Sometimes managers will say to me, "Gee, I have some employees who know a lot more about their work than I do. How can I hold somebody accountable if I have no expertise in their tasks and responsibilities?" And, it's not as odd a situation as it sounds. If you are a manager of a cross functional team and you have a bunch of people doing very different things, you can't be an expert on everything that everyone is doing. Maybe it's the computer person in the office or someone who has some other technical role. Maybe it's an employee who has been delegated a task who has just become the in-house expert on that thing.


You don't have to be an expert on that employee's work to hold that person accountable, just like you don't have to be a doctor to be a really good patient. See, what you need to do in this case, is position yourself as a very shrewd client, and position your employee as a professional. That means you have to ask very good questions. It means you need to do your homework in advance and it means when you are managing this person you have to ask good questions every step of the way: What are you planning to do? How are you planning to do it? How long is that going to take? And then when you monitor and measure the person's performance afterward when you are evaluating, you need to ask the person, "Hey, did you do what you said you were going to do? Did it take about as long as you said it was going to take? Did anything go differently? Why?"


The other thing you can do is, get a second opinion. If you have more than one employee doing the same tasks you should ask those questions of both people and compare their responses and learn from both of them. And see over time you will learn more and more about what that person does. You never have to become an expert. You just have to be a very shrewd client.