What are you an expert in? Model trains? Butterflies? The dark art of scarifying and aerating a lawn so it stays green from March to November?

Whatever it is, you earned it. Years of reading, practising, getting it wrong, watching videos at midnight, then getting it right. Somewhere along the way you became the person your friends ring when they need help.

I have one of those people. My wife’s father. He has just built me a shed, and not a four-sided box from a garden centre either. We have an ugly corner at the back of our property, hemmed in by walls and trees, where nothing grows and the light barely reaches. Perfect for storage, useless for anything else. So we designed a six-sided shed to fit it, with angled walls, awkward little corners and steps made from paving slabs so the whole thing is solid underfoot. It sits just under the 15 square metre permitted planning line, so no paperwork headaches.

I didn't know any of that. He did. My expert kept me right at every step, and I never once felt small for asking.

Which brings me to the question that has bothered me for twenty years. Why don't we do this at work?

The questions nobody asks

Walk into any quarterly business review at a telecoms operator and you will hear the same three questions. What is happening? What is working? What is not working?

Good questions. Necessary questions. But they all look inward. They measure the business against itself.

What you rarely hear is: what does best in class look like? How do we compare to the competition, not just on tariffs but on the actual experience of walking into our store? What can we not do today, and do we even know it?

Reviews are held. Inquests are made. Dashboards are circulated. But nobody digs into the detail and asks where the gaps in our own knowledge are.

How often does a CEO walk their estate and ask how it stacks up against the best retail on the planet? Would they know how their device merchandising compares to the way Rituals presents cosmetics in its Amsterdam flagship, where every product begs to be picked up? Could they explain why their handsets sit on the table with no price in front of them, while the Samsung store further down the mall has some of the finest silent salesmen you will ever see?

How often does a Head of Retail sit down with a world-class analyst and map every data point they hold today, the ones that are missing, and what they could measure if only they knew how?

Almost never. Not because these people are lazy. Most of them go to conferences, read the reports, network hard. But people do not know what they do not know. And when you don't know, you ask the wrong questions with total confidence.

This is an ego problem

Let me be blunt, because someone should be.

Take a very common story. A career technician works their way up from engineer to project manager to CTO, then lands the top job. CEO. Brilliant with networks, respected by the board, a genuine leader. And their biggest headache is sales and distribution, a world they have never lived in.

So they do the sensible thing. They trust their team. They lean on their go-to-market director.

Except that director also grew up inside the business. One operator, one market, one way of doing things. Some of their tactics worked and some didn't, but they have never seen the problem through a different lens. So the CEO asks the obvious questions, the director gives the familiar answers, and everyone nods.

It is harsh to call it the blind leading the blind. In some boardrooms, it isn't far off.

Now look one level down. The Head of Retail is a superb operator. Knows every store manager by name, can smell a bad KPI from across the car park. But they have never run an estate-wide training transformation for 1,000 advisors. Never rebuilt a store format from a blank sheet. So what do they do? They pick the project they can get budget for, and they deliver that. Safely. On time. And the real problem sits untouched.

Nobody wants to be the one who puts their hand up and says, "I don't actually know how to do this." Corporate life punishes that sentence. So everyone performs competence instead of building it.

The sporting paradox

Here is what I find strange.

An elite athlete at the peak of their powers has a coach. Usually several. Nobody thought Rafael Nadal was weak because Toni Nadal stood courtside for years demanding more. Nobody thinks less of a Premier League striker for having a finishing coach. If you are Emma Raducanu, you might even have a new one every other month.

In elite sport, a coach is a sign of seriousness. In big business, it is quietly treated as a sign of weakness.

I hear the same three objections everywhere I go.

"If I ask the board to spend money on me, they'll wonder why they hired me." Wrong way round. Everyone has natural skill biases. The marketing lead who started as a designer. The head of product who spent a decade coding in a basement. Your job is not to know everything. Your job is to get results, and that means going and getting the knowledge you are missing.

"My team is too busy to learn." The busy fool paradox. Of course they are busy. But if your team never becomes self-sufficient, you will chase their tails forever and leave yourself short-handed. Busy is not the same as effective.

"We don't have the budget." You know the old line. The CFO worries about training people who then leave. The CEO asks what happens if you don't train them and they stay. Targeted properly, capability building is one of the highest-return investments a retail business can make. Untargeted, it is a very expensive away day.

What an expert actually does

I'm not talking about a generic leadership retreat. A week at a business school has real value, and plenty of CEOs do exactly that. Then they come home to a team that is still struggling and numbers that still aren't moving.

What most operators need is two things at once. Someone who sits alongside the leader and helps them ask better questions. And someone who goes into the channel with the team, spots the blind spots, and builds capability where the revenue is actually made. On the shop floor. In the advisor's conversation. In the queue that is quietly pushing customers towards a competitor.

The trick is finding the right niche. Don't send a retail team to a coach whose specialty is digital marketing if digital marketing is already their strength. They will love the sessions and learn almost nothing. Find someone who has solved your specific problem, many times, in many markets.

So here it is

Mr CEO, you are not asking the right questions. Not because you aren't clever enough, but because nobody has ever shown you what the right questions are.

Head of Retail, you are so worried about looking inadequate that you are not seeking out the people who could make you brilliant.

The result is that you both need a coach. And corporate life will not let either of you admit it.

I'd like to make that easier.

I have spent twenty years in telecoms retail across 81 countries. I have directly designed, managed, opened, operated and closed more than 30,000 stores. Postpaid-heavy markets with big device subsidies and customers who expect a premium experience. Prepaid, cash-based economies where people queue for an hour just to fix a SIM or top up. Flagships, kiosks, dealers, franchise networks. I have seen what great looks like, and I have seen failure up close.

But here is the part that matters most. This is not about me. My job is to make you look like the superstar. I blend into the background. You take the credit to the board. Your team gets the capability. The numbers move.

Every great athlete has someone in their corner they trust to tell them the truth. You deserve one too.

So put the ego aside, and come and talk to me.

Amplify: straight talk on telecom retail, every fortnight, from someone who’s worked in 75+ countries.

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