When Having All the Answers Isn’t A Good Thing

One of the nettling things about good leadership is that it changes as your role and stature in an organization changes. It turns out that many of the very practices that distinguished you in lower levels of the org chart actually become liabilities or limiters when you reach the executive suite. This means that if you want to be most effective in a top job, you’ve got to unlearn some of the best lessons you learned early on, or stop doing some of the very things that won you the higher position in the first place. Here’s one of those things: Stop answering people’s questions.

When you are at lower levels on the org chart, or when you’re an “independent performer”, your path to greater influence and opportunity lies in your ability to provide answers. You might do this literally by providing the data or information called for by decisions and decision-makers, or metaphorically by providing the solution to new problems or opportunities. Either way, your ability to personally provide answers and fill the info gap is the key to your credibility, the measure of your effectiveness, and likely your ticket to the “big time.” However, once you’ve made it to the “big time” (or at least the “bigger time”) your success depends less on your own effectiveness than on your ability to foster others’. In this endeavor, your ability and/or inclination to provide answers yourself is not only less useful, but counterproductive.

Effective leadership at this level is about preparing others to provide the answers, and they tend not to do this if you’re busily doing it yourself. I frequently hear executives bemoan the fact that their people won’t “step up” or “answer the tough questions.” They’re frustrated and disappointed and they don’t understand their lack of initiative. “After all,” they say, “when I was in their position I always had the answers…” The problem is, they still do, and it creates a vicious cycle, a self-fulfilling prophesy, that creates the very situation they are disliking.

Followers adjust their actions to fit their leaders’, and if a leader is too full of answers, she will eventually discover that her team is only full of questions. If you find yourself in this predicament, you’ll feel like your subordinates’ action (or inaction) is the impetus for your own, but its likely just as true in reverse. They are taking their cues from you. It’s counterintuitive, but to fix this scenario, you need to flip the script.

At this level, success doesn’t come from how much you know or can figure out; it comes from how much your people know and are willing to do, so keep the focus on them. Make a space for their answers by resisting the urge to give your own. Stop answering questions and start asking them instead. Turn e-mails back to the sender with more question marks than periods, and let people leave your office unresolved more often. This doesn’t mean that you should offer no feedback or guidance at all (being clueless and disengaged is a poor leadership strategy at every level) but use your input to shape consideration and direct discussion more productively rather than to settle it once and for all.

I know you often know the answer, and I that it’s often a better answer than what others might provide, but sometimes its better to have a lesser answer from someone else. I also know it’s often faster, more efficient, to simply provide the answers yourself, but sometimes speed isn’t what you need most. Your own expertise and initiative got you to this role, but it’s your ability to build others’ that is going to take you higher. If you’re not careful and sensitive to this dynamic you risk being another promising leader that didn’t pan out, or worse, one more brilliant failure.

Most Answers are Determined BEFORE the Questions are Asked

Earlier in my career, I had a unrealistically tidy notion of organizational activity, and I assumed that decision-making was a deliberate and linear process. By this, I mean that I assumed a question would be posed, pertinent data and opinions would be shared, there would be consideration and discussion, and a decision would be made. Now that I’m more seasoned (or cynical) I realize reality in organizations is rarely this tidy and this isn’t the way most decisions are made.

In many organizations, the press of time makes focused or deliberate consideration seem like a fairy tale— something you read about when you were young and still like to imagine, but something that seems fanciful and entirely out of place in the all-too-real world you inhabit every day. Leaders in these organizations feel like they don’t have time to think, and they perpetually need decisions and actions “yesterday”. Other organizations might as well be declared Data-Free Zones. They have little access to data and even less interest in it. It’s just not part of their culture and when questions come up, their leaders’ daily decisions and strategic choices are unencumbered by any metrics or measures at all. Some organizations avoid even posing the questions. Sure, they make choices, but passively; they ultimately determine direction and initiate action by “omission” rather than “commission”. Their leaders subconsciously conspire to have decisions made for them by other forces: others’ expectations, outside circumstances, the passage of time, the crisis du jour, etc.

When they’re written so starkly on paper, these characterizations sound silly or extreme, but they may also sound frighteningly familiar. In my experience, they describe all organizations some of the time and some organizations all of the time. In reality, deliberate or linear consideration is hard to come by and decision-makers depend instead on their own predispositions when questions arise. This means that their decisions are based more frequently on their pre-existing perspectives than on one that might be cultivated at the time of the decision itself.

I discovered this the hard way. When I saw an important question on the agenda, I prepared to make a case for my preferred course of action. I came to the meeting expecting an opportunity to inform and persuade. To my surprise, this opportunity rarely came, or it came so fleetingly that speaking to it was like hitting a moving target. The question would be raised, discussed, and answered before any real appreciation of its complexity or implications could be cultivated. (Granted, this wasn’t so bad when I agreed with the decision or thought it was in the organization’s best interests, but when it wasn’t, I was frustrated and disappointed.) There I sat, stocked with my carefully organized data and brilliant rationale, but with no real opportunity to employ them. The question was settled and we were already moving on to the next agenda item.

I suppose this could’ve convinced me that organizational decision-making was simply irrational and capricious, but that wasn’t exactly true (at least not in every case.) Decisions were genuinely based on something, just not something that was available to me or manageable during the meeting in which we made them. Instead, they were based on the decision-makers’ pre-dispositions, the convictions and perspectives they held prior to the meeting rather than those I might spark or fan into flame during the discussion itself. In essence, the answers were determined before the questions were asked.

This realization reframed my whole approach and I’ve changed my tactics for influencing organizational decisions. I still prepare data and rationale, but I don’t save my best stuff for a grand “pitch” at decision time. Instead, I focus on the time before the decision and weave my vital information and perspectives into interactions with decision-makers in real time, long before important questions are likely to be raised. I pay less attention to meeting agendas than I do daily conversations and incidental opportunities. For instance, I spend time throughout the year cultivating an appreciation for my fiscal needs so that when the budget allocation process commences, decision-makers already share my priorities. I interject data about employees’ loads, capacity, and performance into incidental regular conversations so that when performance management processes raise personnel questions, decision-makers already appreciate my needs. In short, I direct my persuasive efforts toward cultivating the dispositions that will determine the decisions later on. This may be more savvy, more attentive, or just plain old more manipulative, but in the end its simply more successful.