The Danger of a Little Knowledge (Episode 2)

Transcript

Hello friend. In this episode, we’re going to talk about the danger of a little knowledge.

Now one of the other titles I was thinking about for this episode was why we need to move beyond manager versus leader. And these are actually kind of related topics, the danger of little knowledge, more we need to move beyond manager versus leader.

The reason I was thinking that second one was because a few years ago when I was pretty active on LinkedIn, I saw a lot of leadership versus manager memes or those little posts, graphics about them. And it would be like, this is why leader is great. And all the and this is why a manager is terrible and all the terrible qualities. And I saw them over and over.

And I understand what people are doing about posting it. They’re trying to post good qualities of leaders. But it kind of misses the point of there are purposes of management functions. And really, at least from my perspective, in the jobs I’ve seen, I don’t like to say in absolutes, but in general, if someone’s a manager in most positions I’ve seen jobs, you also need leadership qualities.

You need leadership functions to do that as well. So I think part of it misses the point and part of it is just very, again, cliché-ish and it’s very superficial.

And I’m like, we need to get beyond that. We need to talk about really what is good leadership. We need to get beyond the superficial.

And I took a break from LinkedIn and I’m back on now and I haven’t seen any of those posts which has been pretty awesome. Maybe it’s people aren’t posting them anymore or maybe something to do with algorithm. I don’t know. But we do need to get beyond that.

And it does relate with the danger of little knowledge. Let’s talk about that. What do I mean by the danger of a little knowledge? So I want you to think about this. And you may have seen this when it comes to different things you do, different things you learn.

So for example, you’re learning guitar. I consider this like level one knowledge. You learning guitar, when you start learning it, you learn a lot. You learn fast, you learn quick, it’s all new, it’s awesome, amazing.

And you keep going up and up in that curve. And eventually, that growth ends because you’ve learned the basics. And then it becomes harder. And it takes more to kind of see as much growth because you know the basics. To learn more, it’s a slower process. You can go. You can get better.

But it seems slower because at first, it was really fast because everything was new. But now that new, you know the basics. Then it seems to be a slower trajectory.

What happens, or a problem that can happen is, sometimes in that level one knowledge, when you’re first learning, you learn some guitar chords. You become good at some of these guitar chords. And so then you start playing with your friends, maybe try to impress people, you play Wonderwall, or whatever the top song is, people like to play on guitar now, and so on.

You learn these songs, you play them, the danger is when you think you’re suddenly great at guitar because you know chords.

Now don’t get me wrong, knowing chords in the guitar is great. You can do a lot with it. You can play rhythm. But you don’t really know guitar as well as you could. You’re not at the higher level of knowledge of guitar. You’re just a level one knowledge.

There’s scales. There’s music theory. There’s so much more you can do with it than knowing chords or knowing a couple songs. When you’re at that level one, you can teach people some of that stuff. But you’ve got to realize where you’re at. You’re at level one knowledge. You’re at the basics.

What I see, I think sometimes happens when it comes to leadership and other soft skills. I see the lot with goal setting, maybe even sometimes with time management, is that people get that level one knowledge.

They’re like, ah, I learned about smart goals. I know smart goals, smart goals are amazing. I should do everything smart goals. Everybody should do smart goals. And they may teach smart goals, they may push smart goals, and they do this. And that’s not necessarily bad.

Smart goals can be helpful. There are places for smart goals. Smart goals are not the all in all. They’re not the everything that sometimes people make them out to be. There’s things like stretch goals and other things that you should do. And not every goal technically has to be a smart goal. And there can be issues with smart goals sometimes.

So smart goals can be good, and it’s great that you learned them, but you need to realize sometimes that you’re at a level one knowledge with them.

There’s a deeper level when it comes to goal setting. It’s great to learn great things about time management, and it’s good to know, and it’s good to share those things. There’s nothing wrong with it.

All of us start on level one and go up, but we need to realize when we’re on level one.

When it comes to leadership, a lot of things I see seem to be level one knowledge. A lot of the posts, the cliches, the graphics, a lot of them seem to be level one, very superficial. And that’s what I mean by why we need to move beyond manager versus leader.

Often we get stuck and the common knowledge, common practice that people do is the level one knowledge. It’s I’ve learned some information, some of it’s good, it’s great, but it’s not the be all in all.

 It’s not everything. And sometimes we don’t understand the other aspects of the things we learned that could be a danger, it could be wrong, or things of that nature.

So one thing that I find, for example, for level one knowledge is when it comes to leadership styles. I see people have a lot of big misconceptions about those. And if you look at that, it’s one of the widely searched things on the internet, but the things posted often about it are often honestly wrong, or there’s a big misconception of how they’re presented.

Now, when it comes to this podcast as a whole, what I’m really trying to get at is that with the title, The Danger of a Little Knowledge, why we need to move beyond manager versus leader, level one knowledge, is that as people who want to be great leaders, we need to get beyond level one knowledge.

Level one knowledge can be normal because we all go through that stage. It’s just not good if we stay there. And that’s what I mean by the danger of a little knowledge. Because sometimes things that we learn, they’re true in ways, they’re good in ways, but we don’t have the whole story of it because we don’t have that deeper knowledge of it.

We haven’t gone to the next level. It’s a good practice, good thing to do, but we’re not quite there yet. We just know part of it. When we think we know it all because we know a little, that can be dangerous and we can make mistakes.

So let’s make that commitment to really go deeper in our knowledge. Let’s go past the cliches. Let’s go past the superficial graphics and memes, and let’s really dive into what it means to be a great leader and become great leaders.

I hope this podcast made sense to you. If you have any questions, please message me. You can go to nomorebadleaders.com and then contact me from there.