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Leadership Decisions Series #4

When someone becomes responsible for a team, an expectation can quickly develop around what they should know.

From the team, it may sound like: “How can they manage me if they can't do my job?”, “managers should start from the bottom”, “I know more about this than my supervisor does”.

From the manager, the pressure can sound remarkably similar: “I am the manager, I should know this”. Both raise an important question about what we actually expect from leadership.

The question is: are leaders and managers expected to have all the answers?

There is legitimacy behind expecting managers to understand the work they oversee. Without sufficient understanding, it can be difficult to recognise complexity, challenge assumptions, assess quality, make informed decisions or understand what a team realistically needs to deliver. But understanding the work, being able to perform the work and being able to lead the people performing it are not necessarily the same capability.

As organisations grow, teams often become more specialised, a manager may be responsible for people whose technical expertise is considerably deeper than their own, a leader may oversee several disciplines they could never personally perform at expert level. That doesn't make them less capable of leading those people, because building organisational capability means having people around us who know things we don't. The challenge is that our perception of credibility does not always evolve as quickly.

For employees, having a manager who has previously done their job can create confidence that the realities of the work will be understood, but previous experience does not guarantee current understanding. The role, technology, customers, workload or environment may have changed. Having done the job once does not remove the responsibility to understand the job as it exists today.

For managers themselves, the pressure can be even less visible: “I should know”, so we read more, prepare more and work longer to make sure nobody discovers the gaps in our knowledge. We may avoid asking a question in a meeting because we think we should already know the answer. We hesitate to ask our own manager for support because we worry about how it will be perceived, “will I lose credibility?”, “will my team still respect me?”, “will they question whether I'm ready for this position?” Sometimes they work themselves to the bone trying to know every subject inside out, not because the role genuinely requires it, but because they have connected knowledge with legitimacy. Yet the higher they progress, the less realistic that expectation becomes: Leadership increasingly requires us to make decisions across areas where other people hold deeper expertise. Our responsibility is knowing enough to understand the implications, recognising when we don't know enough, identifying where the relevant knowledge sits, asking the right questions and bringing different perspectives together. That also means being able to ask for help, there is an important difference between saying “I don't know” and abandoning responsibility.

Sometimes people genuinely need their manager to provide an answer, other times they need a decision, direction, expertise or clarity. There are things we should know because they are fundamental to the responsibility we have accepted, but there will also be questions where someone else should know more than we do, situations nobody has encountered before, and decisions where the information available is incomplete.

Here’s the shift: leadership credibility doesn't come from having every answer, it comes from understanding what we need to know, recognising what we don't, knowing where expertise sits and remaining accountable for what happens next. That also changes the question we ask of our managers. Instead of “can they do my job?”, we might ask “do they understand enough about my work to lead me well?”

As managers, instead of asking “shouldn't I already know this?”, we might ask “what do I need to understand to lead this well, and who can help me understand it?”

Because leadership should not require us to be the most knowledgeable person in every room, it should require us to know how to make good use of the knowledge in the room, including when that means admitting that we need help.