When I sit down to meet with prospective leaders on our team, I always want to understand what worries them most about stepping into a leadership role.

“I’m not ready.”

A common answer is that you feel existing leaders “have all the answers.” “I’m not ready,” you say. You’ve convinced yourself that you have to have all the answers before you can become a leader. The problem is: what you believe will make you ready is actually preventing you from becoming ready.

Sure, the leaders you look up to are often very knowledgeable. They seem to know what to try or who to ask or where to start. The issue is the assumption they had all these answers before becoming a leader. The reality is usually the opposite. They seem so well-informed and experienced because they are leaders. The reason being that people ask leaders so many more questions. 

Questions are the answer

When I started my career in IT I was a desktop support technician. The team didn’t have room for me in the main office area where all the other technicians sat. Instead, my manager placed me in a cubicle closer to the front of the office, where customers would walk in. My cubicle was also next to the walkway. As our student technicians working the front desk headed to the back of the office to ask someone a question, they passed by me. I came to learn the misfortune of sitting away from the other desktop support techs was actually a blessing in disguise.

Every time a student tech had a question, they would walk to the back for help. I was the first team member they found, so they would stop and ask me. At first, I didn’t know most of the answers. I was still unfamiliar with many of the processes and procedures. However, I would go with them to the back of the office as they asked another tech their question. I would listen and learn alongside them.

Over time I encountered many questions and their answers. Before long I could provide more and more solutions to the student techs coming back for assistance. I had gained that knowledge and experience because the student techs brought me their questions.

This is the counterintuitive truth about leadership: leaders don’t start with the answers. Instead, they gain much of their knowledge and experience when people ask them their questions. 

You might believe that leaders are in their role because of their high sense of certainty and confidence in themselves. In fact, it is their ability to operate in uncertainty that makes them effective leaders. 

How do you embrace uncertainty? 

Leaders must be adaptable, curious, and evolve with the ever-changing landscape that is the modern workplace. To become leaders, team members must shift away from focusing strictly on performance that expects certainty and confidence. Instead they must open themselves to vulnerability and adopt a learning orientation that embraces uncertainty, questioning and discovery. 

You might fear the vulnerability that comes from asking questions, worrying others will perceive it as incompetence. So instead you want to know it all. Professor and researcher Brené Brown calls being a “knower” a type of armor, or a way to protect yourself from vulnerability. Avoiding vulnerability prevents learning, and learning is the key to growth and development. So if you avoid vulnerability, you are avoiding the opportunities and experience that will grow you into a leader. 

Vulnerability unlocks learning

Professor and Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman famously said: “If you know something, you realize you can’t learn anything.” The timing of vulnerability matters. You don’t open up to vulnerability once you become a leader. You must accept the vulnerability of not knowing in order to develop into a leader. 

Beyond the individual, demonstrating vulnerability can foster an environment of trust and create psychological safety within a team, both key ingredients for organizational learning. 

Management expert and author Jim Collins describes leadership like being a bus driver, determining who should be on the bus and where it should go. However, this analogy doesn’t quite align for me. Buses follow a set route and a clear path. I find that leaders are more like explorers, leading an expedition into uncharted territory. We have a direction, a point on the horizon towards which we are heading. But we don’t always have a GPS route to take us there. It is our role as leaders to work with our team to ask questions and determine how to get there together.

How will we tackle the obstacles we meet along the way? How can we adapt and adjust our course when things don’t go as planned? 

Since the earliest days of human leadership, leaders are the ones who go first into the unknown, first towards the danger. This experience generates their knowledge and their confidence. You don’t find those before the journey, you find them on the journey.

…or are you?

There are countless skills that a leader must develop, from empathy, to communication, to feedback and coaching. But if you’ve put in that work to develop those skills and the only thing holding you back is uncertainty? Start asking questions; how ready you already are might surprise you.