The Myth of the All-Knowing Leader: Freedom from Impossible Expectations

As I look back at my entrepreneurial career and the best ideas and decisions that I've had, there is a startling pattern...

I don't always make the best decisions, nor do I always have the best ideas.

This should be painfully obvious to anyone who knows me, and recognizing the fallibility of human beings, an obvious statement. Yet our culture tends to put way too much faith in the insight and decision-making of the few who are gifted with power and control in our command-and-control-driven business culture.

I've been super lucky to have employees throughout my career who were willing to tell me when I had my head up my... AHEM, rear and had the brilliance to come up with novel solutions that were beyond my ability. Through trial and (very painful) error, I've learned that brilliant decision-making comes from working with others who see a problem differently, allowing those who are closest to a problem to make decisions, and creating frameworks for others to make decisions in a collaborative environment.

Yet despite this reality, the myth of the all-knowing leader persists. Miller's Law suggests that humans can effectively manage only about 5 to 9 pieces of information simultaneously. It’s quite a limitation considering the complexity of our current environment, where the amount of data we have to contend with is doubling every 18 to 36 months. Yet, despite the fact that only 21% of U.S. employees trust the leadership of their organization, we endow them with all of the decision-making power.

The myth of the all-knowing leader, that heroic figure who somehow comprehends what thousands of employees, millions of customers, and billions of data points are telling them, is starting to tarnish. The average executive spends 23 hours a week in meetings and has only 45 minutes a day for actual strategic thinking. They're drowning in data—the amount of information they need to process is increasing exponentially, yet they're still using the same human brain that evolved to track maybe seven variables at once.

And the consequences of this outdated expectation are getting harder to ignore. When a CEO makes a brilliant decision, we praise their insight. When they miss something obvious—like Blockbuster’s inability to get buy-in from franchisors around eliminating late fees (it wasn’t Netflix that did them in) or Nokia dismissing touchscreens—we're somehow surprised. The truth is, we're asking individuals to do what only networks can accomplish, expecting certainty in a world of radical uncertainty. It's not just that our leaders aren't all-knowing—it's that our very belief in all-knowing leadership is part of what's breaking our organizations.

Everything's fine though, right?

In the world that we have now, everyone is suffering. CEOs doubt their ability to manage the complexity of this world and face high levels of stress. The vast majority of our employees are checked out, doing the bare minimum, and crave meaning and agency in their work—wanting to know that their labor makes a difference and having some say in how they apply that labor to that greater purpose. Perhaps it's time to let go of this suffering and make a shift that allows us to feel less burdened and take steps toward a more collaborative form of leadership. The current path of giving leaders all of the power is asking way too much of them, it leaves the brilliance of their teams untapped, and will lead to inevitable failure.

So why do we cling to this outdated trope? ?Well, who doesn't love a good hero story anyway? We've built entire industries around it. Business magazines regularly throw impressive photos of CEOs on their covers, and airport bookstores are scattered with books extolling the brilliance of iconic CEOs. The fact of the matter is, we can't distill Steve Jobs’ success into five easy principles that exclude the brilliance of the people around him that he surrounded himself with.

I remember Lee Iacocca's book being praised for his outrageous intellect, only to have him be dragged through the muck a decade later when his ideas turned sour. And Hollywood sure loves this story as well—from Wall Street to The Social Network, we're fed a steady diet of genius leaders who see what others can't. Even our corporate training programs reinforce this mythology, promising to cultivate "leadership presence" and "executive decision-making" as if these are magical powers that can be downloaded into rising managers.

Not only is this myth unrealistic, it’s actively harmful. We are stuck in a self-reinforcing system where leaders are expected to be omniscient, and then we're somehow surprised when they fail to predict the future or miss obvious threats. It’s an outdated mythology about what leadership can actually accomplish in today's complex world. And it's actively preventing us from developing the networked, distributed decision-making systems we desperately need.

And leaders are suffering under this myth, with 65% of them reporting burnout, and most secretly admit to facing imposter syndrome. We have an obsessive focus on avoiding risk, which hampers our ability to experiment. And let's not forget the astronomically high 70% failure rate of corporate initiatives. Our myth of the all-knowing leader makes for a lonely existence and fills leaders with fear and uncertainty. It is time for a change.

There is an urgent need for organizations to transition from command-and-control to a networked system of distributed leadership where decision-making is pushed to the people closest to the problem.

This goes way beyond the current corporate trend of cutting middle managers right and left—that will only result in chaos and will create even greater decision-making bottlenecks and chaos. Remember, centuries of command and control will not go away as a result of a decree from the C-Suite. We need a gradual shift, exposing groups to new decision-making processes that allow people to experience working in an environment where leadership is shared and decisions can take the multitude of different viewpoints into account without being paralyzed. From this place of understanding, organizations can build the networked structure that is a match for their unique culture, industry, and regulatory environment.

And herein lies the ultimate paradox: currently, leaders are endowed with all the power, yet they are limited in their ability to understand problems and have difficulty making accurate choices that address those problems (which they don't understand). Inevitably, the solutions that this ill-informed group will make toward transitioning to a more networked system of authority will likely replicate the structures they are trying to get away from.

The Cynefin framework, created by David Snowden, is a great tool that helps leaders identify the context they're operating in (simple, complicated, complex, or chaotic) and adjust their decision-making approach accordingly. And for complex and chaotic issues, tools like Strategic Doing offer a way to tap into the expertise of many in adapting to the ever-shifting needs of our new world.

Perhaps it is time to say the silent part we have been avoiding saying out loud: The future of leadership lies not in knowing, but in liberating the leadership ability and wisdom of others.