Leadership Isn’t About Having Answers

Back when I first stepped into a leadership role, I thought my job was to be the smartest person in the room. Man, was I wrong.

I remember this project we were working on — the kind where everything that could go wrong did. Deadlines slipping. Budget creeping up. The weekly status meetings had turned into defensive blame-fests where everyone (including me) was just trying to protect their own reputation.

One Friday afternoon, I just got tired. Tired of pretending I had solutions when I didn’t. Tired of watching the same problems come up week after week.

So I ditched the script.

“Look,” I said. “What we’re doing clearly isn’t working, and honestly, I don’t have a silver bullet fix. What are we missing here?”

The room went quiet. You could practically feel people waiting for the other shoe to drop. But when they realized I was genuinely asking, something shifted.

Dave, who barely spoke in meetings, mentioned a workflow issue he’d been hesitant to bring up. Kim pointed out that our client’s requirements had changed but we hadn’t adjusted our approach. Mark suggested a completely different technical solution we hadn’t considered.

Within an hour, we had scrapped half our plans and charted a new course that actually worked.

That afternoon changed how I think about leadership. I realized my job wasn’t to have all the answers. It was to create the conditions where my team felt safe enough to share theirs.

When I look back at my biggest leadership failures, nearly all of them stem from the same root cause: thinking I needed to know everything. The projects where I micromanaged because I didn’t trust others’ approaches. The times I made snap decisions without gathering input. The moments I was so afraid of looking uncertain that I doubled down on questionable directions.

But my proudest moments? Those came from asking genuine questions, then shutting up long enough to hear the answers.

This approach isn’t about being passive. It takes guts to admit you don’t have everything figured out. It takes skill to ask questions that open up thinking rather than shut it down. And it takes judgment to know when to guide and when to decide.

Here’s what I’ve found works: