12. Embrace Your Ignorance

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    Happy Tuesday!

    How do you lead a team of skilled professionals when you have very little domain knowledge and it feels like you have no clue what you're doing?

    If you're a new leader or have moved into a new organization as a leader this may be a familiar feeling.

    Last week, while working on a project for Tether, I found myself in a strangely familiar situation from back when I first starting leading engineering teams at Unified (my previous employer). I was promoted to management fairly early in my career without very much experience either as an engineer or as a leader.

    On an almost weekly basis I found myself confronted with problems for which I had no solution and no relevant experience to rely on. If I was lucky I would try to do some research to come up with an informed decision but usually I didn't have that much time.

    In most cases I was forced to use my best judgement based on what little I knew already. At times this felt like a lot of pressure and sometimes the decisions I was being asked to make would have consequences far into the future or they involved people's lives and livelihoods.

    I couldn't help but feel like a complete imposter. Like somewhere along the line I tricked everyone into thinking I knew what I was talking about and any day now everyone was going to discover that I was completely incompetent.

    The Phony

    Usually when you start a new project or business it's because you have a passion or interest or relevant skillset. Usually you have some area of competency that you can rely on that gives you confidence and energy.

    Unfortunately, starting an organization of any kind requires so many different kinds of expertise that it's literally impossible to have them all. A competent leader, however, will find clever ways to leverage the talents of others to fill in the gaps where possible.

    To be successful you have to lead a diverse group of people who are way smarter / more experienced than you in a lot of different ways. Sounds nice right?  Everyone knows this.

    Here's what they don't tell you.

    In practice, if you surround yourself with the best people, you're going to feel really stupid, a lot, about things that are very important to the success of your team / business.

    This can be a hard pill to swallow, especially if you've gotten to where you are now because of your skills and competency. You're the leader, but you're not the best.

    And the result of this dynamic that you may feel a like a complete phony. Like you have no idea what you're doing and somehow you tricked all these people into believing that you're a genius and that you have all the answers. You start to feel like any day now they're all going to find out that you're just making it up as you go ...

    Embrace Your Ignorance

    After a few months of leading the team at Unified, this feeling of being a phony started to fade away. It's not like I suddenly learned everything there was to know about engineering or leadership but instead I gained enough experience to realize that it was actually ok to not have all the answers. My job wasn't to know everything, instead it was to do one of three things:

    • Make the best decision given the information available.
    • Postpone making the decision to collect more information.
    • Find someone else who had better information and delegate the decision to them.

    It had been so many years since those early days at Unified that I had almost completely forgot about those early feelings of being a phony and how they later faded away.

    This past week when I was feeling particularly out of my depth as a founder, I was almost embarrassed to realize how similar the feelings were then to my feelings of phoniness now.

    Just like before, it's ok not to know everything. I don't need to pretend like I have all the solutions to be a confident founder and leader. I can be transparent about the boundaries of my expertise and empower others to take ownership and control.

    We don't necessarily want to follow only those who have all the answers but we want to follow those that have a clear direction and vision for the result. Someone who can focus our talents and give structure and purpose to our efforts.

    If you've found yourself in a position of leadership, either in a new organization or in an unfamiliar context,  embrace your ignorance and let those around you excel. It might end up becoming your greatest asset.

    Cheers,

    Nick

    © Nick Nathan, 2022