5 Ways to Lead When You Don't Have the Answer

Transcript

0

We’re going to grow and we’re going to be fine. That was the message that the executives were giving the organization, and yet there wasn’t any evidence to back it up. Even other members of the executive team were looking at that statement, that communication plan to the organization, and saying, “Is that really true? Do we have any evidence to support that that’s true?” And then the company went into bankruptcy.

0

So Tim and I are going to be talking about what it means when the boss can’t say, “I don’t know.” And you related that personal story to me about an experience that you had with an organization.

0

Yeah. And I just wondered, do you have a different set of facts than I have? Because I’m looking at all the facts and I’m looking at the uncertainty and I’m looking at the assumptions that we’re making, and how is it that you’re so optimistic? What is this unfounded optimism? And I thought I must be missing something. And I was young in my career. So I thought, man, I must be naive. Like what’s going on here? But then what happened? We went into bankruptcy.

1

So leaders feel a lot of pressure to sound sure. That’s normal. That’s to be expected. But people are worried and you want to be honest about the situation, but at the same time, you want them to have confidence in where you’re going. But the problem is they can see the uncertainty too. They’re not naive to that. As you said, you thought you had a different set of facts than what was being represented.

1

So if you’re acting as though the answer to some existential questions is completely settled, then what is the organization supposed to do or say with the problem that they see very clearly?

2

Exactly. So what does a team need when a leader doesn’t have a reliable answer? If you as the leader feel uncertainty, you look to the environment and you’re unsure, then what is required of you as a leader? What do you do?

2

Because uncertainty is the certainty, but there are levels of uncertainty, Junior, that we deal with.

2

Yeah. So to think about the situation more broadly, and I’d invite you to think about the situations you’ve been in yourself as a leader. Organizationally, we’ve been taught and socialized to believe that the leader should have the answer. Is that fair?

2

Yeah, it’s fair. I think it originates from the imperial model of leadership, where I’m trying to project almost infallibility. It’s the leader-as-expert model. I’m the oracle, and so I need to have the answers and I’m not going to show any weakness. And part of the extension of not showing weakness is I’m going to project certainty into the future, even though the future is an ocean of uncertainty. And we’ve been doing that, and leaders have been, as you say, socialized to do that, and members of organizations have been socialized to look to their leaders for that certainty.

3

Part of projecting that certainty ends up in this place where we’re taking a lot of assumptions that we’ve made about the environment, and slowly but surely we start treating those assumptions as fact.

3

That’s right. So that’s largely true. When we enter an organization and we look at some of the operating assumptions, we realize that those get treated more concretely than maybe they should.

3

That’s right. They take on the status of a fact and we all look around like, is that a fact in evidence? No, but we treat it that way. That becomes a big problem.

4

The third piece of the situation that I think is worth calling out is that the person who disagrees with maybe the comment that projects certainty, or the idea that we are going to grow, we’re going to double the business, they have a decision to make. They can raise their hand and say, “Hey, I’m seeing things a little bit differently than what you’re telling me.” Or they can remain silent. They can be quiet and keep to themselves. Which of those is less risky?

4

Well, let’s go back, Junior. The certainty that we project in the face of uncertainty. So if we keep going and we keep going, then it becomes denial. And so then if you try to puncture that, you may be accused of not only being pessimistic or being a naysayer, but being disloyal. And so now you’re the bad guy. You’re the one that’s not on board. You’re not in alignment. You’re not committed. And nothing could be further from the truth. You’re totally committed, but you’re trying to absorb reality. You’re trying to look at, understand, interpret the facts, and you see leaders around you who are not doing that. You are justifiably concerned, and you’re trying to raise a flag, get some attention, and confront adaptive challenges which no one seems to be confronting.

5

Yeah, there’s a nuance to this that I want to explore a little bit, and that nuance is that you can discourage disagreement without telling anybody to be quiet and without even punishing vulnerability. So often what we talk about on this podcast is that in order to get feedback, you have to model and reward vulnerability. But there’s another mechanism happening, which is this idea of certainty or confidence, or moving from assumption to fact, or treating assumption as fact. And that is that if you are so certain in a point of view, you could be very pleasant in your certainty. You could even theoretically be approachable in your certainty. But if you appear certain or appear too confident, then that also discourages disagreement. So you’re not being overt about punishing anybody’s question. There just hasn’t been a question. There has been no disagreement, and there won’t be, because of your certainty.

6

So that’s a big liability. If you become overconfident in a point of view as a leader, it is. So we said that sometimes assumptions can take on the status of facts, and then they kind of become unassailable. So don’t even talk about that. Don’t question that, because it’s a fact. In a similar way, a leader’s opinion can turn into dogma, because that opinion is stated so forcefully that the message is you can’t challenge that, you can’t discuss that. That’s non-negotiable, when it’s an opinion, but it’s taken on the status of a dogma.

7

So there’s a similar transition. Now we’re in trouble, because we have assumptions that have become facts and we have opinions that have become dogma. We’re in big trouble as an organization.

7

So we are sliding into denial as an organization. If you are trying to challenge the status quo in good faith in that environment, in that context, and then you’re being branded, after all of that, disloyal. How can you question this? Aren’t you supportive? Wow, now we’re in a big mess.

8

And then the leaders themselves, to compound the problem, the leaders themselves have been deeply socialized to believe that I can’t show any weakness at all. And so I’ve got to project hope and faith and trust and credibility, and that means that I can’t show any weakness. It’s certainty all the way. What a mess. We have undocked from reality at this point.

8

Well, there’s pathology that lives on the other end of the spectrum. So we’ve been critiquing overconfidence. But if you swung entirely the other way, and you said, “The environment is so dynamic that I know nothing about what we’re going to do tomorrow,” then you can hide behind uncertainty and fail to do your job.

9

Yeah. And so it’s not so simple as to say, well, just be less certain, because that can end up in the realm of uncertainty that’s also dangerous.

9

And I’ve seen more of this as of late than the certainty that we’ve seen historically. I think in a relatively static environment, it’s more acceptable to be overconfident. In an environment as dynamic as ours, I’ve seen people swing the other way and say, “I have no idea. I have no clue. Nobody knows. Nobody knows what’s going to happen next year. Nobody knows what’s going to happen in 18 months.” You can say that every day. We can make no projections. I will make no claims about the future. And we think that we’re being cautious. We think that we’re being responsible by admitting the uncertainty that exists.

10

But what happens if you play that out a few moves? You have a leader who’s saying, “I have no idea. I don’t know. I don’t know what the environment’s going to do. I’m completely unmoored.” Well, the organization won’t know what to do as a consequence. And so there’s somewhere in there that we have to operate.

10

Yeah. Somewhere in between. That second example is very interesting. It becomes an abdication of leadership, and people in the organization will say, “Well, I can’t follow you because you’re not leading us anywhere.” And you don’t know where you’re going. And so now you’re just swimming in uncertainty. So we have these extremes.

10

But it’s not extreme to explain the extremes, because we see them. We see both play out on a frequent basis.

11

For those leaders who live on the side of uncertainty, that hide behind it, I think it’s incumbent upon us to ask them questions about how much homework did you really do? Have you really dug into the environment to try and figure out where you are in space? How much homework have you really, truly done? Because there’s a lot that you can know.

11

How much certainty is available to us in an environment that’s this uncertain? Well, there’s a measure of certainty, and hopefully we can peg that out by having our ear to the ground. But a lot of leaders look at AI as a category and say, “Oh, that’s just a bucket of uncertainty, so I’m not even going to approach it.” And thus abdicate their role, which is to go and explore and find some semblance of confidence in the next move, or two or three moves. But instead, they’re putting all of that to the side and saying, “Oh, it’s all uncertainty. Don’t know.” And are excusing themselves from all of the hard work that they might be doing in figuring it out.

12

That reminds me of a conversation that we had with some executives the other day who were thinking about AI, trying to figure out the impact. But the way that they approached AI was they put it in its own little drawer. And so most of the time they put it in the drawer and they close the drawer and they don’t deal with it, and they just run the business as they have run it in the past, without AI, because AI is in a drawer. They know in their minds that there are implications with AI, but they haven’t come yet. The arrival hasn’t happened, not in this business anyway. And so they just kind of think about the future a little bit, but they’re not very serious about that. So that’s a form of denial as well, is to put it in a drawer, close the drawer. We won’t deal with it right now. But it’s not going away.

13

How do we deal with that? If we’re leaders and we want to avoid the overconfidence, and we want to avoid the abdication of our role by just projecting pure uncertainty, what do we do? I would say, and we’ll explore this in the solution piece of the conversation, that you need a way to find the answer. You’re not responsible for having the answer. You’re responsible for finding out how to get one. And so that’s your responsibility, as plainly as I can state it. As a leader, you are responsible for knowing the process to find an answer.

13

Yeah, that answer might be a little bit distant. It might be murky. It might not be a durable answer, but you have to have a process to go out and try and find one. So maybe we need to change that old maxim about the leader, that the leader should have the answer. Maybe we need to say the leader should have the question and the process to go find the answer.

14

That’s right. Because we can bring questions all day long. But the leader has to say, and that’s something, if you want to be confident in something and you’re reaching for that, but you know you can’t be confident in the solution. You can be ultimately confident in your ability to problem-solve. And that’s what I lean on personally with our team. If we get really tough questions about what lies ahead, I’m not going to say, “Oh, this is precisely how this is going to play out.” I won’t even go so far as to say this is my position or opinion about how this thing is going to play out. I’m pretty reticent to do that, because I really don’t know.

14

But you’re confident that you can say to the team, I can lead the process of joint discovery.

15

Exactly that. And that’s where I place the confidence, and you can be very confident in that if you are confident in your ability to problem-solve and go find answers to the next question.

15

So your credibility does not lie in the fact that you have an answer to the uncertainty right now. It lies in your problem-solving ability, and people have confidence in that. And that you can move us through that process together, collectively, and we can figure it out.

15

Exactly that. And your team can find a lot of safety and a lot of respite in that, if your credibility is attached to your skills and your experience, but not in having the answer. No one has the answer.

15

Yeah. Well, and if we’re evaluating another leader, let’s say someone’s leading us, then we need to be asking that question. Do we place our loyalty and our confidence in the leader who has historically had answers to questions, or do we really think that this is the person to navigate the upcoming chapter?

16

That’s right. And the former is less important today. The latter is ultimately important. We need to be able to look at a leader and say that’s the person I want in uncertainty. I’m fully aware that they do not know what’s going to happen. Fully aware that they’re going to apply themselves to figure it out, and that they’ve been able to do that before. They have a track record. I know that they are agile, collaborative problem-solvers.

16

Right. So let’s get into some solutioning. What would we prescribe, based on all of the leaders that we engage with? What would we say are some of the things that you could do to become better at facing uncertainty? The first thing that we would say is reality testing. We have to do reality testing. Bring reality to the organization as quickly and as clearly as we can.

17

And that’s never one and done. No, Junior. This is an ongoing process, right? Peter Drucker talked about this. He said your job as a leader is to interpret the meaningful outside, then bring that into the organization. So this is ongoing.

17

And part of that is making distinctions between what we know for sure, what’s plausible, what some of the options are that we’re considering, what’s completely unknown to us. Because we want the organization to understand our perspective about what the assumptions are, and that they truly are assumptions. My opinions are opinions, and they might change tomorrow. This is my perspective based on the information we have today. Being explicit with the organization about our confidence intervals, we could put it that way, about different pieces of information is really important.

18

We also need to look for what could prove our assumption wrong. So we might say to the organization, this is what I’m thinking today, and in order to think something else, this would have to be true. If we could disprove this, or if we could prove this, it would mean X, Y, or Z, and we would shift our opinion. We need to keep doing that as the situation changes. The frequency with which we’ve made these distinctions in our business has gone up at least twofold, because the environment’s so dynamic. So we may have thought something was going to be true in 30 days, but two days later something shifted, and now we have to go back to the organization and say, hey, this thing changed, which means this about the way we were thinking about the problem, which means we’re going to allocate resource differently, this way. And we do that constantly.

18

Junior, we like to talk about adaptive challenges in three categories: opportunities, threats, and crises. And if you look at adaptive challenges at any given point in time, you could identify those and say, “Okay, these are what they are.” But it is so dynamic. And so as we go week to week, month to month, the basket of adaptive challenges that we confront has changed. And this is a given, and everyone needs to understand that. And so this is the actual process of doing reality testing: identifying and interpreting those adaptive challenges on a regular basis, and then having some kind of shared understanding in the organization about what they are. You can’t just have your own interpretation or your own knowledge about those by yourself. It can’t be private. It has to be shared, because that leads to the alignment of the organization. Shared understanding, shared commitment is also based on a shared interpretation about the meaningful outside, about what’s going on.

20

Yep. So that’s reality testing. We want to interpret the meaningful outside, bring reality to the organization. Two is be explicit about what you don’t know. Communicate the unknowns as clearly as you can, and admit to the organization what you are unsure about.

20

So much of what builds trust is what I might call a damaging admission. You think about this in marketing. If I said to you, “This pen lasts 10 times longer than a normal pen, but it smells sort of bad,” what’s your confidence in me and my interpretation of this pen? If I say something like that, versus if I said, “This is the greatest pen that you’ve ever seen. It writes 10 times longer than any other pen I’ve used.” In which situation are you more likely to buy?

21

If you as a leader are trying to build trust with your people, one of the best ways to do that is, it’s not inherently damaging, but an admission. Here are the things that I’m unsure about, but this is where we’re going to go. If a leader comes to me and admits their ignorance to a piece of the situation, I’m ironically or unironically more confident in their ability to move forward than I would be if they came and said, “This is precisely the solution, and we’re going to go get after it.” Well, I know you’re fallible. There must be something that we don’t know for sure. And so admitting that upfront to the organization can be a great way to build some trust.

21

About being explicit, because you’re acknowledging the limitations, the weaknesses, the risks. You’ve got to be open about that.

22

You’ve got to be open, and you can believe as a leader, again, where should you place the confidence? In your team’s ability to figure it out and work through that unknown. So what I mean to say is you can bring encouragement, optimism, and energy to a conversation in which you are communicating a lack of certainty.

22

Yes. Those two things can be true. They can go together at the same time.

22

That’s right. So just because you’re communicating a damaging admission, you’re communicating something you’re unsure about, doesn’t mean that the nature of that conversation is discouraging or pessimistic or rainy. You can bring energy to a conversation in which there’s not full certainty.

22

Junior, it makes me think of two different axes that we are talking about. The one is denial to acceptance of the reality, and the other is the optimism to the pessimism. And so if you think about those on two different axes, that’s pretty interesting. And I think we’ve had experiences with leaders. For example, I mentioned to you, I had a profound experience early in my career with a leader who was in the quadrant that I would label optimistic denial. That’s really what I would, because he would come to work and communicate to the organization, everything’s going to be okay. We’re going to get through this. And we’re looking around. We’re looking at obstacles, and we have no idea how we’re going to overcome these obstacles, and there are structural problems in the industry and with our organization and in our cost structure. And so this optimistic denial doesn’t help anything. And so eventually he loses credibility. You are detached.

24

Right. So that’s interesting. We should make that a two by two. I bet we could come up with some good labels.

24

It’s an interesting one. I think the other thing that really hits me hard is that when the assumptions turn into facts and when the opinions turn into dogma, it closes the door for feedback. You mentioned this a little bit before. You are not open to feedback, to input. You’ve closed the door on that. What am I supposed to say? You’re so certain. We have facts and we have dogma. We don’t have assumptions and we don’t have opinions anymore. And so, are you inviting dialogue? Are you inviting discovery? Are you inviting exploration? You’ve shut everyone down. That’s how dangerous that is. And yet we’re at the point in time where we need to work together the most to try to figure this out.

25

Yeah. Our third tip is make participation rights and decision-making rights clear. So you need to be able to go to the organization and say, these are the things that are on the table for discussion. These are the things that aren’t. These are the things that I would like your perspective on, and here is the person who has the decision. Bringing clarity to the conversation that way helps the team orient: these are the things that I can chime in on. And participation rights should be available to almost everybody, almost all the time. By default, it should be everyone, all the time. If the stakes are really high and the margin for error is low, then that’s a time where you need to be ultra explicit and say, “I need participation in these areas. We’re on a timeline. I need to make a call by this time, and I will be responsible for that decision.”

25

There’s reassurance in that clarity. This is a decision that I’m going to make myself. This is a decision that we’re going to make collectively. This one we’re going to do unanimously.

26

Because if the team shows up and thinks that it’s going to be a unanimous decision, and that we won’t move forward until we have unanimity, then they’re going to be very disappointed when they see you take some of the input and then go make a call without consulting their final decision on a go/no-go. And so if you set the expectation up front, you’re not going to run into that, and you can defuse that situation really early.

26

Let’s get into the fourth, and then we’ve got one tip after that to round it out at five. Four is give people something to work toward. So you need to be honest about the situation, but you also have to have a positive enough version of what the future looks like to have something that’s pulling the team forward. If it’s just doom and gloom and uncertainty, even if it’s not doom and gloom but it’s just pure uncertainty, that is not enough to anchor a team in something in the distance to work towards. They need to have some vision of the future that’s going to help pull them forward.

27

So let’s talk a little bit about vision, Junior, because this is where vision has an operating role. It has a very important role that it plays in the organization. So if we think of vision as packaged ambition, we’re going to package our ambition. And what is it? It’s a portrait of the future that hangs out there. It’s a seedling of reality that we have not yet realized. It has a force, an attraction force that takes us to that. And it’s a longer-term aspiration of what we want to accomplish. Well, that’s very powerful. What does it do? It reduces the unit cost of making decisions. So it helps us make decisions that get there. It also provides vital motivation.

28

We really need to think about this motivation that moves beyond the survival instinct. We all have a survival instinct. We want to survive. Okay, but what about going beyond that? We need a packaged ambition. We need a portrait of the future. We need a vision that pulls us forward. And that’s what the vision does. It provides vital motivation that goes beyond that survival instinct. And so if you are in the midst of uncertainty, you can still have a portrait of the future that is inspiring, that we want to move toward, and we know that there’s a way to get there. We may not know what it is, but we know that it’s possible. We feel that it’s possible.

29

The final tip that we would give to you today, we’ll call make the call. Make a decision. That’s your job as a leader. And that’s not something that you can just abdicate in a world of uncertainty. There’s a level of decisiveness that you have to have as a leader in order to be effective. You will not have perfect information, especially today. A call that’s right today might be wrong tomorrow, and you’ll have to walk it back. Regardless of the uncertainty, you must move forward, and the team needs to see movement.

29

That’s right. If the team sees you in stasis, in paralysis, because of the dynamism, they’re not going to have confidence. They’re not going to give you their trust.

29

So they need to be able to see somebody go out, gather information, collaborate, and then make a call. And then after that call is made, continue to listen and see what might have to be different tomorrow when we approach this thing again.

30

Now, Junior, can that go to an extreme? Yes. For example, we have seen organizations and leaders that engage in what we like to call permanent offense. We’re always pushing forward. Now, that’s wonderful. It’s a wonderful sentiment. We love that you have a bias for action. You’re moving forward. You’re trying to accomplish your goals. But can it go too far? Yes. It can become reckless. And so we need to understand that there’s also some moderation and temperance that guides our decisions. It guides the trade-offs that we make. It guides the way that we do execution. So I just wanted to say that, okay, yeah, we get excited about this idea of permanent offense, but not recklessly.

30

Well, as a leader, in order to be effective, you can see, especially in this conversation, that you have to be moderate across the spectrums that we’ve outlined. There’s this spectrum of certainty to uncertainty, and you have to fall somewhere on that line, depending on the situation. There’s a spectrum from offense to defense. You need to be somewhere on that line.

31

And so that’s where the art form lies in leadership, is figuring out exactly how much to apply of a given ingredient in a given situation.

31

And so with the dynamism of today’s environment, we’re saying that we need to live somewhere in the middle of the certainty-uncertainty spectrum, and we need to be confident in our ability to go find the answer, not necessarily have it. So if we’re going to summarize, I would say if there’s a decision that you need to go and take to your team, there are a few things to do. First is communicate what you’re sure of. Then communicate what you’re unsure of. What do you want their perspective on? Who’s going to make the final decision? What’s going to change your mind, based on the current point of view? What would have to be true in order for you to move a different direction? If you communicate those types of things to your team on a high-frequency cadence, they’re going to be much more trusting in your ability to lead them into the future.

32

I think it’s fair, and I don’t think that members of an organization would expect more.

32

Yep. I think that that’s true. I believe that if you went and asked your team, “Do you expect me to have all the answers all the time?” they’re not going to say yes, right? They realize that you’re a human, just as they are. And we know that about everybody else above, to the side, and beneath us in an org chart. And so it’s very useful if there’s some admission on that front about our own ignorance.

32

I completely agree.

32

So that’s today’s conversation about what to do if a boss says, or can’t say, “I don’t know.” We need to be able to be the boss who says, “I don’t know,” and then figure out how to know. So hopefully those tips were valuable today. If you’ve seen this in your organization, we would love to hear about it in the comments, as well as any tips or tricks that you have found to be useful. If you’re not subscribed, please subscribe. We’re putting episodes out like this every single week, and we will see you in the next one.