Alistair Gordon, CEO of Expertunity, is driven by a mission to empower technical experts to reach their full potential by mastering enterprise skills that elevate their impact.

We learn about Alistair’s journey into expert development and his creation of The Expert-ship Model, a framework that helps technical professionals move beyond subject-matter expertise to become influential leaders within their organizations. The model outlines nine core capabilities across three domains: Technical, Relationship, and Value—ranging from solving complex problems and transferring knowledge to collaborating across teams, engaging stakeholders, understanding the business, and leading change.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Alistair Gordon, who is the CEO of Expertunity, a new global enterprise dedicated to helping technical experts everywhere reach their full potential. Alistair, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Steve. Thank you for the invite.

It’s great to have you and learn about this opportunity for experts, how to get them to reach their full potential. So, let’s start with your personal “Why,” your personal mission, and what are you doing to manifest it in your business?

So, over many years, I’ve worked for lots and lots of organizations, Steve, in many roles as a leader and as a consultant to lots of businesses. And mostly my prominence, if you like, is leadership development. Sort of topics that your podcast covers, very relevant and very familiar to me. But along the way, sort of 10 years or so ago, we discovered this large group of people who weren’t really being developed, technical experts most of your listeners will, I’m sure know one or other of these people, highly technical, they might be in finance, they might be in IT, whatever. And they’re technically brilliant, but they’re very stuck and frustrated, and not really fulfilling their potential and not necessarily having a fully fulfilling work life because they’re technically brilliant, but they’re missing some of what we call these enterprise skills that really help them add value at 2X, 3X to their organization. So having spotted the gap, we’ve done lots of research. We’ve worked with thousands and thousands of them now over the years and feel like we know them really well, Steve.

And the most fulfilling part of this is that once you show a technical expert how they can be a better expert, they attack it with military precision and they really lean into it. And both themselves and their families and the organizations they work for get just extraordinary benefits from them really leaning in and making the difference they know they can make.

And why do you think, Alistair, there is this gap? Is it not natural to not have the gap or is it the difference between the entrepreneur who develops a multifaceted approach to the expert who is more of in a silo and they just never got the chance to develop it. Why does that happen? Is this the corporate environment that takes care of it?

I mean, it’s absolutely the right question, Steve, from my perspective, because the answer is, as you might expect, multifaceted. So if we just look at it from the organizational perspective, most large organizations, even medium organizations, I know a lot of your listeners are, will have someone responsible for developing talent, but

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They even have a model called the 9-Box Grid, which most large organizations use to establish who is high potential talent and they are the people who get spent lots of money on them developing their skills and what have you. And the definition of potential for most organizations is the ability to lead more people in the future. So it’s people leadership orientated and what have you. And in a 9-Box Grid, they have this little box at the top left of the grid you can look it up on Google, 9-Box Grid, and you’ll see a box called technical experts. In some models, they call the box technical stars to make the technical experts feel a bit better. But basically, they’re very high performers, but they’re low potential because technical experts are not seen as potential future leaders. So, we work with those organizations closely to change their definition of potential and say it’s the potential to add more value they should be thinking about, in which case a lot of the technical experts move across into this sort of investment pool.

So, on the one hand, it’s the organizations. The talent team’s been given the mandate to find our next generation of leaders and that kind of excludes a lot of technical experts who don’t want to be people leaders. It’s not necessarily playing to their strengths. The experts themselves feel that the way to progress is to become even more expert and deeper and deeper experts. And that actually moves them further away, actually, from that sort of broad knowledge of their organization that they need in order to really deploy their technical expertise to the maximum extent.

Yeah, I can relate to this. I had a good friend of mine who was in computer programming and database architecture, and he kept moving to bigger and bigger companies. And at some point when he worked for IBM and Oracle, then he had to move and go to a bigger country where they would be able to pay for his expertise. And then he ended up with a very big company that went public. And that was his only way to increase his value was to work for bigger and bigger companies who serve bigger clients and with bigger value product to be able to get the leverage.

And I stayed where I was and I went into the leadership line because I realized that we were in the periphery and the only way to advance would be to generalize being more of an expert. So that’s very interesting. Very relatable. So, let’s talk about a framework that you developed, which you call The Expert-ship Model. What is this model and what is this designed to do?

Most organizations, larger organizations like your colleague went to, would have complex leadership capability frameworks. So, in other words, really a roadmap for people leaders as they grew through the organization. So there’d be the capabilities you need to have and master in order to be a frontline leader. And then the next one would be the capabilities you need to master to be a middle manager and then a general manager. And then, God at the end, as a CEO. The interesting thing is that we discovered is there’s no similar capability framework for technical experts.

They might have a capability expert, a capability framework specifically for their expertise, like project management or coding or what have you. But in general terms, how to be the best expert inside your organization. There was no roadmap or capability framework. So, we built this one. We decided to call it expert-ship rather than leadership because it is its own skill set in its own right. And the framework itself has nine capabilities. And these are the sort of capabilities that our research showed that the very best experts around the world have mastered all nine of these capabilities. Three of them, Steve, are what we call technical capabilities, which most experts are already very good at. But the other six are what we call enterprise skills. Occasionally, experts will call them soft skills. It’s not a good description. I’m on a personal mission to abolish this phrase from the vernacular because there’s nothing soft about these skills.

They’re quite difficult to learn and they have very high impact and so on. So we built this sort of roadmap and we use it to help organizations develop their experts and we work with experts themselves to assess where they’re already very strong in those capabilities and which capabilities are growth opportunities for them. And this helps generate a much more well-rounded technical expert,

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So there are nine skills, there are three technical skills and six expertise skills. And I think you mentioned that there are within the expertise skills, there are value skills and there are relationship skills.

That’s correct. So there’s three domains of capability, if you like. Technical capability, so that’s their expert knowledge, it’s how they go about solutioning or finding solutions to problems, which, of course, technical experts spend a lot of their time doing. And also, knowledge transfer is in that technical skills. How good are they at explaining what’s happening technically and training other people to build up their skills. And then in the relationship domain, we’re talking about things like collaboration, personal impact and stakeholder engagement.

So, most technical experts, just to use the example of your colleague, which is a great one, Steve, by the time that person arrived in a large organization, he would have had a very complex stakeholder map. He’d have been working on multiple projects globally. He might’ve had a line manager somewhere, but I bet he had three or four other really critical stakeholders that all of whom he was aiming to deliver for simultaneously probably. So, stakeholder engagement skills, collaboration skills, the way you influence people, communicate with people, and understand what is driving them, what motivates them, what their objectives are and KPIs are. Those sorts of skills, most technical experts are pretty good at having conversations with other technical people, but they struggle when they start working with generalists. So, that’s a skill set that they’re partially good at generally. I’m making these generalizations from all the data that we’ve captured because we assess experts against this model all the time, hundreds and hundreds of them every quarter.

And so, we’ve got a lot of data that suggests that they’re very good with some stakeholder groups and not with others. And then the final one is the value domain, which is usually the black hole, Steve. It’s the business acumen market context,

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Well, the Cobbler’s Sons are always bare feet. It’s kind of normal. But yeah, I mean, it sounds like it’s a very big program because expert knowledge, finding solutions, knowledge transfer, being able to do that and then collaborate and making a personal and big impact and selling your impact and then managing your stakeholders. And then business acumen, just one of nine. That is huge. And then understanding the market and the change. So this is an enormous lift. It’s almost like being an entrepreneur, like an intrapreneur training, that kind of thing.

Yeah, I think that’s a really good way of describing it because most technical experts are advisors to their organization. People sort of say, okay, well, how do we take cyber security as an example, which is obviously very topical at the moment. So, the organization is hiring people who are cyber experts and those people are supposed to develop systems and what have you that protect the assets and indeed the employees of the organizations they’re working for. But at the same time as while they’re doing that, they’re down usually, I mean in the weeds, Steve, because there’s a lot of detail involved in doing that. But at the same time, the organisation is saying, what do we need to do to do this properly? And those technical experts need to build a business case for the right sort of investment, tools, people, and software and so on.

And very often, they know what the organisation needs, but they’re not necessarily particularly good at articulating that to generalists. So they’re building an entrepreneurial case and getting the funds and resources needed to do that job properly. That’s the bit very often they’re missing and, by the way, frustrates them a lot. And yet ,all of those skills are, in my view, they’re easier to learn than the technical skills that’s their ticket to the game. But a lot of technical experts don’t see the enterprise skills as important. And as leaders, we’re partially responsible for that, I believe, because we tell them what a great technical job we’re doing, they’re doing, but when we see them engage and collaborate with a stakeholder, we don’t make a big fuss of that, and we should do, because that’s kind of the additional skill on top that makes all the difference.

Yeah, that’s interesting. And what about the personalities of these technical experts? Because often introverted people are the ones that gravitate toward expert-ship, and extroverted people, they want to communicate, they want to be out there and shake some trees and convince people, persuade people. So how do you get these experts out of their shells and motivate them to want to engage more and want to be more of a contextual person that collaborates?

It’s a great question. I’d say, I mean, we’ve now worked with thousands and thousands of experts and I’d say, again, just sort of thinking of the data, probably 75 to 80% are introverted, and some of those are very introverted. And I think you’re right. I do think the mentality of technical experts is very widely misunderstood by management and by senior leadership. They do operate in their technical bubble. It’s a safe space, Steve. That’s where they’re expert. When you’re a technical expert, your whole sheet is what you know at the end of the day. So I think they’re misunderstood because they can be perceived as negative.

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But they’re extremely good at seeing the downsides of suggestions first. And they tend to articulate these very articulately very early on. And a lot of your listeners will have had the experience at some stage or another in their careers, they’ll ask you, an IT person, what do you think of this idea? And the IT person will tell you 19 reasons why it won’t work. And then you might say, so you think it’s a bad idea. And then they’ll say, no, no, it’s a great idea. I just wanted you to understand how difficult it is going to be for me to execute it. So the answer to your question is we ask them to articulate what their challenges are and what their aspirations are, where they believe they can add extra value. And we help them work through what’s getting in the way of them being able to add that new value. The development is all about taking them to the next level of value creation at the end of the day. And once they’ve identified what the barriers are, some of which are management, for sure, but some of which are with their deficits in their skill set, then we work through a plan and say, right, what bits are you going to attack first? They’re generally very ambitious to add that extra value.

And once they see the value of developing some of their mastering, some of these additional enterprise skills, as I mentioned earlier on, they’re all terribly smart. So they’re very quick at being able to develop these skills. And to be honest with you, Steve, it’s an absolute professional joy to watch. And I just get a huge kick out of it, as my team do, because it’s amazing when you do something and you see the impact that you’re having. And this has impact, by the way, not just in their organizational settings, but so many people I’ve coached say it’s completely changed the way they operate and communicate with their family as well. And it really enriches their home life, not just their work life.

I can imagine. This makes them a much more multifaceted individual. One of the things that I was wondering, I mean, obviously you say that you bring these people out of their shells and they are eager, they know how to develop expertise and they realize that this is another level of expertise they can develop and they do it with gusto. But one thing that you said, which struck me, which was said that you can teach experts to be good with people at will. So can you elaborate on this idea that what does it take to make people good with other people at will?

I think one of the things that we learned very early on, Steve, is that you actually can’t teach a technical expert anything. You can’t be that sort of teacher and stand up there with a PowerPoint presentation and tell them, right, here’s how you should deal with people and here’s how you should say nice things to them and what have you. They have to want to be able to learn it themselves. They have to be able to see the payoff of putting the effort into it. Because most technical experts, because of the way I think we react to them as leaders sometimes, they think they’re just being more and more and more technical and having broader and broader technical scope, as your colleague did, is the way to go when in fact it’s adding a few additional skills that will be the case.

So most of the work that we do with technical experts is in group, and we ask them a lot of really difficult questions and challenge them to come up with incredibly insightful and smart answers. And of course, you can imagine they love this challenge, right? This is their whole sheet.

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But it definitely starts with saying, if you want to have more influence and impact and you’re currently not having that, what’s in the way? And I guess the one thing we do tell them is it’s not all management’s fault. It’s 50-50 here and yes, management need to think differently about your expertise and listen to you more, but you need to be very good to listen to. I’ve experienced a lot of experts when they get the chance to be in front of the CFO or the CEO, they completely mess it up by going into too much detail. And you see the CFO losing the will to live, Steve, with all this technical detail that the cyber experts going on about, I’m engaging with this learning. It’s that ability to help them probably build skills that maybe you and I have learned as through our leadership journey, which is versioning, figuring out what people actually want to know rather than what do we want to tell them and all of those sort of basic things that because experts have been so focused on building their technical skills, they’ve missed out on learning those things as they’ve gone along. So we’re helping them catch up.

Yeah, love it. Very interesting. So Alistair, you wrote a book, the title is Master Expert. So why did you write this book and what is your main message with this book?

Yeah, so I think we know we’re a relatively small company, although we have lots of very big clients, ironically, around the world. And we established that there’s 40 million technical experts, we think, in the world. And we think about 38 million of them need help. And we figured that we’re not going to be able to do that. So, the reason for writing the book was to say, well, people can’t necessarily attend our courses or afford that. And so, how do we get this message out to experts that this is an approach they might want to take? So the book is really a textbook and it’s structured in such a way that they can take our assessment for example and then figure out which chapters they really want to focus on and so on. You can imagine it goes through all nine of those capabilities. What does being an expert look like? What does master expert look like? What’s the difference? What skill sets do we need to master? How would an expert go about mastering them? What sort of actions would they take? What sort of people would they interface with and so on?

So if we take market expert, which the market context, I should say, which is the areas that you described earlier on, I mean, the business acumen piece and what have you is absolutely critical. You and I know as entrepreneurs and business leaders, we really need to understand what we’re doing and what our customers are doing and what our competitors are doing, what are those value propositions? How can we influence those value propositions so more people come to us? Those sorts of things are generally speaking, not things that most technical experts that have been on our courses are familiar with. So, in the chapters in the book around that, it’s like, how do you go about acquiring that knowledge? What sort of stakeholders do you need to start interfacing with? When you meet the CFO at a meeting, you don’t ask him or her, how are they? You have some very specific questions ready.

Most technical experts hate networking, Steve, because of the personality traits that they tend to have, being a bit more introverted. So we work very hard with experts to say, you’re not networking, you’re intelligence gathering. That’s the whole point. You suddenly got four minutes with a CFO. What questions are you going to ask that puts you on the map with that person, but also demonstrates that whichever technical team you’re representing is interested in financial performance, capital management, whatever the case may be? So, it’s that ability that the book is basically a manual for how to acquire these skills if you don’t have a coach or you can’t go on a formal programme.

Love it. So Alistair, if people would like to learn more, they want to read this book, they want to do the assessment, they want to maybe reach out to you, where can they find you?

Yeah, so I think the easiest thing to do is to go to expertship.com and on there they’ll find first and foremost this assessment that they can take if they want to. I mean, a lot of your listeners will be people leaders and entrepreneurs. A lot of them will probably have one or two technical experts. It struck me preparing for this interview, Steve, that the smaller businesses, it’s even more fraught finding the right technical expert. And then you’re likely to find a technical expert who needs this sort of development. So if you’re a people leader or a manager of an expert, you can buy them this book. And half of the book is online for free at expertship.com and there’s an assessment there. They can obviously reach out to us. We have coaches who are accredited in expert-ship around the world. So, if they need some coaching, which very often they do in terms of interpreting the assessment, then that’s easy for them to reach out to us. But a lot of value can just be leaning in, thinking about what’s getting in the way and using these tools, which are certainly the assessment tool is completely free, Steve, for anybody to figure out which areas have they got some skills deficits and how do they attack them.

Yeah. Okay. This is fascinating. So if you are a technical expert and you want to upgrade your skills so that the C-suite will listen to you and will want to promote you, or if you have some technical experts on your team that you would like to have a bigger impact or you want to have them have a bigger role so that they’re more energized, motivated for your business and you can allow you to keep them because these people always want to advance and they might go for a bigger company if you don’t look after them, then check out Master Expert, the book from Alistair Gordon and also expertship.com. Check out the evaluation, see where you land, and what are the next steps you need. So thank you Alistair. That was a very eye-opening interview and for those of you listening, if you found this interesting, then please follow us on YouTube and give us a review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for coming, Alistair, and thank you for listening.