The Power of I Don't Know

Throughout my career in sales and sales management, my highest stress points came in my moments of not knowing.

Moments when I faced a question, a challenge, or a problem that I couldn’t solve. I didn’t possess the knowledge. I missed that day of class in college because the weather was too nice. I was working with people who had been around the block many more times than I had. I didn’t have the courage to tell people that I didn’t know, or perhaps the drive to ask them to help me find the answer.

These were difficult moments for me. Though I came to appreciate the value of the phrase “I don’t know” later in my career, early on I missed opportunities to act in a fully empowered manner. I avoided the personal risk of stepping out of my comfort zone to aggressively seek knowledge through the people around me. But I got better at it as I went along. And I’m still getting better at it today.

I learned the power in the simple phrase, “I don’t know.”

Do you exercise that power?

When faced with that moment when you feel like an imposter because you haven’t got the slightest clue about what others are talking about, step forward, not back. Focus on improvement.

Try these three tactics:

Manage your own self-deception

You receive directives from senior leaders and you contribute to strategy development work. Your decision-making authority is limited, though your accountability to those above you in your company is extensive. You must deliver financial results, manage your people effectively, and carry out difficult actions when the company calls on you to do that. You maintain your assertive self through the most pressure packed circumstances. And you don’t let anyone see you sweat.

You are accountable to your team as well. You take company initiatives and you synthesize and package them for your team to understand, embrace, and execute. You have managerial authority over your team members, but that’s not how you get things done through your team. You pay attention, you coach, you influence. You suggest navigational changes and mission adjustments. You push harder on one side of your business when the other side dips. You are the public relations face of the company to your customers, and you provide cover to your people to keep them safe from flying debris from inside and outside of your company.

You are really in command, right?

But the problem you are presented with now stops you in your tracks. You don’t have the solution at the tip of your tongue and you are afraid you don’t know enough to even understand the question. Don’t fake it. Even though you’ve been conditioned to always appear on top of your game, resist the urge to try to look smarter than you are in this moment. Take an honest assessment of your understanding of the situation and be transparent with those around you about that. You probably know more than you think you do and not as much as you could. Just play it straight and don’t worry about looking weak because you have questions. Embrace the questions you have. Ask them.

Understand and fill your skill gaps

There’s a difference between needing to answer a few clarifying questions about a problem and having serious skill gaps. If you’re facing a situation you’ve never experienced before, you’ll need to go deeper.

For those specific areas where you do want to focus more intensely on your improvement, choose wisely. Perhaps you are well tuned to your needed areas for improvement. You’ve recognized missteps along your path and you have a good sense of where to begin your development plan. But perhaps not. Perhaps you are like the rest of us. Perhaps you have some level of self-deception that creeps into your genuine understanding of your strengths and weaknesses. After all, you’ve been pretty successful. You’ve overcome most of the things you don’t do well by overplaying your core strengths. Nobody really notices those gaps anyway, right?

Well, no. Not right. You need to get brutally honest with yourself. And to do that, you need objective and comprehensive feedback about your behaviors. Your habits. Your predictable and observable avoidance mechanisms that surface in you during times of stress or uncertainty.

To figure out your strengths and your gaps, ask for feedback. Conduct after action reviews on projects you’ve led or to which you’ve contributed. Invite your team to provide input on your leadership of them and ask them to tell you things they’re not getting from you. Push your own manager to provide candid suggestions about areas of improvement. Enlist her assistance to access training and relevant experience opportunities. These are all good habits to keep information flowing to you to help you focus on getting better where you need to grow.

Involve other people

Develop a select number of deep relationships with your colleagues, team members, and superiors. Create safe spaces. Get a commitment that you’ll get the real scoop on your behaviors from these people. The things they say about you when you’re not there. Participate in blind 360-degree feedback processes. In my view, you should do these every 3 years to get a fresh picture of how you are leading. In my own experience, this cadence was critical to my performance. Things that looked like strengths for me in one cycle came back as opportunities for improvement in later cycles. Good habits I had demonstrated and put on auto pilot slipped into problem status because of the pushes and pulls of the business. The deep feedback I received made me aware and I corrected my course.

Get close in your relationships with other people. You can decide whether that means a handful, or a dozen, or more. But develop relationships with them as whole persons. Get personal. My most enduring relationships that originated in my workplaces are with people who are very different from me. Except for one thing. They care about me and I care about them. It’s personal. When we talk, I am oriented to help them. I listen. I give honest answers and feedback. I want them to get better at whatever it is they are working to improve.

To your colleagues, the functional leaders across your company, you are the thought leader for the sales department. As a sales professional, you are already perceived as different. Human, yes. Just a different kind of human. You have chosen a profession that most of your colleagues see as odd at best, strangely alien at worst. They can’t imagine themselves in your shoes.

Get close to the people around you. Give as much as you get, but make sure what you’re getting is real. Then act on the feedback you get.

It’s in the context of these relationships that I’ve grown to know myself better. People who tell me the truth. Facts as they see them. Things for me to think about and work on. To learn something new each day and to add that new knowledge to my understanding for the subsequent day. And so on.

Keep going

As a manager in the middle of your organization, I believe you have the most difficult job in the business world today. You are accountable to people above and below you. You stand at the intersection of strategy and execution. Talk about a busy intersection!

Effective leaders aren’t afraid of not knowing. They don’t see the unknown as a threat. They utter those three little words. “I don’t know.”

They understand the door of learning that phrase can unlock.

Unlock your effectiveness as a leader by embracing your self-awareness, recognizing and filling competency gaps, and genuinely involving others in your growth journey.

There will always be plenty more for you to learn.

Lead well.

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