When I started my management career, I thought leadership was about having the answers.
What I didn’t realize then was that leadership doesn’t just shape your decisions. It multiplies the consequences of being wrong.
At the bottom of the org chart pyramid, we have the people who actually know what they’re doing, a.k.a. individual contributors. They have specific skills, a clear scope, and if they’re wrong, the damage is contained.
But then you get promoted. Suddenly, you’re in middle management, and that’s where the gap between confidence and your actual competence starts to widen.
I’ll give you an example.
A few years ago I worked with a recently promoted director who derailed a technical project just to save face.
I’ve known him for a while and he was great in Sales Operations. Then he got put in charge of a fairly complex platform migration, without having a real technical depth. When engineers asked to choose between two schema options, he didn’t know the answer.
He was responsible for a decision he wasn’t equipped to make. Instead of asking for help, he forced a decision just to look decisive. Half a year and $400 K later, the migration failed. And to no surprise he left the company shortly after.
Common traps for new managers
I bet the assumption that a promotion means you should suddenly know everything is common.
We take strong specialists, give them authority, and expect them to handle problems they’ve never dealt with before, like budgets, people issues, or systems they didn’t build.
Under that pressure, most new managers do one of three things:
They think they should already know, so they stay quiet. Decisions get made on instinct instead of understanding.
They confuse sounding confident with being right, and make quick calls to avoid looking unsure.
Something worked in their last role, so they assume it will work here too, even when the problem is completely different.
If you’re a strong individual contributor thinking about management, please remember this: trying to be the smartest person in the room is how teams end up executing bad decisions very efficiently.
Knowledge boundaries
You don’t need to know everything and no one expects you to become an expert overnight.
However, you do need to know where your knowledge ends.
As a leader your job is to be clear about what you do know, what you don’t, and how risky it is to guess.
Leadership is mostly risk management, so admitting “I don’t know” early is often the safest move you have. It slows bad decisions down before they get expensive.
Here’s how to keep your limits visible without losing authority.
If a decision depends on knowledge you don’t have, don’t stall or bluff. Say it plainly and move the conversation forward by asking what information would actually settle the question.
Your role gives you authority. Your team gives you competence. When something is outside your depth, your job is to find who understands it best and lean on them.
Some decisions are easy to undo, so make those quickly. Others aren’t. If a decision is expensive or hard to reverse, hold on until you have enough understanding (or someone else on your team) to make it safely.
The bottom line
Leadership isn’t about having all the answers or being an expert in everything.
But you do have to be honest about what you know, rely on the expertise around you, and treat high risk decisions with care.
Strong managers don’t pretend. They define their competence, work within it, and design their team, and their decisions, around it.
The goal isn’t to look smart. It’s to make the right calls without causing unnecessary damage. That’s how leadership actually scales.
See you next Tuesday.