I Googled my own industry.

I Googled reinsurance before the meeting.

I had just joined a financial services firm after a long career in medical devices and pharma. Before I got there, insurance meant the policy on my house. Now everyone around me seemed to speak a foreign language. I was trying to get enough of the basics down to follow the conversation without showing how little I understood.

My title made it uncomfortable. They had hired me into a senior role, and I was supposed to bring experience and answers. Sitting at my desk searching for a basic explanation of the industry I had just joined did not feel particularly senior.

So I kept my learning to myself. I listened carefully in meetings. When someone used a term I didn't know, I made a mental note and looked it up later. I don't remember much about that particular meeting anymore. I do remember how badly I wanted to walk into it looking like I belonged there.

The funny part is that this wasn't the first time I had worked in a business where the people around me knew far more about the product than I did.

Earlier in my career I worked alongside engineers in orthopedics and vision care. They understood the science and the technical details at a level I never would. That was their expertise. My work needed a different view. I learned enough about the products to step back and see how everything connected. Where did one decision create a problem downstream? Why were two parts of the organization solving the same problem differently?

The engineers could go deeper than I could. I could see wider.

Somewhere between those years and my first week in insurance, I forgot that.

The longer you are good at something, the stranger it feels to be a beginner again.

Early in your career nobody expects you to know everything. Asking questions is part of the job. Then people start coming to you for answers. You get promoted for your expertise, and at some point competence becomes part of who you are.

That makes being new harder. You move into a different industry or inherit a team you’ve never led. Suddenly there are things everyone else seems to understand that you don't. A sentence shows up in your head. 

So you get careful about which questions you ask. You listen a little longer before admitting you're lost. You nod through the acronym and figure it out later. I did plenty of that.

Eventually I learned enough about reinsurance that I stopped having to look up the basics. What stayed with me had very little to do with reinsurance.

I had confused being unfamiliar with the industry with being unprepared to lead in it. Everything that had made me effective before came with me. I still knew how to listen for what wasn't working and how to follow a problem across functions. That was the expertise they hired me for. My job was to understand enough to know what to do with what the product experts knew.

Seeing it that way took the pressure off and made me a better learner. Once I stopped treating every gap as evidence that I didn't belong, I asked better questions. I could listen without spending half the conversation proving I already understood.

The higher up you go, the easier it is to believe you should already know.

That belief can make capable leaders hide the exact questions that would help them learn faster. You listen longer than you need to. You fill in the blanks yourself. You wait until after the meeting to look up what you could have asked in the moment.

At some point, leadership requires enough confidence to say, “I don’t understand that yet. Walk me through it.”

The question is simple. Saying it can feel harder than it should.

What are you pretending to understand right now because you think someone at your level should already know?

If you’ve ever nodded along and figured it out later, hit reply and tell me.

Until next Tuesday.
Ceaneh