Why do teams with a high-performing subject matter expert sometimes deliver worse results?
It often comes down to the approach of the team’s internal expert. Instead of viewing their role as one that lifts collective performance, they can operate from a personal performance perspective. This sometimes occurs because the organisation lacks the structure and direction to enable experts to support their teams.
In the absence of knowledge management, training pathways and documented procedures, the expert is implicitly expected to lead by role modelling correct performance. They have been elevated into a leadership type role because they are the most experienced and seem to have the greatest store of undocumented knowledge – not necessarily because they are best suited to support, coach and train others. Without structures, expectation and guidance in how to best support team members, the expert defaults to the familiarity of processing the most complex tasks, leaving the opportunity to lift the whole team underdone.
Why it happens
The expert knows all the variations, the nuance, the edge cases, the discretionary calls. But their less experienced colleagues rarely have access to that information. Many standard procedures are either poorly documented or not at all, and most don’t handle the complex variations well. Exceptions are not captured. Training is often ad hoc, ungraded and inconsistent.
So, the team relies on the heroic expert to answer every question, resolve every uncertainty, and step in when things are unclear. They become central to performance and are rewarded for it. Staff seek them out. Leadership relies on them for quick decisions. Their knowledge is prized. They feel valued, even as they unintentionally entrench the very issues causing inefficiency.
The more scenarios they solve, the deeper their knowledge gets. And the more they are relied on, the less likely they are to step back, document, or train others to take on the load. There is no incentive to reduce variation or enable others to handle it.
This reinforces a loop: the more they are needed, the more the expert will come to believe their approach is working. They are caught in the activity trap, too busy to document, delegate or train.
When expertise becomes overprocessing
Often, these experts begin to overprocess because of their high focus on quality. Knowing all the exceptional ways work can go wrong, they begin to review tasks unnecessarily, second guessing team decisions (and even their own), and reworking items to avoid mistakes that may not even exist. They are introducing excess effort and that role modelling slows the entire team down. While their quality checks may occasionally ‘catch’ an error, the cost of this overprocessing across all items across the whole team quickly outweighs the value. The service or product backlog grows. Customers must wait longer. The pursuit of perfection eventually can break the system.
Team impact: uncertainty and attrition
This behaviour also affects team culture. Colleagues begin to doubt themselves. Some start mimicking the overprocessing out of fear. High performing team members leave, not because they lack capability, but because the system has evolved to reinforce the expert as central to knowledge, which is not for scalable for team success.
Team members may not be consciously aware that the expert’s behaviour is limiting their personal performance. Each time an error is “caught” that they were not trained to avoid, it erodes their confidence. New starters might ignore it at first, assuming it is part of learning. But when it is still happening weeks or months later, most capable team members will look elsewhere for roles where they can succeed independently. Then expert / novice loop is further entrenched as you’re left with an experienced individual surrounded by the lower capability team members who haven’t moved on and the new starters.
What good looks like
As with all operational work, context matters. Defining an acceptable error rate and quality level is essential. But the real shift comes when the expert’s role is to lift quality and performance systemically – in other words, when the team still performs well without needing to refer regularly to the expert.
This shift is possible, but it needs to be an organisational expectation. One reinforced and praised by leadership, and supported through practical systems like:
- A core process and procedure library, clearly documented
- Proportional documentation of exceptions, trained over time
- Workflows that identify and separate exceptions for targeted handling
- A structured training matrix, including waves of exception training at the intermediate level
- A simple expectation: if the expert is asked a question, they note it, document it, and ensure it becomes part of shared learning.
With applied effort and organisational support, the expert can move from solo performer to system builder and become the kind of leader who lifts capability across the team, sustainably. We embed it within our competency framework, which you can read about here in my article – (8) From Attrition to Advantage | LinkedIn