Why We Need Leaders with Expertise

Amanda Goodall is a Senior Lecturer in Management at Bayes Business School. She started in fashion, then to NGOs, and finally into to academe.  She completed her PhD in leadership at Warwick Business School. Her research looks at the relationship between leadership and organizational performance; it shows that leaders should have a deep understanding of the core business of the organizations they are to lead. Amanda publishes in academic journals, practitioner publications and in the media. In June 2023 she released her new book “Credible: The power of Expert Leadership”.

We talk with Amanda about how her career unfolded, her transition from working as a model then to NGOs and into academia, the lessons she learned along the way and her advice for early career professionals, why she wrote Credible and the main ideas of her book, how should organizations approach the mix of both experts and generalist, which industries are better off with an expert leader, what makes an organization an expert-friendly one and the notion of Expertopia, and her advice for professionals who want to develop their career as experts.

Links from the episode: 

• Amanda’s personal homepage
• Amanda’s new book Credible: The Power of Expert Leaders
• Amanda’s LinkedIn profile