Dear friend,
I want to use this newsletter to share some of my thoughts on a topic that I reflect on frequently, and I would dearly love to hear back from you what this evokes for yourself as a professional and as a leader.
Very appropriately, when we start out in our careers, we notice the value of attaining new knowledge. It is critical for becoming good at most jobs and it is a way of differentiating oneself from others. Through the early stages in one’s career, the classic way of winning a promotion is being the person who knows best or most. This is entirely rational, as most team leaders in early-mid career lead teams that are knowledge-based (e.g. finance, engineering, sales, etc.).
Demonstrating knowledge is fundamental to standing out.
One unfortunate side effect of this, however, is that we often start associating our own professional credibility, and others’, with demonstrating knowledge. This tends to stay with us as we get more and more senior. We keep giving professional knowledge a heavy weight in our assessment of ourselves and others.
However, the very thing that makes us successful early in our careers can easily end up limiting us as senior leaders.
This can be recognised at senior levels as we listen to executives explain what their job entails. I frequently hear statements like:
“My job is to resolve the issues that others haven’t been able to.”
“People come to me for my expertise when they are stuck.”
“I am the ultimate sense-check to ensure everything is in place before we move on.”
Knowledge unwittingly remains central to how we define our contribution. Our way of sounding credible in our jobs is to intuitively lean on our accumulated knowledge.
In groups I also observe how we fall into this pattern. When a leader presents a new possibility or an outcome they think can be delivered, we typically respond with this classic question:
“How are you going to do that?”
If that question cannot be answered adequately right there, the outcome is somehow judged to be less likely to be attainable.
This reflex feels responsible. It sounds rigorous. But ultimately it is constraining.
Just because we cannot see how an outcome will be delivered from the outset does not lessen the likelihood that it can be. The absence of a clear path does not make an outcome unlikely. It simply means the path has not yet been created.
However, if the knowledge in the room cannot see the answer to this question, the outcome to go for will often be adjusted to fit perceived capability or even rejected entirely.
When immediate clarity becomes the benchmark for commitment, we inevitably narrow our ambition.
The obvious fall-out from this is uncompetitive strategy, goals and actions. In every field there will be other players that have taken the needed steps to equip their teams with the capability to spot where they let knowledge get in the way of pursuing what is possible to deliver, where they have learnt how to mobilise their organisations into purposeful action despite not having answers, create a culture of accountability and turn every set-back and problem into a source for creativity.
At some point, leadership stops being about what we know and becomes about what we are willing to stand for.
Senior leadership requires a different stance. Being possibility-oriented rather than strictly knowledge-oriented, and committing to outcomes that exceed present knowledge. It requires comfort with being seen without immediate answers.
If we get limited by our knowledge, we will be out-competed.
To paraphrase Richard Branson:
“I was blessed with the inability to see what is not possible.”
Best wishes,
