Early in my leadership career, a colleague told me something I did not particularly want to hear. She did not quite say, “You are a rubbish leader,” but that was close enough to the message. We were friends, although even that friendship was beginning to strain, because I had acquired a leadership title and apparently decided that one of its requirements was to demonstrate, repeatedly, that I knew what I was doing. I talked too much. I told people what to do. I offered opinions in areas I did not understand as well as the people doing the work every day. I was trying to prove myself, and in doing so I was becoming harder to work with.
My first reaction was predictable: shock, followed fairly quickly by defensiveness. I asked other people what they thought, perhaps hoping they would tell me she had got it wrong. They were noticeably reluctant to do so. Nobody rushed to reassure me that I was doing a wonderful job. Their hesitation became evidence of its own. Eight years later, that same colleague told me, with characteristic directness, that I was considerably less bad at leadership than I had been when I started. We have remained in touch ever since. Somewhere across those years I had begun talking less, listening more and involving people more readily. Most importantly, I had become less preoccupied with proving that I deserved the title.
It was an early lesson in something I have had to relearn in different forms ever since: having responsibility for a situation does not mean you fully understand it.
The first problem is diagnosis
Leadership advice has a tendency to jump quickly to action. Communicate clearly. Consult people. Trust your team. Be decisive. Be vulnerable. Change course when the evidence changes. All of those can be sensible, and all of them can be wrong in the wrong situation. Before deciding how to lead, there is a more basic question: what is actually happening here?
That sounds obvious, but much of leadership takes place before we possess a complete answer. We notice a colleague becoming quieter and decide they are disengaged. We hear several complaints and conclude that the organisation wants change. We see resistance to a new initiative and assume the initiative is failing. We inherit a recurring meeting and continue holding it because that is what happens on Tuesdays. Observation quietly becomes interpretation, and interpretation becomes fact before we have noticed the transition.
I have made that mistake. In one organisation I led, I inherited a strong message that people wanted more organisation and greater leadership presence. There was frustration about a lack of coordination. Things were not always planned far enough ahead, responsibilities could be unclear, and people wanted greater consistency. Organisation happens to be one of my strengths, so I did what seemed entirely rational: I organised. I introduced longer term planning and greater structure. To me, much of it felt straightforward. To some of the people experiencing those changes, it felt like additional workload.
Looking back, I do not think the simple lesson is that I failed to listen. I had listened. The more uncomfortable lesson is that I heard the problem partly through the filter of what I was good at solving. People had talked about organisation, but they had also talked about presence. I responded particularly strongly to the part of the problem that fitted one of my strengths.
That distinction matters. Leaders are often encouraged to play to their strengths, but strengths do not merely affect how we respond to problems. They can influence which problem we think we are looking at. If you are an organiser, disorder becomes especially visible. If you are highly relational, fractured relationships may command your attention. If you are commercially minded, the numbers may dominate. If your background is operational, execution may look like the answer. None of those perspectives is inherently wrong. The danger begins when our preferred lens becomes the whole picture.
Sometimes we solve the problem we are most comfortable solving rather than the one the organisation most needs us to solve.
Consultation is not the same as understanding
This is why consultation, valuable as it is, should not be confused with understanding. We can ask many people for their views and still leave with an incomplete picture.
I used to describe some decisions quite explicitly as consultative: this is what I am thinking, convince me otherwise. I still believe leaders should be honest about how a decision will be made. There is a real difference between a democratic decision, a consultation and a decision that ultimately sits with the leader. Pretending that every consultation is a vote is unfair to everyone involved.
Yet I have become less comfortable with the phrase “convince me otherwise”. It places the leader’s existing position at the centre and asks everyone else to dislodge it. Even when unintended, authority changes a conversation. If the most senior person in the room announces what they believe before everyone else has spoken, some people will inevitably edit what they say. Others will unconsciously begin responding to the leader’s solution rather than thinking openly about the problem.
A better consultation does not require the leader to arrive without a view. That would often be artificial. It requires enough openness for that view to change. There is a meaningful difference between saying, “Convince me I am wrong,” and saying, “This is where my thinking currently is, but I want to understand what you see.”
It also acknowledges something that can make leadership decisions difficult to explain. The leader may possess information other people do not, while the people around them possess expertise the leader does not. The final decision may therefore still be unpopular. Consultation is not a promise that the majority view will prevail, nor should it be. Sometimes leaders are balancing financial constraints, confidential information, competing organisational priorities or wider considerations that cannot simply be laid on the table. People deserve honesty about the process and as much explanation as can responsibly be given, but transparency does not mean unrestricted disclosure.
Understanding therefore requires more than collecting opinions. It requires listening closely enough to discover what sits behind them.
Coaching offers a useful parallel. The first answer someone gives is often the easiest answer, not necessarily the fullest one. Good questioning is not an interrogation in which the leader marches through a prepared list. It is attention. You listen to the answer closely enough for it to shape what comes next, and sometimes you leave enough silence for the other person to reach the next layer themselves.
The same principle applies outside a coaching conversation. If someone appears unusually subdued, “You look sad today” already contains a diagnosis. Perhaps they are not sad at all. Perhaps you happened to see them during one difficult moment. “How are you?” leaves more room for reality.
The difference looks tiny, but it reveals a larger leadership discipline: separate what you have noticed from the story you have told yourself about it.
Experience helps, until it doesn’t
Experience should make this easier. Sometimes it does.
Experienced leaders recognise patterns more quickly. They know which questions tend to matter. They have lived through enough difficult situations to avoid rediscovering everything from first principles. There are also circumstances in which extended consultation would be absurd. If there is an emergency, people do not need a leader to announce that they would like to begin a listening exercise. They need someone to act. Policies, expertise and previous experience exist precisely because some situations require clarity and speed.
But experience carries its own risk.
People often talk about having twenty years of experience as though the passage of time automatically produces wisdom. Sometimes it does. Sometimes twenty years of experience is one year of experience repeated twenty times. The difference is not time. It is whether we have continued questioning, reflecting and learning while that time has passed.
Familiarity makes us efficient, but it can also make things disappear from view.
I spent eighteen years in one organisation. That gave me contextual knowledge that somebody arriving from outside could not possibly possess immediately. I knew the history behind decisions, understood relationships and had watched the organisation change over many years. That knowledge had genuine value.
It also meant there were things I had lived with for so long that I may no longer have seen them clearly enough to question them.
A later leader arrived with a very different approach and reshaped a great deal. There were things I would have approached differently and changes I would probably have made more slowly. But with distance, I can also recognise something important: the organisation needed to move forward, and at that moment a different kind of leadership may have been exactly what it required.
That is uncomfortable because we like to imagine experience as an uncomplicated asset. It is not. Deep contextual understanding and institutional blindness can grow from exactly the same years of service.
Sometimes the practices we stop questioning are very ordinary. Meetings are a good example. A meeting can remain in the calendar long after anyone remembers why it exists. Before sending an invitation, it is worth asking a basic question: why are we meeting? Perhaps we need to decide something, solve something, clarify something, answer questions or build understanding. Perhaps there is nothing that could not be communicated more effectively another way.
Cancelling that meeting is not poor leadership. It may simply be respect for people’s time.
The lesson is larger than meetings. Systems acquire momentum. Processes survive their original purpose. Experienced people can become particularly vulnerable to saying, “That is how we do it here,” without noticing that the conditions which once justified it have changed.
Diagnosis is only half the job
Even understanding the situation does not guarantee a good response.
I can look back at occasions when I misunderstood what was happening and then applied an approach that might have been perfectly sensible had my diagnosis been correct. I can also identify occasions when I understood the situation reasonably well and still handled it badly.
Those are different leadership failures.
The first is a failure of diagnosis: I solved the wrong problem.
The second is a failure of response: I saw the problem and chose, or implemented, the wrong way of dealing with it.
I once had to make a difficult resource decision between two competing organisational priorities. Both had value. Both had people advocating strongly for them. Resources were finite, and one area was under considerably greater pressure. After listening to the people closest to that pressure and considering the wider constraints, I made the decision to move resources towards it.
I can still explain the reasoning behind that decision. What I did not do well enough was stay close to what happened afterwards.
The people affected by the change had to absorb responsibilities previously held elsewhere, and I did not check in sufficiently. I did not spend enough time close to the work to understand how implementation was progressing. I had made the decision and trusted people to get on with it.
Trust is one of the values I place highly in leadership, but even a good value can be badly applied. Trust without attention can become distance.
Delegation does not remove a leader’s responsibility to notice what happens next. A decision is not finished when it is announced. Implementation produces new information. That information may confirm the original judgement, expose a problem in execution or reveal that the decision itself needs revisiting.
Monitoring is not the opposite of trust when it is done properly. It is part of understanding whether what we intended is what is actually happening.
Do not confuse responsiveness with reactivity
This creates another difficulty. If leaders must remain open to new information, when should they stop questioning and commit?
Change almost always creates some discomfort. A new process may initially feel slower. A reorganised team may take time to settle. People who preferred the previous arrangement may object loudly. If a leader treats every negative reaction as evidence that the decision was wrong, nothing is ever given time to work. Responsiveness then becomes reactivity, and the organisation experiences constant movement without meaningful progress.
I tend to look for repetition and patterns. One source tells you something: listen. Several genuinely different sources begin saying the same thing: pay closer attention. The same concern keeps returning from different parts of the organisation: sit up.
Even that is not a mathematical rule. Ten people can repeat one person’s interpretation, while a lone voice can sometimes identify a serious problem before anyone else sees it. Leadership judgement cannot be reduced to counting opinions. We have to consider the quality of the evidence, whether the sources are genuinely independent, the consequences of being wrong and how much time the situation allows.
Eventually, though, there comes a point when continued questioning stops improving the decision. If the evidence repeatedly brings you back to the same place, decide.
And then give the decision a chance.
That does not mean becoming attached to it. If the evidence later shows that you are travelling down the wrong road, put your hands up and say so. Changing course is not necessarily inconsistency. Sometimes it is evidence that you are still paying attention.
The responsibility then is to explain what has changed, why the original decision no longer holds and what the new direction means for people. Imagine boarding a plane knowing you are flying to Spain and discovering halfway through the journey that the pilot has changed course without saying a word. You might trust that there is a good reason, but you would reasonably expect an announcement. Not necessarily because you object to the change, but because you deserve to understand it.
People can cope with a changed destination more readily than they can cope with unexplained uncertainty.
Leadership is grey
Perhaps this is why I am increasingly suspicious of leadership advice that presents a behaviour as universally good.
Consult people, except when the situation requires immediate command. Be vulnerable, except when announcing that you have no idea what to do would destroy necessary confidence. Trust your experience, except when experience is preventing you from seeing what has changed. Move quickly, except when speed is substituting for understanding. Go slowly, except when an organisation genuinely needs disruption. Listen to your people, but remember that a vocal group is not automatically the whole organisation. Be adaptable, but do not adapt so completely that leadership becomes an act you perform rather than something you can genuinely stand behind.
There is no contradiction in that list that can be solved by discovering the perfect leadership style.
The contradiction is the work.
Leadership is contextual. The same behaviour can be courageous in one situation and reckless in another. Vulnerability can create trust or anxiety. Decisiveness can provide clarity or silence expertise. Patience can allow change to embed or become an excuse for drift. The leader’s task is not to collect enough principles to eliminate judgement. It is to improve the quality of the judgement those principles inform.
That also means recognising the limits of our own range. Leaders are not equally strong in every aspect of their role, particularly when they lead large, complex organisations filled with specialists who know their work better than the person at the top. I have led teams of sixty and a hundred people. I would be deluding myself if I claimed to understand every specialist function better than the people doing those jobs every day.
Leadership does not require that.
It does require creating conditions in which those people can tell you what you are missing, and being secure enough to hear them when they do.
Sometimes the challenge goes deeper still. An approach that once served an organisation well may no longer be what it needs. A leader can adapt behaviours, learn new skills and respond differently, but adaptation has limits. There is a difference between stretching yourself and putting on an act.
There may eventually be a difficult question for both the leader and those responsible for the organisation: does this leader need to adapt, or does this organisation now need a different kind of leader?
That can be a horrible question precisely because nobody necessarily has to be the villain. A leader can have contributed enormously and still cease to be the right person for the next stage. Equally, a leader whose approach would be wrong for one organisation may be exactly what another needs.
Good leadership is not necessarily permanent leadership. Effectiveness belongs partly to the relationship between a leader, a moment and an organisation.
The pause before the decision
None of this is an argument for endless reflection.
Leaders who refuse to act until they possess certainty will wait forever. Decisions have to be made with incomplete information, and sometimes they will be wrong. I have often told colleagues that I would rather they act than do nothing at all.
The aim is not to remove uncertainty. It is to resist unnecessary certainty: the confidence that the first explanation must be the right one, that our preferred strength must provide the solution, that the loudest voices represent everyone, or that because something worked before it will work again.
If time allows, understand the situation, then make the decision.
The words “if time allows” matter. Sometimes leadership gives you months to listen, test and think. Sometimes it gives you minutes. Occasionally it gives you seconds. Use the time the situation genuinely gives you. Go to the source rather than constructing a conclusion from everyone around it. Ask open questions. Look for patterns. Draw on expertise. Notice where your own strengths are shaping what you see. Be clear about how the decision will be made.
Then, when the evidence keeps returning you to the same place, stop asking the question simply because another answer might feel safer.
My colleague’s criticism early in my leadership career did not suddenly make me a good leader. Eight years later, even her backhanded compliment did not mean I had finished learning. If anything, the value of that relationship was that it made certainty a little less comfortable.
I had once thought leadership meant showing people that I was ready for the role. What I gradually learned was almost the reverse. A title proved very little. Neither did having the quickest answer in the room.
Leadership was in doing the work well enough to know when I understood, being humble enough to notice when I did not, and eventually having the courage to decide anyway.
The danger is not that leaders sometimes get things wrong. We will.
The greater danger may be knowing too soon.
If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.