Seth Dobbs (he/him): Do you feel that as a leader, you need to have all the answers? Do you worry that because you’re not enough of an expert to have all the answers, you might not be ready to lead? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast where I share principles of leadership, along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be.

These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building organizations and in coaching others who become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential for helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact.

And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. And leadership is a journey. The step we’re taking today involves shifting the way you engage with others, by focusing less on having all the answers and more on finding solutions. I met Malik while speaking at a conference years ago, and he’d recently been moved up to a leadership role.

He was really excited about the change. It’s what he’d been wanting. He’d been really working towards it for a while, but as I spoke with him, it became clear to me that he seemed fairly stressed. So we talked a bit about how the new role was working out for him and overall he thought it was going well, but it was also a lot harder than he expected.

And in particular, he said things like, I thought I was really smart before taking this position and knowing all the answers ahead of time is really a lot harder than I thought it would be. So this in particular caught my attention and I dug deeper. We actually spoke for a while and he talked about how he was struggling to stay ahead of everybody so that he could give the team all the right answers.

For example, there’s a case where he found out that some of the team needed to work with a new ERP system, so he spent several near sleepless nights reading up on it so he could know everything about it and tell them how they can do the work. Another time, his team was stuck trying to get certain data outta the operations team, and so he just went and used his higher level access to the system to write the reports himself.

And at one point he was, talking to me about how do you get people to hit a deadline. He went through this example where he was going through cycles of finding out from his team. They didn’t think they could make a deadline. He’d go to the other department that would depended on this deadline to tell ’em the team would be late.

They’d push back. They were unhappy. So he’d go back to tell his team that they just needed to get it done and kind of bounce back and forth between these two concepts without really resolving it. Beyond that, he was inviting himself into every discussion that was happening so that he could direct them and make sure they were talking about the right things.

Then as we look at the team, some of the team actually had expertise in things that he had never done, and he was fairly, to me, clearly uncomfortable trying to lead that. But also even where he did have experience, some of that team was actually a far more of an expert at the work than he was, and some of them pointed that out to him.

So beyond that even he felt he just needed to be everywhere to keep learning, understanding, directing, staying ahead of everybody, and he just wondered, how do we lead without knowing everything, he even started noticing that the team seemed unhappy, but he felt that it was because he wasn’t giving them enough of this kind of direction.

Now the more we spoke, it just became clearer to me that he was really close to burning out and or sinking into a depression. This kind of behavior, this kind of pattern, especially for someone that’s new into leadership isn’t all that unusual. You, yourself might have experienced this or seen someone go through it.

So the enabling principle, for this episode is that getting to write is more important than being right. So over the past few episodes, I’ve introduced some related concepts that I wanna bring together. Here I’ve talked about the notion of fostering an organization that embraces the spirit of problem resolution.

And in doing that, you need to focus on two key drives, the drive to face reality, and the drive to prioritize. And I’ve also talked a little bit about the need to course correct early, how a little vigilance can go a long way in preventing major issues. And that conflict is often based in solving different problems, but manifest its solution.

So bringing all of this together, the overarching drive we need to have is not the drive to be right. It’s the drive to get to right. I’ll say this clearly leaders don’t need to have all the answers. I think that’s a good thing because it’s impossible for any of us to know everything we might ever need to know before we need to know it.

And in fact, I would argue that the best leaders don’t just sit on the mountaintop, toing out answers. The best leaders develop the skills to find the right answers, ideally leveraging the team and organization that they lead. This ties into why the second core principle of leadership is that leaders resolve problems.

You’re not here to solve and fix everything for everybody else, and this is a shift from being an individual contributor, where you’re more directly responsible to leadership. As a leader, you’re here to make sure that problems are resolved and to help others get there. So to be clear, you don’t need all the answers.

You do need to be very good at asking the right questions, and this was central in the previous episode to resolving conflict, asking about assumptions, asking about a problems. What are the people trying to do? How are they thinking about it? You should be curious as a leader, always looking for more insights and you should be using questions to drive to conclusions, to help yourself drive to conclusions, to move people collectively toward the desire, outcomes, and resolving the problem but not necessarily solving it itself.

And this works at whatever level you’re working at, whether you’re new in leadership or all the way to where I am as a C-Suite executive. I apply this kind of questioning all the time. And you yourself can start seeing that you’re taking this correctly, that it’s working for you when you start finding yourself engaged in more discussions rather than giving direction to your team.

And sometimes we do need to give direction, but getting to right is about guidance. And by providing this guidance, by working to get to right, the team becomes clearer on the outcomes, on the assumptions, and will bring their expertise to help you make the best decisions you can. So going back to Malik, he needed to make some changes quickly, both for his own sake and for his teams.

So I talked him through this concept that getting to right is more important than being right, and I tried to help him view things differently as well as to understand the impacts of his existing behaviors. So again, first I emphasize that it’s impossible to have all the answers. It’s that simple. I don’t even really know what it would mean to have all the answers.

And so he needed to change the way he interacted in team meetings and in other discussions to be, in some cases, more of a facilitator, a director, but not necessarily the answer person. I told him what it was like he had this whole crew on a boat, but he was running up and down the ship trying to work every or himself.

It’s not very effective. You don’t get a lot of good forward motion that way. Whereas getting to right is leading by showing where you want the crew to be, not making it all happen yourself, letting them use their expertise to get you there. So by framing discussions around getting to right, rather than asserting the right answers, he’d be able to actually enable the teams themselves to meet, have discussions, work through things without him, and then bring him recommendations.

And this is important because regardless of your intention, putting yourself in every meeting and every discussion tells your team that you don’t trust them. So we went through a few examples of what he was doing and how he could look at it and approach things differently. For example, when he wrote that operational report himself, he did both his team and the operations team a huge disservice.

He should have connected the teams. He could have worked with his team to make sure they were clear on not just what information they needed, but why. How it was gonna be impactful to the way they did their job. Then he could have simply coached them to have that conversation with the operations team and make their needs clear.

With the deadline, you could see that just trying to have the right answer and pushing back and forth, really would shut down any kind of curiosity. He wasn’t actually trying to resolve the real problem, instead of just bouncing back and forth trying to assert something. He should have asked the team any number of questions such as, well, what’s preventing you from reaching the deadline?

What challenges have you been experiencing? Maybe what resources do you need more of? People or system access or what? Are there other priorities fighting for your attention, making it hard for you to focus on this? And if so, what’s the biggest priority on your plate right now? Because maybe we need to reprioritize, right?

Any of these could have led to a genuine attempt at problem resolution instead of just oscillating between trying to push a simplistic solution on one team or another. Thinking about getting to right rather than just being right would also help him shift his interactions with the team members that had deeper expertise than he did.

He didn’t need to know more about how to do the work. He needed to guide them through outcomes and leverage their knowledge to do it better. So a few examples in this case, the ERP system. He wanted to have all the answers, again, impossible, even after he had read all the documentation. Worse, his belief that he had all the answers may have led him, led to him giving out bad information and stifling the team’s ability to do the work themselves.

Instead, he should have just encouraged that team to develop the necessary knowledge and if a problem did come up that they couldn’t resolve. He could then coach them in digging in to try to still resolve it themselves. He could even use this principle to improve how he was leading the team members that did work in areas that he had never touched.

And honestly, as far as I could tell, he seemed to be avoiding them. So any leadership was gonna be an improvement. But if you think about this principle, getting to right is more important than being right can help you lead functions that you’re not an expert in doing. If you understand the results, if you understand the outcomes that need to come out of that work, you can still guide teams to write.

Now even so in regardless of any of these situations in getting to right, you still ultimately as the leader, own the results. You’re ultimately responsible for the decisions, but that’s a very different thing than having to have all of the answers yourself. Engaging in a spirit of problem resolution is to bring our best collective response to bear in the face of whatever adversity comes our way.

So the more that you can frame discussions around getting to right, rather than being right or who is right, that goes a long way to creating this spirit. This concept also ties into a previous episode where I talked about how people thrive when they own their work. Creating the space to get to right gives far more ownership to the people you lead.

And it helps people grow so much more than by simply giving them answers or commands. So said another way, assuming you as the leader have to have all the answers, is actually limiting in multiple ways. It constricts problem resolution by centering things on you and ignoring all the expertise around you.

It might even prevent you from wanting to take on further leadership roles because of the fear of being called out that you don’t have all the answers. Trying to have all the answers also prevents the people you lead from growing, from owning, from enjoying their craft because you’re restricting their activity.

And again, they might become afraid to be be leaders because they don’t see themselves being able to have all the answers. Getting to write is a skill. It’s not just about hoping others are gonna have all the answers. It’s really centering the discussion on the outcomes you need to reach, asking questions to move things forward, not centering on the methods of reaching the results.

This gives space for questions that can help shape the path and help people grow. Getting the right, create space for others to contribute and take ownership. And again, ultimately you might have to make the final decision, but that doesn’t mean you have to walk in with all the answers. Give yourself and your team the space to get to right, and you’ll get truly powerful results.

So in closing, I want you to think about recent times when you might have held yourself back from engaging in something because you didn’t have all the answers. And instead think about what questions you could have asked to get to a better spot. Or think about times where you asserted the answers, and instead, what questions could have you asked the team to help them move forward?

Think about that, and then think about how to apply those questions and that mindset in the future. And if you find yourself just pushing answers out and telling people what to do, hold back, ask questions, provide guidance. Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe and share with a friend if you liked it, and join me next time where I’m gonna talk about how to recognize if something really is a problem, and then how to categorize it.