The wrong kind of knowledge

The obvious move when there’s a leadership opening is to promote the top performer. The best gift officer becomes the fundraising director. The most experienced copywriter takes over the creative team.

It makes intuitive sense. They know the work.

The problem is that doing the work and leading the team require very different kinds of knowledge.

Conflating one kind of knowledge for another is an easy mistake. And a costly one.

I’ve watched this play out across fundraising teams, marketing teams, and policy teams. The pattern is consistent.

The star performer steps into leadership assuming their domain mastery covers the new role. Not out of arrogance. It just never occurs to them that there’s different knowledge required.

This is unearned confidence in a new domain: an incomplete model of what the job actually requires.

A great gift officer knows more about building relationships with major donors than anyone on the team. A great fundraising director knows who knows what, and how to use it.

Sometimes this is the same person. But that shouldn’t be assumed.

The best leaders I’ve worked with don’t pretend to have all the answers. But they know who does. They understand that knowledge is distributed across a team — that their job is to use that knowledge to inform decisions, not to supply the answers themselves.

They have less certainty, not more.