A US President for a multi-therapeutic pharma company shouldn't aim to be an expert on every disease. Their primary job is to enable deep subject matter experts, get out of their way, and constantly ask the strategic question: "What's going to take us to that next threshold?"

When leading a function outside your expertise (e.g., a comms leader managing BDRs), success depends on hiring a great functional leader. Your role becomes asking them to explain concepts simply until you understand, trusting their expertise, and advocating for their needs, rather than trying to become the expert yourself.

A technical founder's greatest value can be in business functions like corporate development, not remaining the company's top scientific expert. This allows for focused growth while leveraging a team of smarter specialists to handle the deep science.

In a highly technical field, a leader's job is not to be the smartest person in the room. Instead, their role is to surround themselves with brilliant specialists, ask the right questions to connect disparate pieces of information, and guide the collective expertise toward a single, unified goal.

Kevin Pojasek credits his effectiveness to a deliberate 12-year journey through diverse roles—investing, company creation, research, and clinical operations. This broad experience allows a leader to understand how all parts of the company, from high-level strategy to detailed science, fit together.

A key benefit of being a generalist leader is the inherent humility of knowing you are surrounded by experts. This mindset shifts the leader's focus from being the source of answers to orchestrating and integrating the deep expertise of others, creating a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

A common leadership trap is feeling the need to be the smartest person with all the answers. The more leveraged skill is ensuring the organization focuses on solving the right problem. As Einstein noted, defining the question correctly is the majority of the work toward the solution.

When leading functions outside your core expertise (e.g., product leading tech and data), credibility cannot come from having answers. Instead, it's built by consistently asking open-ended questions to deeply understand the team's challenges. This approach prevents solutionizing and fosters trust.

A CEO doesn't need functional mastery but should aspire to understand 80% of what their executives know. This threshold provides just enough knowledge to assess if a function is performing well and to know what 'good' looks like, without needing to be an expert practitioner.