Leadership authority and subject-matter expertise are not always found in the same person.
A senior leader may understand the organisation, its priorities and the commercial consequences of a decision better than anyone else in the room, while a member of their team understands a particular system, customer segment, technical process or emerging technology in far greater depth. As work becomes more specialised and cross-functional, that situation is becoming increasingly normal.
Strong leadership therefore depends partly on knowing how to use expertise that sits elsewhere. Leaders still provide direction, make decisions and carry accountability, but they do not need to be the source of every answer. They need enough curiosity to ask useful questions, enough confidence to listen when someone else knows more, and enough judgement to combine specialist input with the wider context only they may hold.
This is an important part of collaborative leadership. In practical terms, collaborative leadership means drawing knowledge and perspective from across a team while retaining responsibility for direction and decisions. It allows expertise to move towards the problem rather than assuming it must always flow down the hierarchy.
Expertise and seniority serve different purposes
People often move into leadership because they have experience, credibility and a strong understanding of their field. That experience remains valuable. The problem begins when leadership creates an expectation that the person at the top must continue to know more about every part of the work than the people they lead.
In a specialist team, that is rarely realistic. A technology leader may manage experts in cybersecurity, data, cloud infrastructure and AI without having the deepest technical expertise in every discipline. An operations executive may understand the overall supply chain while a frontline manager knows far more about a particular process that is causing delays. A marketing leader may set strategic direction while someone much earlier in their career has a better understanding of how a new platform is actually being used by customers.
The leader’s contribution is broader than being the best technical specialist. They need to understand which expertise matters, draw it into the conversation and connect it to organisational priorities. That requires a different kind of confidence from always having an immediate answer.
Research on teams has long shown why this matters. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety focuses on how leaders create conditions in which people are willing to contribute information, ask questions and raise concerns. Her research highlights a simple organisational risk: useful knowledge cannot influence a decision if the person holding it does not feel able to speak.
Curiosity gives leaders access to knowledge they do not hold themselves
Curiosity in leadership is sometimes reduced to a personality trait. Its practical value is much greater.
A curious leader asks questions because the answer could change their understanding of the problem. They want to know what the people closest to the work are seeing, where assumptions may be wrong and which information has not yet reached the decision-making level.
The quality of those questions matters. Asking a team for input after the decision is effectively complete may feel consultative without creating much opportunity for learning. Asking early enough for the answer to influence the thinking sends a different signal.
Questions such as “What are we missing?”, “Who understands this part of the problem best?” or “What would make this difficult to implement in practice?” help leaders surface information that may otherwise remain distributed across different roles.
Edmondson’s work similarly emphasises proactive inquiry and what she describes as situational humility: recognising that the leader does not have all relevant information and deliberately inviting other people to contribute. This approach does not require a leader to diminish their expertise. It acknowledges that complex work often depends on combining several kinds of expertise.
Learning from the team can improve the quality of a decision
Consider a senior leader overseeing the introduction of a new customer-facing technology.
The leader understands the commercial objective, budget, implementation timeline and broader customer strategy. A team member who has spent far more time using the technology understands where it performs well, where it creates friction and which assumptions made during planning may not hold up in everyday use.
There are several ways the leader could respond. They could treat the employee’s role as simply implementing the decision. They could defer entirely to the technical specialist. Or they could use the specialist knowledge to improve their own understanding, weigh it alongside the commercial context and then make a better-informed decision.
The third option is the useful one.
Collaborative leadership does not transfer accountability to whichever person knows the most about one aspect of a problem. It allows leaders to make fuller use of the expertise available before exercising their own judgement.
This is particularly valuable where work crosses functional boundaries. Research published in the Journal of Innovation & Knowledge in 2024 found a positive relationship between participative leadership and employees’ willingness to speak up in the context studied, reinforcing the importance of leadership behaviour in whether knowledge moves through an organisation.
People need to believe their expertise is genuinely welcome
elling employees to “speak up” is not enough if previous experience has taught them that disagreement is unwelcome.
People make small judgements about this constantly. What happens when somebody challenges a senior person’s assumption? Does the leader ask a follow-up question or become defensive? Is bad news treated as useful information or as a problem created by the person delivering it? Does input from a junior employee receive serious consideration, or is the same idea only valued once someone senior repeats it?
These reactions shape whether useful knowledge continues to surface.
Psychological safety is relevant here, but it does not need to become a separate leadership philosophy. It simply describes a climate where people believe they can raise questions, concerns, ideas and mistakes without being punished or humiliated for doing so. Edmondson’s research also makes an important distinction between psychological safety and low accountability. Teams can be expected to perform at a high standard while still making it safe for people to challenge, question and contribute.
For leaders who want to learn from their teams, the practical implication is straightforward. Asking for input only works when people have evidence that their input can be heard without unnecessary interpersonal risk.
Knowledge-sharing works best when it moves in more than one direction
Organisations invest heavily in bringing knowledgeable people together, but having expertise inside the business does not guarantee that the expertise will travel to where it is needed.
Knowledge can become concentrated inside functions, roles or individuals. A technical team may understand something that would improve a commercial decision. Frontline employees may repeatedly encounter a customer problem that never reaches the people redesigning the process. A younger employee may understand a new digital platform while an experienced colleague holds years of industry and organisational knowledge that cannot be learned from a tutorial.
Useful learning can move in every direction across those relationships.
Research on knowledge-sharing has repeatedly linked collaborative leadership environments with greater willingness to exchange what people know. Recent studies have also found relationships between leadership behaviour, psychological safety and knowledge-sharing, although the specific mechanisms and strength of those relationships vary by context.
For leaders, this makes knowledge-sharing an operational capability rather than a cultural nice-to-have. Teams can solve problems faster when they do not repeatedly rediscover information that already exists somewhere else in the organisation.
Reverse mentoring is one structured example of two-way learning
Reverse mentoring is one way organisations have formalised the idea that expertise can flow upwards as well as downwards.
In a traditional mentoring relationship, a more experienced employee typically shares knowledge, perspective and career guidance with someone earlier in their career. Reverse mentoring deliberately creates opportunities for a more junior or differently experienced employee to share expertise with a more senior colleague, often around technology, changing customer behaviour, culture or perspectives the senior person encounters less directly.
The concept can be useful, but it should not be turned into a generational stereotype. Junior employees do not automatically understand technology better, and senior employees do not suddenly become learners with nothing to contribute. Effective reverse mentoring works because the two people bring different knowledge to the relationship.
A recent systematic review of reverse-mentoring research identified reciprocity, psychological safety, trust, leadership support and a culture of knowledge-sharing among the factors associated with effective programmes. The wider literature also suggests that reverse mentoring can support knowledge exchange and development across organisational levels.
The principle is more important than the programme label: useful expertise should not be ignored simply because it sits lower in the hierarchy.
Leaders can learn from their teams without weakening authority
A common concern with collaborative leadership is that openness will make the leader look uncertain or reduce their authority.
That depends greatly on how the leader behaves after seeking input.
There is a meaningful difference between saying, “I don’t know, somebody else decide,” and saying, “You understand this area better than I do. Help me understand what I need to know before we decide.”
The second response demonstrates judgement rather than weakness. The leader is recognising the limits of their own knowledge, identifying the person best placed to close the gap and then using that input as part of the decision.
Authority is not strengthened by confidently making a poorly informed decision simply to preserve appearances.
Nor does collaboration require consensus. Leaders may hear several perspectives and still make a decision that some team members disagree with. Their responsibility is to gather the relevant expertise, weigh competing considerations, make the call and explain the reasoning clearly enough for the team to move forward.
That distinction is important because the purpose of learning from the team is not to dilute accountability. It is to improve the information and understanding on which accountable decisions are based.
Leaders also shape whether employees learn from one another
A leader who is willing to learn sends a wider message about what capable behaviour looks like.
When employees see a senior person asking questions, seeking specialist input and changing their understanding when presented with better information, learning becomes easier to treat as part of competent work rather than evidence that somebody was lacking knowledge in the first place.
The same principle can extend across the team. One employee may understand a customer segment particularly well. Another may have deeper technical expertise. Someone else may have handled similar operational problems for years. Good leaders can create opportunities for those people to teach, demonstrate and share rather than allowing knowledge to remain attached to individual roles.
This connects closely with continuous learning, but the leader’s role is specific. They do not need to personally deliver all of the development happening in the team. They help create an environment in which people know who holds useful expertise, can access it and are encouraged to build on what others have learned.
That approach can also make teams more adaptable. When knowledge is distributed and shared, the organisation is less dependent on one individual being available every time a particular problem arises.
Collaborative leadership still requires experience and judgement
There is a risk of overcorrecting the old “leader knows best” model and implying that experience, hierarchy or formal authority no longer matter.
They do.
Experience helps leaders recognise patterns, understand consequences and provide context that may not be visible from one specialist perspective. Hierarchy can clarify accountability and allow decisions to be made when a team cannot reach agreement. Organisational responsibility still sits with the people appointed to carry it.
The opportunity is to use those strengths without assuming that seniority gives one person the best information on every subject.
The most effective relationship is therefore complementary. Team members contribute detailed expertise, frontline knowledge and perspectives that the leader may not have. The leader combines those inputs with wider organisational context, priorities and responsibility for the outcome.
That is a more realistic model of leadership for complex work than expecting one person to be both the most senior and the most knowledgeable about every issue the team encounters.
Strong leaders make knowledge easier to use
A team’s collective knowledge can only strengthen the organisation when people are able and willing to share it.
Leaders have significant influence over whether that happens. They can ask questions before decisions are closed, recognise expertise regardless of seniority, respond constructively when people challenge assumptions and make room for employees to teach one another.
They also need to know what happens after listening. Collaborative leadership is valuable because it improves the leader’s access to knowledge, not because responsibility disappears into the group.
As teams become more specialised and organisations rely increasingly on cross-functional expertise, leadership credibility is likely to depend less on appearing to know everything and more on being able to recognise, combine and use what other people know.
A capable leader can learn from the team and still lead it.
Develop leaders who make better use of the capability around them
If your organisation wants leaders who can build stronger teams by drawing on expertise across different roles and levels, Edge Training Global can help develop the leadership, mentoring, communication and collaboration capabilities that support better learning at work.
Our leadership development helps organisations build managers who can ask better questions, share knowledge, develop others and use the capability already present across their teams.
