Chad Silverstein (Built Two Lead) explains how leaders commonly suffer from the "curse of knowledge": they assume others already understand what they know. He advises leaders to stop assuming, ask team members to play back what they heard, create a safe space for questions, repeat and vary messages, and adapt communication to different learning styles so vision and expectations stick.
Chapters
At Built two Lead, we say that the leaders that we work with, they have what we call the curse of knowledge. They don't even remember what it's like to not remember. They know something so well, they've worked so hard to master their craft, or they've been in their industry and they've started their business, or they've been in their position for so long that they just assume that everyone else should know exactly what they know. And even worse, they think because they've said it 10,000 times that there's an expectation that you do know. But leaders tend to forget and they have a short term memory when it comes to growing a company and having new people jump onto your team over the last several months and they haven't heard that message 10,000 times, or maybe the last time you said it, you didn't say it the same way that you said it six months ago. And so you have to really stop and look at where the curse of knowledge shows up in your life as a leader and where you had this expectation and think that everybody should know what you know and you should assume the other, you should assume the other side, which is that they probably don't know. And so one of the ways you can play against this tendency of having the curse of knowledge is make sure that people play back what they've heard. So that when you speak or you're in a meeting that you stop, you know every, you know every often, every so often, and you ask them, you know, what did you hear? And ask them if they have questions and really create a safe environment for them to ask those questions. Because there's nothing more frustrating for a leader who especially has a very clear vision, but can't get everybody to, can't get it to stick. And you have to be able to repeat yourself. You have to be able to show them in different ways. Some people are visual learners, some people like to see things written down. And that's important because if you don't even know what type of a style of a communicator you are, and you don't know really how to read your audience and know how many people in your audience have different types of ways of consuming all the information that you're giving them. You could tell them certain things, but again, again, they hear it wherever they are. And it's important to understand that you're gonna have to say it over and over and over again and never assume that they know. So the curse of knowledge could really get a lot of leaders in trouble and it causes a lot of frustration. So if you feel like you are frustrated with your team because there's certain things that you expect them to know, just know that that's normal and that you probably have the curse of knowledge. And you should not assume that everybody knows as much as you know. And you shouldn't assume they know it because you think you've already told them. So be careful about having the curse of knowledge.
