The Belief
A lot of leaders think their job is to have the answer. Someone raises a problem in a meeting, and the room waits for the person at the head of the table to solve it. Say “I’m not sure” too often and people start to wonder why you’re in the chair.
I think this belief does real damage. I have run businesses across very different markets, with people from very different backgrounds, and the leaders who insisted on always having the answer were rarely the ones their teams trusted most.
Why It Persists
It persists because it feels efficient. A confident answer moves a meeting along. A room full of open questions feels slow, even unproductive, especially to a board or an investor watching the clock.
It also persists because admitting you don’t know something can feel like weakness, particularly if you’ve spent decades building a reputation for judgment. Nobody wants to be the CEO who shrugs.
But efficiency in the room is not the same as being right. I have watched confident, fast answers send a business in the wrong direction more than once. The cost just shows up later, when it’s harder to trace back to the meeting where it started.
What I Think Is Actually True
The best leaders I’ve worked with treat not knowing as information, not a gap to hide. If you don’t have the answer, that tells you something: maybe the question needs more people in the room, maybe it needs more time, maybe it’s the wrong question entirely.
I do not believe any one person, however senior, holds a monopoly on the right idea. I’ve said this to staff and to clients for years: I don’t have sole license on brains. Neither does anyone else in the room. The moment a leader forgets that, the team stops offering their best thinking, because why bother if the boss already knows?
What This Looks Like Day To Day
In practice, this means I ask more questions than I answer, especially early in a problem. Not performative questions designed to look thoughtful, but real ones: what matters here, who else needs to weigh in, what are we assuming that might not be true.
It also means slowing down before a decision gets made, not after. Most leaders I’ve seen get into trouble didn’t lack intelligence. They moved too fast on too little information because slowing down felt like it would cost them credibility.
Where This Gets Tested
This gets hardest under pressure, when a board wants a decision this week and the instinct is to project total certainty. That’s exactly when I try to resist it most.
I’ve found that a leader who says “here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t, and here’s how we’ll find out” earns more trust over time than one who guesses confidently and gets it wrong. People remember who was honest with them when it counted.
This is not the same as indecision. Once the information is in, I make the call and I hold it. But I try to separate the gathering from the deciding, instead of collapsing both into a single confident-sounding moment.
What I’d Tell Someone Building A Team
If you’re building or leading a team across markets or functions that don’t naturally agree with each other, this matters even more. People from different backgrounds will read “the leader has all the answers” differently depending on where they were trained. Some will defer instantly. Others will quietly disengage because they assume their view isn’t wanted.
Either way, you lose the thing you actually need, which is the range of perspective in the room. I would rather build a team that argues with me and tells me when I’m missing something, than one that nods and waits to be told what to think.
The Trade-Off
There is a real cost to this approach. It is slower. It can look, from the outside, like you’re less in control than the leader down the hall who has an instant answer for everything. Some boards will read that as weakness before they read it as discipline.
I accept that trade-off. In my experience, the businesses that hold up over years are run by people who were honest about what they didn’t know, and built the habit of finding out before they acted. The ones that get built on confident guesses tend to need rebuilding sooner than anyone expected.
