At the Confluence of Emerging and Professional

LEADERS AT EVERY LEVEL

Holly Callahan

The Emerging Professionals Committee regularly hosts the Leadership Webinar Series. Past webinar topics have included Navigating Biases in Decision Making, What Makes a Great Leader, Local Floodplain Manager to California’s CRS Coordinator, and Stop Wasting My Time! How to save years of your professional life through more efficient meetings. The September 2022 webinar focused on Mentorship and the Importance of Building Relationships. During the webinar, the panelists, Hunter Merritt and Aaron Schlein, both from the US Army Corps of Engineers, were asked to discuss at what point a person is no longer an Emerging Professional and is instead a leader. Aaron Schlein answered this question by describing the “curse of knowledge.” According to The Decision Lab, "the ‘curse of knowledge,’ or ‘the curse of expertise,’ is a cognitive bias where we incorrectly assume that everyone knows as much as we do on a given topic.”1 As engineers, this could result in experienced leaders forgetting what they needed to learn in order to get to their current level of understanding. Another way of looking at the “curse of knowledge”, and the way Aaron Schlein described in the webinar, is people tend to view themselves as average and forget the tasks and knowledge they learned as they progressed to their current position. Essentially, through the routinization of new tasks, people forget the original effort required to learn them. In this process also we forget this knowledge is something we know and could teach to others.

1 Curse of Knowledge, 2022; The Decision Lab.

Mr. Schlein’s advice is to look deeper into what you tend to do slightly better than other people, or what you may know that you can share with others, and share it! With this thought process, there is no definitive line between an Emerging Professional and a leader, rather a person with only a month of experience could be a leader to someone on their first day. For leadership to be possible at all levels, it is important for employers to foster a culture of knowledge sharing at every level. That new entry level engineer that just joined the firm? Maybe they took a coding class in college and can use C# to make informative maps using the RASter Calculator in RASMapper. Or maybe a more junior employee knows computer shortcuts, like pressing “R” to reorient north in Google Earth or one of the many Excel keyboard shortcuts that could enhance the workflow of a more senior professional. By empowering people of with all levels of experience to share what they know, employers can have leaders at every level. For more information on upcoming and past webinars, visit the FMA Emerging Professionals website at https://sites.google.com/view/fmaepcommittee/about-us/webinars. 25

THE HIGH WATER MARK

The Newsletter of the Floodplain Management Association