When Expertise Makes People Feel Smaller
- Sarah Gruneisen
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
Last week I was helping someone design a security training.
We started where most technical conversations start.
What content should be covered?
What labs should people complete?
What skills should they learn?
What stories should be included?
What security concepts were most important?
The conversation made perfect sense.
And yet, somewhere in the middle of it, I felt something nagging at me.
Because I have sat through a lot of trainings in my life.
š As an engineer.
š As a leader.
š As a consultant.
š As a coach.
And if Iām honest, most of the ones I remember were not memorable because of what they taught me.
They were memorable because of how they made me feel.
ā¤ļøāš„ Some left me energized.
ā¤ļøāš„ Some left me curious.
ā¤ļøāš„ Some left me believing I was capable of more than I thought.
š¤ Others left me feeling stupid.
Not because I was.
Because of what happened in the room.
š¤ Iāve sat in technical labs where I couldnāt keep up.
Not because I didnāt understand the topic.
Not because I lacked experience.
Iāve been an engineer since the late 1990s.
But because the pace was overwhelming.
The cognitive load was too high.
The room felt competitive instead of collaborative.
The focus was on getting the right answer rather than exploring the problem.
And slowly, almost invisibly, I started comparing myself to everyone else.
Maybe youāve experienced that too.
You stop asking questions.
You stop experimenting.
You become cautious.
You become quiet.
Not because youāre incapable.
Because something in the environment told you that being wrong was dangerous.
As we talked, I found myself asking a different question.
Not:
āWhat should people learn?ā
But:
āWhat should people leave with?ā
The difference matters.
A lot.
Because I have met people who completed every exercise and learned very little.
And Iāve met people who never finished the exercise but walked away transformed.
The older I get, the more convinced I become that leadership and learning are not primarily about information.
Theyāre about identity.
Theyāre about what people begin to believe is possible for themselves.
Every room teaches something.
Every workshop teaches something.
Every leader teaches something.
The question is whether weāre teaching people that they are capableā¦
ā¦or teaching them that someone else is.
I think this is why so many organizations struggle with transformation.
They focus on transferring knowledge.
They focus on frameworks.
They focus on process.
They focus on tools.
They focus on AI.
They focus on technology.
And then they wonder why people donāt change.
Knowledge alone rarely changes people.
Experience does.
Belonging does.
Trust does.
Feeling safe enough to contribute does.
Feeling seen does.
Feeling capable does.
I found myself saying:
āThe goal is not to make the trainer the hero.ā
The goal is to make everyone in the room the hero.
And leadership works exactly the same way.
The best leaders Iāve worked with werenāt the smartest people in the room.
Some were.
Some werenāt.
That wasnāt what made them extraordinary.
What made them extraordinary was how people felt after interacting with them.
People left feeling larger.
More capable.
More confident.
More trusted.
More willing to try.
More willing to speak.
More willing to lead.
THATāS OWNERSHIP
Iāve spent much of my career in technology.
For years I was often the only woman in the room.
Or one of very few.
And Iāve seen both sides of this.
Iāve seen expertise used to teach.
And Iāve seen expertise used to establish status.
One creates growth.
The other creates dependence.
One invites people in.
The other reminds them they donāt belong.
One creates future leaders.
The other creates followers.
That distinction feels even more important in an AI era.
Content is becoming abundant.
Information is everywhere.
Explanations are cheap.
What remains rare is the ability to create environments where people can think, learn, contribute, question, and grow.
What remains rare is leadership.
Real leadership.
The kind that leaves people stronger than you found them.
So hereās the question Iāve been carrying with me since that conversation:
When people leave your meetingsā¦
Your workshopsā¦
Your coaching sessionsā¦
Your leadershipā¦
Do they feel more aware of how capable you are?
Or more aware of how capable they are?
Because leadership is not about being the hero of the story.
Itās about creating the conditions for other people to discover that they can be heroes too.
š
If this article resonated, perhaps youāre learning to lead without needing to be the smartest voice in the room, create trust without controlling everything, and help others grow without shrinking yourself in the process.
Thatās exactly the journey we explore in Leadership Landing, where we help leaders build the self-awareness, trust, courage, and human skills needed to lead in an increasingly complex world. Applications for the next cohort beginning mid-August are currently open at TheLeadershipLanding.com. (Only runs twice per year, donāt miss out!)
And if your organization is navigating leadership development, transformation, culture change, or AI adoption, Iād love to explore how Xebia can help create environments where both people and business outcomes thrive.
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