporting dashboard?”, try: “By the end of the quarter, the client needs to be able to see, in under five minutes, whether their campaigns are working. They’re not technical. If they have to ask us what a chart means, we’ve failed. What would it take to get there?”
You’ve set a clear, tangible expectation without needing to know a single thing about how dashboards get built. And you’ve given them something specific to be accountable for.
2. Ask them to teach you the shape of the work, not the details
You don’t need to learn their job. You need to understand enough about how it works to ask sensible questions.
Book 30 minutes with each specialist on your team and ask things like:
- “What are the main stages of this kind of work?”
- “Where does it usually go wrong?”
- “What are the things that make it take longer than expected?”
- “What would you want a manager to understand about your work that most don’t?”
That last question is a big one. Most specialists have been waiting years for someone to ask them about it.
This isn’t about becoming an expert. It’s about building a map. Once you know where the usual sticking points are, you know where to check in and which delays are normal versus which ones are worth a conversation.
3. Forecast in ranges and assumptions, not single numbers
A single number (“three weeks”) gives you nothing to work with. You either accept it or you argue with it and you’re not qualified to do either.
Instead, ask for a range and the assumptions behind it:
“What’s the best case, the likely case and the worst case? And what would you need for the best case to happen?”
Now you’re having a very different conversation. You don’t need to judge whether three weeks is right. You can judge whether the assumptions sound reasonable (“This assumes the client signs off the copy in two days” – has that ever happened?) and you can agree what happens if one of them changes.
Then do one thing: keep track of estimates versus actual over time. Not to catch anyone out, but to calibrate. After a few months, you’ll know that one person always estimates optimistically and another always builds in plenty of buffer. That’s judgement you can build without any technical expertise at all.
4. Borrow the expertise you don’t have
You don’t have to be the only check on quality.
Find someone who does know the discipline and can give you a sense check now and then. That might be a senior person in another team, a peer at another company, a trusted freelancer, or an industry benchmark. “Is three months normal for a site migration this size?” is a question that someone in your network can answer in two minutes.
You can also build this into the work itself. Peer reviews within the team. A quick external review on big pieces. Asking the specialist: “Who would you want to check this before it goes out?”
This isn’t about not trusting your team. It’s about not making yourself the single point of judgement on something you’re not equipped to judge.
5. Hold people accountable for behaviours you can actually see
This is the big one.
You might not be able to judge the quality of someone’s code, but you can absolutely judge whether they flagged a risk early, gave you a clear update, or did what they said they’d do by when they said they’d do it.
So make those things an explicit agreement. Something along the lines of:
“I won’t always be able to tell if the plan is right and that’s fine. That’s what you’re here for. What I need from you is no surprises. If you think we’re going to miss a date, or an assumption has changed, tell me as soon as you know. Not when you’re sure, when you suspect.”
Then use a handful of questions that will work in any discipline:
- “How confident are you that we’ll hit this, out of ten?”
- “What’s the biggest risk right now?”
- “What would make you change the plan?”
- “What do you need from me?”
The confidence score is particularly useful. You don’t need to understand the work to notice it dropping from an eight to a five over two weeks. And you don’t need to understand it to ask, “What changed?”
That’s real accountability. Not accountability for a number you couldn’t verify in the first place, but accountability for being honest, early and clear. Which, frankly, is what you need from your experts more than anything else.
You can still trust people completely. This isn’t about needing to become a micromanager or an absolute expert in everything. It’s about replacing blind trust with informed trust.
