Expertise becomes the entry requirement, not the differentiator
One senior leader I coach built her reputation through deep scientific expertise. As her responsibilities grew, she expected greater technical excellence to increase her influence. Instead, she found that the most important conversations were no longer about scientific accuracy, but about helping people with different priorities and perspectives find common ground. Her expertise built credibility. Her ability to create understanding across perspectives expanded her influence. I’ve seen the same shift across sectors: technical excellence remains essential, but increasingly, it is the entry point—not the differentiator.
Leadership begins to depend less on having the best answer and more on helping others think through complexity.
This transition from technical expertise to strategic leadership is particularly important for professionals moving into more senior roles. In an Impactpool session for STEM professionals, I explored the mindset shift from “doing” to “enabling”, and why emotional intelligence, systems thinking and strategic thinking become increasingly important as responsibility grows.
Explore the transition from STEM expert to strategic leader.
So, if expertise is no longer the differentiator, what replaces it?
Leadership begins before decisions are made
We often describe leadership as decision-making. Increasingly, I think that starts too late. Decisions are the visible outcome; what often matters more is the thinking and sensemaking behind them.
One executive I worked with had a highly capable team producing excellent analysis, yet strategic discussions repeatedly stalled. The problem wasn’t the information—it was understanding what it meant for the choices ahead.
The role shifted from presenting analysis to creating meaning: from producing information to enabling understanding. Perhaps this is one of the most overlooked dimensions of leadership: before leaders can move people toward a decision, they must help them see the situation differently—make sense of complexity, connect perspectives, and recognise what truly matters.
The most important work of leadership happens before a decision is ever made.
This is also why leadership in international organisations requires more than technical competence. Strategic vision, coordination, change management and the ability to work across cultures and disciplines all shape how leaders create direction in complex environments. Explore Impactpool’s practical guide to leadership and managerial competencies. But understanding alone does not guarantee effective leadership. A third pattern repeatedly emerges.
Empowerment creates energy. Shared clarity creates direction.
One of the strongest patterns I observe in executive coaching is that organisational challenges rarely arise because people are unwilling to contribute. More often, capable and committed people are working from different interpretations of reality.
Leaders cannot control how every individual makes sense of the world. Sensemaking is ultimately personal. What leaders can do is create enough shared clarity around purpose, priorities, and context for individual perspectives to converge rather than fragment. We rightly celebrate empowerment as a defining leadership capability. It creates initiative, ownership and commitment. But empowerment alone is not enough. Highly empowered people working from fundamentally different interpretations of reality can end up pulling in different directions. Perhaps my mathematical background influences how I think about this. In mathematics, we distinguish between necessary and sufficient conditions.
Empowerment is necessary for high-performing teams. It creates the energy to act. But energy without shared clarity can become fragmentation. Leaders therefore have another responsibility: cultivating the quality of collective thinking by creating shared clarity around purpose, priorities, meaning and trade-offs. Only then can empowered people make sound decisions, stay aligned and implement effectively.
Empowerment creates the energy to act. Shared clarity provides the direction. Leadership requires both.
A different way of thinking about leadership
Reflecting on these coaching conversations, I realised they were pointing towards the same underlying idea. Expertise remains essential. Empowerment remains essential. Yet neither fully explains why some leaders consistently navigate complexity while others struggle. Increasingly, I think about leadership this way:
Leadership is the process of creating shared clarity through thinking and sensemaking, enabling better decisions, alignment and implementation.
This shifts the focus from leadership as a position or a collection of behaviours towards leadership as a cognitive and relational process. Before people can align their actions, they need to align their understanding. Perhaps that is why implementation succeeds or fails long before execution begins. It starts with the quality of collective thinking that leadership enables. And this matters not only inside organisations. It increasingly shapes how senior leaders are assessed.
In senior-level recruitment, candidates are expected to demonstrate more than technical expertise. They need to show that they can see the broader picture, handle complexity and demonstrate the mindset required to lead at scale.
Read more about what can make candidates struggle in senior-level interviews. For leaders navigating complex organisations, three questions may be worth revisiting:
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Am I primarily providing answers, or improving the quality of thinking around me?
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Does my team share an understanding of our purpose, priorities and trade-offs?
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Have I created enough shared clarity for empowered people to exercise sound judgement independently?
These observations have reshaped how I think about leadership. They have also left me with one question: What is a leader’s primary responsibility? Is it making better decisions? Empowering others? Or creating the conditions in which many people can think well together before decisions are made? I don't have a definitive answer yet. But I am increasingly convinced that this question deserves more attention — particularly for leaders working across cultures, disciplines and complex global environments.
How does this resonate with your own leadership experience?
About the Author
Matanat Rahimova, PhD, MBA, PCC, is an Executive Coach and Leadership Development Consultant who helps mid- to senior-level professionals grow as leaders and navigate impactful careers in the UN and multilateral system.
With more than 20 years of global experience across UN agencies, multilateral institutions and development organisations — including UNICEF, UNDP, UNHCR, WFP, OSCE, CTBTO, UNOCHA and the World Bank — Matanat has led institutional reforms, managed complex cross-functional initiatives and built high-performing teams across more than 30 countries.
Her background spans STEM, education, diplomacy, social protection, nuclear security and development finance, giving her a distinctive perspective on the transition from technical expertise to strategic leadership.
As an ICF-certified Executive Coach (PCC), she supports professionals with leadership development, career transitions, strategic clarity and navigating UN recruitment and selection processes.
Explore Matanat’s Executive & Leadership Coaching on Impactpool.
This article has been adapted from a post originally published by Matanat through other channels.