Expertise Got You the Seat. It Won't Get You the Room.

In cyber and tech, leaders pour years into accreditation and technical mastery and almost nothing into how to conduct the human exchange. The day you start leading, that exchange becomes the whole job.

I've watched a lot of brilliant technical experts hit the same wall. The mastery that earned the promotion is the very thing that stops mattering the day the job becomes getting other people to move. So they reach for the only move the field ever trained them to make, more expertise, a better architecture, a tighter argument, another certification and none of it lands. The gap was never technical. It sits in what they're asking of people, and how, and whether anyone actually signed up or just nodded.

And it matters more now than it used to. The knowledge that made you valuable is exactly what AI is busy commoditising and, as John Pattersonargues, what keeps rising in value is the ability to engage powerfully with other people. Expertise is getting cheaper. The human exchange isn't.

There's finally a book that names this properly. HIGH TQ, by Kirkland Tibbels and John Patterson, is out now. It sets Transactional Intelligence® alongside IQ and EQ as a third intelligence, and instead of telling you to communicate better, it maps what's actually happening between two people and what to do about it. I work with cyber and tech leaders, and TQ is the most practical framework I've found for reducing the friction and getting things done. Expertise got you the seat. This is the GPS for the part no one trained you for.

If you've ever been the smartest person in the room and still couldn't get the room to move, this book is for you.

As AI takes over more of the technical work, which human skills do you think will matter most in leadership?