MODERN LEADERSHIP
Why Your Expertise Is
Damaging Your Leadership
By Michael Bunting
I
n my experience as a mindfulness
and leadership coach to high level
executives, I’ve found time and
again that leaders like to be seen as
the “experts”–the ones who have all
the answers. This makes them feel
important and they believe it gives
them more credibility. However, the
truth is that being a beginner is a
much more effective strategy.
From Zen Buddhism we learn a
concept called “beginner’s mind.”
Beginner’s mind is viewing the world
and our experiences with an innocent
mind devoid of preconceptions,
50 ModernBusiness
October 2016
expectations, judgments, and
prejudices. Attitudinally, it is
beautifully summed up by the quote
from Socrates, “I would rather be
proved wrong than right.”
It is to explore and observe things
with a deep sense of openness,
much like a child explores the world
with curiosity and wonder, with no
fixed point of view. It is to lose our
“expert’s mind,” which tends to be
rigid, calcified, and fixated.
When we view the world through
expert’s mind, we think we know
all the answers, and are therefore
closed to new possibilities.
Under the influence of expert’s
mind, we fall prey to two common
cognitive biases: confirmation bias
and sunk cost bias.
We’ve all heard of confirmation
bias: the tendency to search for or
interpret information that confirms
our beliefs or hypotheses. We
typically approach something with
a preconceived notion, or a fiercely
held belief. Then, we proceed
to search only for evidence that