The Cost of Making Leadership Look Easy

We talk a lot about confident leadership. We celebrate the leaders who seem to have the answers, who walk into a room with certainty and who can speak knowledgeably about just about anything that comes their way. There is an expectation, sometimes spoken and sometimes not, that good leaders should look like they know what they're doing.

But I wonder if we've confused confidence with certainty.

I've had the opportunity to lead in a few different contexts throughout my career, and one of the most valuable leadership experiences I had was also one where I was, quite frankly, the least knowledgeable person in the room.

I became the leader of a division in which I had very little subject-matter expertise. On paper, that might not sound like an ideal situation. Surely a leader should understand the work of the people they're leading, right?

As it turned out, not necessarily.

My lack of technical expertise meant I couldn't get too far into the weeds. I had to rely on the people around me who knew the work far better than I did. I had to ask questions, listen carefully and trust their expertise. I had to resist the temptation to jump in with my own solutions simply because I was the leader.

And I learned a lot from them.

What I realized was that my job wasn't to become the expert in everything my division did. My job was to lead the division.

That meant getting clear on what we needed to achieve, helping the team understand why it mattered, communicating our priorities and making sure we were moving in the same direction. It meant paying attention to what was getting in the way and figuring out how I could help remove those barriers. And it meant creating enough space for the people with the expertise to actually use it.

In some ways, not knowing the details freed me to focus on the things a leader should be focused on.

This experience has stayed with me because I think we put an enormous amount of pressure on leaders to prove that they belong in the room. We expect them to be knowledgeable, decisive and confident. We sometimes reward the leader who speaks first and has an answer for everything.

But leadership isn't about being the smartest or most knowledgeable person in the room. In fact, if you are, there may be a problem.

Your team doesn't need you to know more about their area of expertise than they do. They need you to value their expertise. They need you to create clarity about where you're going and what you're trying to accomplish. They need you to make decisions when decisions need to be made, remove obstacles when you can, and give them the autonomy to do the work they're good at doing.

That takes a different kind of confidence.

It takes confidence that allows you to say, “I don't know. What do you think?”

It takes humility to recognize that someone on your team may have a better answer than you do.

It takes trust to give people room to do their jobs without constantly looking over their shoulder.

And it takes enough security in your own leadership that you don't feel the need to prove yourself by having all the answers.

I think that's where we sometimes get leadership wrong. We mistake authority for expertise and confidence for certainty. We assume the leader should be the person who knows the most, when often the leader's greatest contribution is creating the environment where everyone else's knowledge, experience and expertise can be put to work.

This doesn't mean leaders get to sit back and simply “trust the experts.” Leadership still requires accountability. You need to understand enough to ask good questions. You need to be willing to make difficult decisions. You need to set expectations, provide direction and hold people accountable for the commitments they've made.

But there's a difference between being informed and needing to be the expert.

There's also a difference between being confident and pretending you're certain.

Some of the strongest leaders I've worked with are comfortable saying, “I don't know yet.” They don't see questions as evidence that they aren't capable leaders. They understand that asking a good question can be far more valuable than giving a quick answer.

And perhaps most importantly, they aren't afraid of what happens when someone else knows more than they do.

They recognize that this isn't a threat to their leadership. It's the whole point.

When I look back at that experience leading a division where I wasn't the expert, I can see how much it shaped the leader I became. It taught me that I didn't need to know everything to lead well. I needed to know what we were trying to accomplish, communicate that clearly, surround myself with capable people and trust them enough to let them do what they were good at doing.

That's not making leadership look easy.

It's making leadership about what it is actually supposed to be about: creating the conditions for other people to do their best work.

Maybe the goal isn't to become the leader who always has the answer.

Maybe it's to become the leader who knows when the answer should come from someone else.