As a professional you may have found yourself in a situation where your experience has been disconsidered. If not, you will. Question is: how should you react? It’s obviously uncomfortable to be ignored or even worse: discredited. Not to mention if it’s coming from someone with no experience at all.
At a high level, there are two aspects you have to take into account: liability for pecuniary losses and impact on your emotions.
Why would your experience be disconsidered?
Knowledge is disconsidered for two main reasons. Either people don’t have the same level of know-how (“they don’t know that they don’t know”) OR they have an opposite interest which your knowledge doesn’t serve.
Doctors are probably, and unfortunately, the most familiar with the first case. Anyone who’s spent 10 minutes watching a YouTube video pretends to know more than a doctor who studied the whole subject for years. Professionals working in corporations are more familiar with the latter case. Because of what goes on behind the scenes, their advice is ignored on purpose.
Now that you know this will happen to you sooner or later and you know why, question is: how should you react?
Legal liability
Overruling an expert’s recommendations can sometimes have devastating consequences. Whether we’re talking constructions, financial investments, securing an IT system or mounting pipes, if you sign off the implementation, you are accountable.
For this reason, when your expert advice gets ignored you need to respectfully document proposals and risk, chosen decision and who were the decision makers. All this can be captured in a KDD (key decision document) or worst case in meeting minutes. The central element is “put it in writing”. Next, you need to make this known to everyone, so that people can’t act surprised when shit hits the fan.
There might be cases where the best option is to take a step back or even raise concerns to appropriate authorities. You might fear retaliation, but the other option could be a criminal sentence. However, if fear of retaliation wins in front of the law (sometimes for good reasons), you just empower this fear. That’s how mobsters built their power.
Either way, you need a clear head to make this analysis, prepare and distribute proper documentation. It’s the only thing that can save your ass, legally.
Emotional impact
No one likes to be ignored or trashed around. Especially when this is coming from someone that doesn’t know your field of expertise. Having your experience disconsidered does just that.
Caring for your own wellbeing, best thing to do is emotional detachment. It’s easy only if you know your worth. Read again what I’ve written above about the reasons. You’ll be fighting windmills trying to convince people you truly are an expert in your domain. It’s not worth it.
If you know your worth and if the current project, job, group doesn’t serve your interest or wellbeing anymore, it’s time to move on. Strictly for your own wellbeing, it’s not worth to spend months or years trying to make people value you. You are already valuable.
Conclusion
If it costs you your peace of mind, it’s too expensive.
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