I’ve spent more than thirty years around organisations, leaders and leadership development, and after that long you start to see the same things get read as “leadership” over and over again.
Confidence is a big one. Being articulate. Having an answer when someone asks a difficult question. Being able to walk into a room and take charge of it without looking remotely uncomfortable about the fact that twenty people are staring at you waiting to hear what you think.
I’ve watched people get promoted on the back of those things. I’ve been in plenty of conversations about who has potential, who’s ready for the next role, who needs more development, who has that slightly mysterious thing we call “executive presence”.
At some point, though, I think we start confusing the signals of leadership with leadership itself.
That’s not to say those qualities don’t matter. Being able to take something complicated and explain it in a way that helps everyone understand what is going on is a hugely valuable skill. I’ve worked with people who could walk into a completely muddled situation, listen for a while and somehow find the three sentences that made everything clearer.
The problem comes when sounding like you know becomes part of the proof that you should be leading.
I’ve been part of that world too. I’ve spent a large chunk of my career in HR and senior leadership, inside the systems that identify and develop leaders, and I’ve absorbed plenty of the messages that come with it.
One of them is that the more senior you become, the more you’re supposed to know.
Nobody actually tells you that. There isn’t a little card tucked inside your promotion letter saying, Congratulations, from Monday onwards please have an answer for everything. It just sort of seeps in.
People start coming to you for answers. The decisions get bigger. There are more eyes on what you say. Saying “I’m not sure” can start to feel a little more uncomfortable than it used to.
So you learn how to answer. You learn how to make the recommendation, present the strategy, hold the room and give people confidence that there is, in fact, a plan.
Sometimes there is. Sometimes you’re also standing there thinking, God, I hope this works.
I’ve certainly done both.
Confidence and certainty aren’t the same thing.
You can be confident enough to make a decision without being certain it’s the right one. You can give people direction without pretending you know exactly where you’ll end up. You can know enough to take the next step without knowing steps seven, eight and nine.
There are plenty of situations now where steps seven, eight and nine simply aren’t available to us yet.
Take AI. We’re all talking about what it means for work, jobs, teams and organisations while simultaneously trying to work out what it means for work, jobs, teams and organisations. There isn’t a leadership manual hidden away somewhere with the answers in the back.
The same is true of a lot of organisational change. I’ve been around enough restructures to know that however lovely the new boxes look on the PowerPoint slide, nobody really knows how the organisation is going to work until actual human beings start working inside it.
Then there are all the much smaller things that don’t make it into articles about “the future of work” but are sitting on a leader’s desk on a random Thursday morning.
A team that isn’t quite working. Someone who was brilliant six months ago and suddenly isn’t. A new boss. A role nobody has properly defined. A decision where both options have consequences. A change that’s perfectly sensible on paper but isn’t landing with the people who are supposed to make it happen.
That’s leadership too, and most of the time there isn’t a neat answer.
The person worth following in those moments might not be the one who can make us believe they know exactly what happens next. Maybe what we’re looking for changes when certainty isn’t actually available.
The ability to explain still matters. Experience and judgement definitely still matter. Perhaps we’re also looking for the person who can help us move when there isn’t a perfect answer. Someone willing to begin somewhere and find out what happens next.
It might be the person who can say: Here’s what I know. Here’s what I don’t know yet. Here’s what I think we should try. What are you seeing?
I like that, because you’re not pretending to know something you don’t, but you’re not leaving everyone floundering either. You’re saying, this is what I can see from where I’m sitting, this is what I think we should do next, and I might be missing something, so tell me what you’re seeing.
I’d follow that person.
I don’t mean I want leaders wandering around saying they haven’t got a clue. Experience and judgement still matter enormously. It’s more about being able to recognise the difference between what you genuinely know and what you’re pretending to know because being the leader makes you feel as though you should.
I want someone who has enough judgement to take a thoughtful first step when there isn’t enough information to construct the perfect ten-step plan, and enough humility to pay attention to what happens after they’ve taken it.
Otherwise we simply replace the leader who has all the answers with the leader who has the big new idea, and everyone is still expected to follow along. I’m not sure that’s much of an evolution.
Once you’ve actually started, all sorts of things happen that you couldn’t have known when you made the plan.
You find out that the team heard something completely different from what you thought you’d said. The process that looked sensible doesn’t work in practice. Someone closer to the customer sees a problem you couldn’t see from where you were sitting. The person you thought would resist the change becomes the person who makes it work.
So you listen. You change something, and you try again.
That sounds incredibly obvious written down, but I’m not convinced it’s how leadership has always felt from the inside.
We’ve spent a lot of time teaching people how to be credible leaders. How to communicate with impact, influence, make decisions, have difficult conversations and think strategically.
All useful things. But if credibility gets tangled up with certainty, we create another problem.
What happens if you’re naturally someone who wants to think before you answer? Or you’re the leader who notices things rather than announces things? Maybe your strength is asking the question that changes the conversation rather than being the person with the fastest response.
What if you’re very good at listening, but you’ve spent years thinking you need to talk more because that’s what senior leaders do?
This is where I think the problem might be less about whether we’ve chosen the right leadership qualities and more about the fact that we’ve been looking for the same combination of qualities in everyone.
We build the picture of what a good leader looks like, then assess people against it, find their gaps and start working on them. Not strategic enough. Not visible enough. Needs more gravitas. Needs to speak up. Needs to delegate. Needs to be more decisive.
Some of that feedback will be completely valid and useful, but I wonder how often we ask something much simpler:
How does this person actually lead well?
Not how could we make them look more like the person who got promoted before them. Not which bits of the competency framework are still missing. This person.
Maybe that changes our relationship with “I don’t know yet” as well.
Leadership doesn’t require you to know everything. It might require you to know yourself well enough that you don’t need to perform knowing. That feels like a much more useful place to start.
So I’m going to try something.
Over the next little while, I’m going to pay attention to the people I instinctively recognise as leaders. Not necessarily people with leadership titles. I’m more interested in the people I trust, whose judgement I seek, who I’d choose to work with again, and who I’d be prepared to follow into something when none of us quite knows how it’s going to turn out.
I want to notice what I’m responding to.
Maybe it is confidence or experience or the way they speak. Perhaps it’s also the way they listen. Whether they can make a decision without pretending it’s guaranteed to work. Whether they can change their mind without treating that as some kind of leadership failure. Whether they create enough direction for people to move while leaving room for other people to contribute to where they’re going.
I’m not particularly interested in replacing one leadership mould with another. We’ve spent long enough trying to squeeze people into those. I want to know what happens when we widen what we’re prepared to recognise as leadership and start with the individual human being doing the leading.
Perhaps the question isn’t How do I become the kind of leader I’m supposed to be?
It’s How do I lead well as me?
Sometimes that might mean being the person who’s comfortable enough to say, “I don’t know yet. But here’s where I think we could begin.”