The forgotten target group in your organization?
When things get complex, when a project stalls, when teams can’t break through silos, who do we call? The expert. Not the manager. The expert.
They get the project moving again. Coach the junior colleague. Align across departments. Prepare decisions. And do all of this without a title, without a formal mandate, without protected time.
In virtually every sector, we see the same pattern. Organizations structurally rely on their experts to keep systems running: technically, socially and operationally. What sounds like empowerment from the outside is, in practice, often an unspoken structural dependency.
And that rarely comes without consequences.
Leadership that emerges by accident
Research has shown for years that shared leadership can be effective and even has a positive impact on team performance beyond what classic hierarchical leadership explains. But those same studies are clear: it only works when it is consciously designed. Not when it emerges because nobody else steps up.
The reality is that expert-driven leadership in many organisations is still treated as something informal, temporary, self-evident. Free, even.
That is the heart of the problem.
A triple load without a label
What we see at clients — large and small, public and private — is strikingly consistent. Experts today carry three roles simultaneously: delivering high-quality output, leading projects or teams, and developing and coaching colleagues. Each of those roles demands different energy and different skills.
When that combination is not made explicit, a predictable pattern follows: chronic overload among the same key people, erosion of deep technical expertise, quiet attrition of business-critical talent.
What seems to work well for a long time stops when the energy runs out.
Not an individual problem but a design question
The solution does not lie in making experts more resilient. It is a design question. For HR, for formal leaders, for the organization as a whole.
The question is not whether expert leadership is needed. It is. The question is whether organizations are willing to keep letting it emerge by accident, or finally design it with intention.
In the full Beanzine edition, Jan Bal goes deeper into the structural tension of expert leadership, the hidden cost of undesigned leadership, and how we approach this concretely in our Leadership for Experts programmes.
Read the full article in Beanzine.
