You don’t have to be right to be helpful

As leaders, we’re involved in many conversations where our role is clear. The Board wants a recommendation, an investor wants an outcome, or the regulator wants an answer. We spend years building expertise to deliver those expectations. Those skills are real and valuable. In reality, most of our week doesn’t look or feel like that. It’s usually messier: strategy still forming, unclear problems emerge, forcing our teams and us to consider something new. In those conversations, the same frame that serves us in the boardroom can (quietly) work against us.

It’s not about having the answer.

The assumption that it’s our job to have the answer is rarely a conscious one. It has been reinforced every step along the way. Being right, repeatedly and reliably, is usually how we earn our senior stripes. As we climb the ladder, the more others look to us for direction. And the more natural it feels to provide it.

At the same time, wanting to be right produces a set of consequences we can’t always see.

When the conversation closes before the thinking is finished

Entering a conversation with a fixed perspective changes its dynamic. We risk missing valuable ideas, alternative viewpoints, challenging questions, or early-stage thoughts that need space to develop. Teams are perceptive and often adjust their input, sometimes unconsciously.

Over time, this creates something more permanent. Teams that have learned that “the answer comes from the boss” stop developing their own. They bring polished positions rather than early thinking. High performers begin to disengage. Decisions look certain, but the reality is they are less rigorous than anyone realises.

Cost accumulates quietly

The commercial cost builds over time. Decisions get revisited. Talent stops being stretched and eventually leaves. Organisations grow in headcount but not in cognitive architecture, that distributed capacity to think, challenge, and decide well without waiting for direction from above. At scale, that becomes a structural problem. A thinking culture that forms gradually around this particular model of what leadership contribution looks like becomes an expensive and invisible bottleneck.

Reframing our contribution

There are conversations where our job is to spark thinking rather than supply it. Where a question, a reframe, or a deliberately incomplete observation creates a thought that the other person wouldn’t have reached alone. In that case, our input doesn’t need to be correct to be valuable. It needs to activate something. That’s a different version of adding value, and it requires a different mindset.

It also requires genuinely diverse views, not as a representation of team culture, but as a thinking tool. Decisions only tested against similar views carry unacknowledged assumptions.  The person in the room who sees it differently provides a critical stress test, and the leaders who understand this create conditions where those views can surface.

At the Executive level, there is a problem category that demands us to acknowledge that we don't have the answer. Those new, strategic questions that sit at the edge of the organisation’s experience require us to hold the ambiguity productively and keep the thinking open longer than feels comfortable. This ‘holding’ is a leadership act worth being intentional about.

Habits that hurt us at speed

Two patterns tend to surface in the middle of conversations that are moving quickly.

The first is when we believe we have embedded a curious leadership style. We have learned not to speak first. We are asking questions, listening carefully. But the questions are leading, the listening is evaluative, and underneath it, we are still steering toward a view already formed. It looks like openness, but functions as something else. This is the most subtle version of the pattern. The pull toward convergence is so normalised that it operates below our conscious intention. And the truth is that the team usually feels it before we do.

The second is the moment someone heads in a direction we have already considered and rejected. The instinct to redirect arrives quickly, dressed as helpfulness and efficiency. But that idea, given airtime, might have developed into something unanticipated. What felt like time-saving shut down something we will never even know we missed.

Both these patterns are normal. The difficulty is catching them in real time, when defaulting to the familiar frame feels entirely reasonable.

The real challenge

The pull toward the answer will be there in the next conversation, as it was in the last one. What changes, over time, is what we notice and what we do with that noticing.