Unsure and Decisive

From Here to There: the 9th in a series of newsletters for the successful leader. From that same successful leader who still knows there is more impact out there.

Kristopher Evje Nov 2

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[On Friday I stood in front of a room in Sartell, MN and talked about what great leaders do. The very next morning I woke up unsure about my own next step. So I did what I usually do. I got up, read, and wrote. And, this is what came out.]

It’s okay not to know. It’s okay to acknowledge it.

It’s not okay, and it will tear down credibility and culture, when you pretend you know but you don’t. They will know. They will know you don’t know.

Pretending is the off-ramp away from the security and safety of a free exchange of ideas and questions. It exposes a lack of character, and character is the one thing you can’t afford to lose.

A lack of knowledge is easy. That’s why you have your team. A lack of character starts a race to reclaim your credibility, a race you may never catch up in.

In the moment, our brain is perfectly designed, and very convincing, to tell us that pretending to know is needed to keep us out of danger. It’s tapping into something hard-wired in us that no longer serves its original purpose: survival.

Now it often fuels a set of false needs.

Control.
Perfection.
Being there for others.
Approval.
And the big one: knowing the answer.

You need food, water, and shelter to survive.

Not the answer.

[Tim Clark’s four stages of psychological safety make the cost plain. A team can’t reach the stage where people learn out loud, let alone the stage where they challenge the boss, if the person at the front of the room can’t say “I don’t know.”]

So here’s the tension. On one side is the uncertainty of “I don’t know.” On the other is the clarity of “…AND I’m confident and committed that together we will figure it out.”

That tension is what you were put in the position to navigate.

Your role is to provide clarity on the win, and to delegate the action steps to your people.

You don’t have to have the answer to lead. You have to be honest enough to say you don’t, and clear enough that your people know where you’re going anyway.

Unsure, and decisive.

That’s how we go from HERE to THERE.

[A question to carry into this week: Are you pretending to know exactly what’s next or what the anaswer is right now, and what would it cost you to say “I don’t know, AND we’ll figure it out together”?]

— Kris

Kris Evje is superintendent of Ortonville Public Schools and founder of Play Tall Leadership. He is a Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coach and a certified DISC practitioner.