292,000 data points can't be wrong: here's four recommendations for companies who want better relationships with their experts and individual contributors
Summary: Four tips for hiring, developing, motivating and retaining individual contributors and other subject matter experts.
Written by Grant Heinrich 25 Mar 2021

Yesterday our CRO Darin Fox presented four recommendations on “what does a high-performing expert look like?” - coders, scientists, researchers, engineers, individual contributors.

The recommendations are based on analysis of 4000 stakeholder inputs into the performance reviews of experts, with roughly 292,000 data points.

Darin made four recommendations:

  • Always hire experts who show interest in mentoring, succession planning, and industry trends outside the technical sphere - the data shows they’re pretty much guaranteed to be strong across the board

  • The most effective development you can offer experts is to build their commercial acumen, and help them take leadership of change.

  • Despite the stereotype, never assume experts are “bad with people”. Actually their stakeholders are pretty happy with them.

  • And finally, and this to me is really important: You can reduce flight risk, ie motivate and retain experts by challenging them to take on the “hidden” parts of the expert role to their mandate.

Download the presentation below.

Download our presentation deck on what makes a high performing technical subject matter expert?