Leadership and the phrase “I don’t know”

I recently attended a training on outside in coaching, or the method of using “ask” more than “tell” as a tool to get the most out of a person for whom you have been given the responsibility of coaching. At North Highland, we take people development very seriously. As a professional services firm our people are our currency, so to ensure we are market leaders in what we do, there is a keen focus on performance enablement across all levels of the organization. This is one of the reasons I made a career change from the digital agency space to North Highland / Sparks Grove – the endless focus on learning.

I was the sole executive in this particular session. In attendance were a wide range of folks, some of whom were being asked to coach a fellow North Highlander for the first time. I’ll openly admit I was skeptical that I would get very much from the session going in based solely on the attendee list. I could not have been more wrong.

During one of the discussions our instructor dove into the statement “I don’t know” and how, as a coach, you can the most out of a coachee who is saying “I don’t know,” and that the answer isn’t to just tell them how to do it. I made the accidentally profound comment that early in one’s career “I don’t know” is a critical statement and evidence of self-awareness. I always worry about a relatively inexperienced person who has all the answers. However, as you advance in the middle of your career, especially in consulting where expertise and experience is the coin of the realm, that phase falls away; you are now an expert! At North Highland we even have an entire career path around focused expertise, which we call the “practitioner path” and refer to those folks as Expert Practitioners and Master Practitioners. Here was my accidentally profound observation: once you pass the so-called master level, into the most knowledgeable phase of your career and start acting as an executive leader and not just a project leader, that term “I don’t know” returns to its former glory as a critical declaration which demonstrates both self-awareness and leadership.

Executives in general are granted a lot of leeway in how we operate today. While there is no policy around this at any organization I’ve ever worked at, led, or advised, I have often noted that the most effective leaders surround themselves with people of differing characters and experience, and always people of deep knowledge and expertise across multiple domains. In my first senior role of my career, I worked directly with the global CEO of a digital ad agency. He would hold a Tuesday morning meeting to review client status and would sit at the head of a long conference table with a yellow notebook pad, a printout of a spreadsheet and a laser focus on asking questions of us, and always demanding our attention. As happens in these meetings, at times it felt like you were being interrogated, sometimes rewarded, and occasionally you felt like you were about to be consumed alive while your peers watched in horror. What is most interesting, upon reflection, is how often this leader would ask of us when we were blocked, or clearly in a complex and failing situation, who we had asked for help. I also remember how often he asked for help.

Stylistically I am unlike this gentleman when it comes to engaging with people, but my leadership approach to asking who you asked for help was born in that room. I never actively noticed or understood how often he sought guidance from experts, but in that moment in that training earlier this week it was a eureka! moment for me. The division I was part of was by far the best performing and most respected at that time. This came from a leadership culture of not actually knowing all the answers, but of finding the right people who did and engaging a team to bring solutions to life for our clients.

I started thinking about the best leaders I have experienced and observed and when they use “ask” tools and “tell” tools in their repertoire. Unless it is a critical situation which is about to create a negative outcome for the business, the leaders I most admire use a mixture of asking for advice and asking guiding questions of the people they lead as a means for developing both talent and consistent, high-quality, outcomes; which is the iconic output of strong leadership.

So, what does this mean for consultants and buyers of consulting services? I’ll respond to that with a question. When was the last time you had a consultant of any stripe tell you “I don’t know” and further, how did they go about getting that answer?