How To Establish Domain Expertise For Your Team?

When it comes to growing your small business one challenge you’ll face is growing your team.

When starting out it’s perfectly okay to wear all the hats yourself but there will come a point when you need more hands on deck to meet demand — or burn yourself out and your business to the ground trying to manage on your own.

One thing we talk about a lot with business hiring is to focus on staff attitude rather than skill. Skill you can build, attitude is usually pretty set. This blog takes that concept further, into domain expertise.

Okay, so the idea is to hire great attitudes and put in the work to train them to run your business your way. It sounds simple enough but I see a lot of small business owners struggle to get their team to understand the job and clients as well as the founders do.

There are plenty of different reasons why this happens. Evolving into a natural leader will take time, experience and patience. At the same time, you need to take into account that your staff might not have enough overall business or market knowledge to meet your expectations. While it is forgivable and fixable with time, it will hold your business back and stifle growth.

That means it’s on your shoulders as the business creator to ensure that each staff member learns the specific skills that deliver the highest possible output quality, in the shortest time frame possible. Knowing just how to go about it is the sticking point.

In order to let your team know what they have to do in their specific roles to meet your business goals, you’ll need to build domain expertise.

What is domain expertise?

Domain expertise is the specific skills required to complete a particular job in a refined industry. So while there are key soft skills you want your employees to have that facilitate doing aggregate jobs in any industry, anywhere: Teamwork, time management skills, adaptability, and the ability to work under pressure, what you want to be able to achieve is the refined, specific and unique skills essential to doing their work in your employment better than anyone else can.

For example, a content writer should have in-depth knowledge about SEO copywriting and about the industry that they’re writing for. An environmental lawyer needs a deeper understanding of environmental laws than an immigration lawyer. A financial analyst should know more about the performance of stocks and bonds better than a retail sales expert.

These skills are known as domain expertise.

The more knowledge and proficiency your team members have in your specific discipline or field (in contrast to general knowledge), the better equipped they will be in looking after your business and achieving high-quality work and productivity.

Why domain expertise is important

It is vital for every business owner to assist their team in gaining domain expertise. This will involve targeting the specific areas relevant to your business, defining how these skills work in each role as well as making sure skills are updated as your business and industry change.

When your staff have domain expertise they know exactly what they’re doing, which is an obvious step towards a successful business in itself. There are several other benefits you’ll notice including:

• Job efficiency. Those who work in a job they’re not an expert in will eventually find themselves in a slump. They’ll need to ask around or consult an expert, and it will take them much longer to get the work done compared to someone who already knows what to do from the start.
• Accuracy of output. While mistakes are normal in every business, you still want to minimise them whenever you can. Being highly skilled and knowledgeable in a particular field will mean fewer errors and higher quality. It saves both time and resources, and is a great motivation to keep excelling.
• Work confidence. Research shows that when people expect to fail in their tasks, their performance plummets. So confidence is crucial to excelling at work. Having the right knowledge to get the work done, as well as the mindset that they have things under control, boosts that confidence.

It’s pretty obvious that domain expertise is good for your staff, the hidden advantage here is that the process of drafting your niche and developing domain expertise systems benefits you too.

With less confusion on what to do and what the business needs, this frees you up from extra work and stress as well as gives you a stronger understanding of what your business is and what it does well.

7 ways to establish domain expertise for your team

Knowing that it’s important to establish domain expertise for your team is one thing, knowing just how to go about it is another. We’ve put together the seven ways you can learn as a leader that will naturally flow through to your team and enable them to get a handle of exactly what is required, what your goals are and how they can help meet them to see incredible growth in skill and productivity.

1. Read Widely

Reading is a general skill that often gets overlooked as both a career advantage and a quality pastime.

Reading is the perfect start to learning something new. There are thousands of books out there for every industry and career that are set up to cover beginner, intermediate and advanced so you can keep stepping up your levels as your progress in knowledge and understanding.

Reading can increase employee performance through:

• Strengthening and stimulating the brain. Research on the long-term effects of reading confirms that any reading (e.g. novels, magazines, non-fiction) significantly increases brain connectivity. More areas of the brain light up with activity the more engaged the reader is.
• Increasing knowledge. Everything you read adds pieces of information that your brain stores, and you can use this knowledge as needed. The more information you have, the better equipped you are to accomplish a task related to it.
• Improving analytical skills. Studies on what reading achieves show that reading helps people spot patterns quicker, boosting their analytical and problem-solving skills.

“Reading is the gateway skill that makes all other learning possible.” — Barack Obama

2. Offer video learning, online tutorials and infographics

For visual learners, how-to videos, graphs and infographics are the best way to win their engagement and give them a wider knowledge of your solutions and how they work for customers.

Think about how you can utilise webinars, podcasts and training videos you might already have allocated for customers to help encourage and educate your team.

Creating these resources yourself can be rewarding for everyone, but if you don’t have the time and resources just yet, don’t be afraid to lean on Google, it is the world’s largest library, after all.

Rather than let them browse through, have preselected and authorised libraries available for materials you know are high quality and relevant to what you are trying to teach. As well as ensuring your team is getting the right information, you are also cutting back on any confusion or overwhelm they might face in looking up new resources on their own.

3. Do a product or service demo

Live demonstrations appeal to your team members who are kinesthetic-minded. A great way to cater to employees with this learning style is to do product or service demos.

A product or service demo is a presentation of the value of your product or service. This means that you show the core features and capabilities of your product.

For instance, if you’re selling a coffee machine, you can do a product demo by demonstrating what each button does, and what are the exact steps to follow to get the machine to make coffee, from start to end. Giving them hands-on experience will join the dots a lot faster for them and win their engagement faster and more effectively than reading or watching a video demonstration.

While demos are normally reserved for customers, it’s important to remember to offer them to your staff too, so they can fully understand what your business is trying to sell and what the experience is like at the customer end.

4. Set up a knowledge base for employees and contractors

Now that you have started gathering the resources listed above, make them as widely available as possible through developing your own in-house resource library.

This is called a knowledge base.

A knowledge base is a self-serve online library about topics relevant to your business that gives staff access to information on what they are working on at any given time.

This helps your staff easily find answers to their questions independently and gives them a headstart on materials to broaden their knowledge about your business and how it works.

5. Discuss and share the details with customers or senior team members

People work best when they’re part of a team. Collaboration gives each team member a sense of purpose and responsibility as well as allows information about your business and team members’ personal business experiences to be shared.

New ideas and information will circulate and give everyone (even experienced team members) a deeper knowledge of different perspectives and angles of your business.

6. Test internally to check out the skills of employees and contractors

Peppering your team with questions about what they do, how they do it, and how to serve specific customers (i.e. through internal tests — written or otherwise) needs to happen before they start working with a customer by themselves without guidance or supervision.

You need to assess how much they already know, how fit they are to work confidently in the job, and what they still need to learn and improve on so they can accurately accomplish their tasks.

7. Complete certifications

There are a wide range of certifications available across multiple fields. Your team members will not only benefit in terms of skill, but they will also appreciate the time and expense you put in to give them the proven skills they need to personally and professionally grow and develop. Your employees after all are also an important business investment.

As well as boosting their confidence, you’ll also increase customer confidence in your business credibility and competence to build their trust and establish your business as an authority in the industry.

While certifications can be expensive, more often than not it gives back more than the asking price — and you can check out your taxable deductions as well.

Because everyone has different learning style preferences, it’s important to encourage different ways to learn, even if it’s not a team member’s usual or most comfortable style. This will help your team to respond to tasks in more varied ways, increase their problem-solving set and get them feeling more comfortable outside their comfort zone. Of course, it goes without saying that you are adopting all these methods of learning and honing your domain expertise as well — right?

Your staff can’t succeed or even fully understand your business intentions and goals if they aren’t proficient in their field or don’t have a working knowledge of your industry, customers, products or services through domain expertise.

Domain expertise leads to better results, fewer mistakes, and higher productivity for your business.

Not only will this knowledge improve their efficiency, output accuracy and confidence — this will also help you maximise your time and energy on the work within your business that only you can do.

If you need more tips on how to boost domain expertise for your team, book a free call and we can get specific about your business needs and how you can fill the gaps.