Are People Preparing for the Work—or Preparing for You?

You’ll want to know what is actually happening in the business, understand why performance is changing, whether your team has identified the right problem, where the risks are, and whether the people closest to the work really understand what they are managing.

That instinct is a good one. The challenge is that you also have more authority than ever before.

If something doesn't make sense, you can interrupt and ask about it. If someone references a report you haven't seen, you can ask them to pull it up. If an answer seems incomplete, you can keep questioning until you're satisfied.

And because you're the senior leader in the room, people will usually respond.

That can make it feel as though tighter control is creating greater certainty. But as your authority grows, you need to pay attention to something else:

Are people preparing for the business, or are they preparing for you?

The answer to that question will tell you a lot about the kind of leader you're becoming.

Great leaders expect people to prepare before they meet.

If someone recommends an investment, they should understand the economics behind it. If they explain a performance problem, they should understand the data. When they ask you to make a decision, they should be able to explain the options, risks, and tradeoffs beforehand. 

Coaching your people to prepare is the mark of a great leader. But there's another kind of preparation that can develop around a senior leader, and it can be easy to mistake it for rigor.

People start wondering what you might ask.  They start wondering things like, what if she asks me about something that isn't in the presentation? What reports should I have open just in case? What if he challenges this number? What else should I put in the appendix? What could I possibly be asked that I'm not even expected to know in my role?

When this happens, they're no longer spending all of their preparation time understanding the problem.  Some of it is being spent protecting themselves from you.

There is an important difference between rigorous preparation and defensive preparation.

Rigorous preparation helps someone understand the business better. Defensive preparation helps someone survive the meeting.

As a leader, you want to know which one you're creating.

Imagine someone on your team tells you something you didn't know.

You're discussing referrals into a program, and someone mentions that a surprising number of people who don't initially appear on an eligibility list ultimately turn out to be eligible.

You didn't know that, but you immediately recognize that it could be important. So you ask, "Did everyone know this?"

Then you turn to the person closest to the work and say something like, "Mark, not to put you on the spot, but can you pull up that view?"

There's nothing unreasonable about wanting to see it. In fact, this is exactly the kind of curiosity I would want you to have as a senior leader.

But imagine Mark wasn't supposed to present that day. Maybe he wasn't even originally invited because the meeting was intended for a senior leaders, he's an individual contributor, and someone pulled him in after the conversation had already started.

Now he's searching for the report while you and a room full of senior leaders wait.

A minute passes. Then three. Then five.

This is where I want you to think beyond the question you asked.

What did everyone else in the room just learn?

They didn't simply learn that you care about the data. They learned something about what happens when someone introduces unexpected information in a meeting with you.

If the experience feels uncomfortable enough, people adapt. The next person who notices something unusual may make sure she has the analysis finished before mentioning it. Someone who suspects there's a problem may wait until he can prove it.  Someone who doesn't know an answer may try to construct one rather than simply saying, "I don't know."

Here's the thing - You may have never explicitly told anyone to behave this way, and you don't have to. People are remarkably good at learning how to operate around powerful people. And this is where your pursuit of certainty can start producing exactly the opposite result.

As you become more senior, you're going to depend more heavily on other people to understand your business.

You simply cannot know everything anymore. You won't personally inspect every process, analyze every report, talk to every customer, or understand every operational detail.  And your view of the organization will increasingly be assembled from what other people bring you.

That means the quality of your leadership depends partly on the quality of information people are willing to put in front of you.

An authoritarian management style can make that information look remarkably clean because people show up prepared, questions get answered, presentations are polished, and few people openly disagree.

While that might feel like control, I want you to learn to distinguish certainty about the business from certainty performed for the leader, because they aren't the same thing.  

If people have learned that uncertainty is dangerous around you, you may hear less of it. That doesn't mean you've eliminated uncertainty from the business- you just eliminated it from the conversation.

Many leaders have heard psychological safety discussed as a way to make employees feel comfortable speaking up.  That's true, but as you become a more senior leader, I want you to think about it differently.

Psychological safety affects the quality of information you receive.

You need people who will tell you things like, "I don't understand," "I think we're making the wrong assumption, "Something about this doesn't look right," "I disagree," "I don't know yet," and "I made a mistake."

A team that feels comfortable making statements like those is a team that feels comfortable feeding you information. And sometimes it's the most valuable information you can receive.

An authoritarian leader may instinctively try to eliminate that uncertainty.

A psychologically safe leader learns how to investigate it.

That's an important distinction because businesses actually become more understandable when people expose uncertainty, rather than trying to hide it.

There is a trap here that I don't want you to fall into. Psychological safety doesn't mean lowering your standards. 

You should absolutely continue asking difficult questions, challenge assumptions, and expect people to deeply understand their work. You should also notice when someone hasn't thought something through. And when someone says, "I don't know," you should expect them to find out.

However, there is also a significant difference between not being prepared and not having every possible answer.  You must learn to recognize it.

You can be an extraordinarily demanding leader without making people afraid of you. 

In fact, that's one of the combinations worth aspiring to as you become more senior: high psychological safety and high accountability. High psychological safety without accountability can become comfort. High accountability without psychological safety can become fear-driven performance.

You want both.

You want people to know that their thinking will be challenged without believing their credibility is constantly on trial.

You want someone to be able to tell you, "I don't know," and know that your next question will be, "How can we find out?" rather than, "How could you possibly not know that?"

And you want people to understand that once they commit to finding out, you expect them to follow through.

That's not soft leadership. It's the mark of a disciplined leader.

There will be uncomfortable moments on the teams you lead, and rightfully so.

Performance will eventually miss expectations, strategies won't work, people will disagree, and someone will inevitably make a mistake. You'll discover something about the business that you wish you had known six months earlier.

Your job isn't to eliminate that discomfort. Your job is to make sure the discomfort comes from confronting the problem rather than confronting you.

Let's go back to the example with Mark for a moment.

You're in the meeting and hear the same unexpected information.  Only this time you say:

"That's interesting. I didn't realize that. Mark, do you happen to have that view handy? If not, don't worry about pulling it up now. I'd like to understand it better, though, so let's come back to it."

See the difference in what that does not just for Mark, but for everyone in the room?  You didn't lower the standard.  After all, you still want the answer.

You haven't sacrificed rigor, and you're still holding Matt accountable.

But this time, you made it safe for him to say, "I don't have that ready."

That's a small leadership behavior, but your team will notice hundreds of small behaviors like it. Over time, those moments teach people what happens when they bring you something unexpected.

This is one reason I believe leadership and management principles become increasingly important as you move into senior roles.

You won't be able to script your response to every situation. But you can decide what you believe about how people should be treated when the pressure rises.

Maybe one of your principles is curiosity before judgment.

Perhaps it's challenge the thinking without diminishing the thinker.

Or even, it's acceptable not to know, but it's not acceptable not to follow through.

The exact words don't matter as much, as long as you know how you want to lead. 

It's easy to create psychological safety when everything is going well, but your team learns what you really believe when the number is wrong, the deadline is missed, the strategy fails, or someone tells you something you don't want to hear. That's when your management style becomes visible.

Here's the paradox I want you to remember as you become more senior.

You may believe that being more controlling will give you greater certainty. And in the short term, it might feel that way.

People will come overprepared, they will answer quickly, challenge you less, learn what you expect, and become very good at giving it to you. At the same time, silence can look remarkably similar to alignment. Confidence can look remarkably similar to understanding. And fear can look remarkably similar to accountability.

A leader who creates psychological safety may actually hear more uncertainty, more questions, more disagreement, more competing interpretations, more "I don't know yet," and receive more uncomfortable information. 

Your organization may occasionally feel less certain because people are willing to show you where the uncertainty actually exists. But that's exactly why you may understand your business better.

Once you see this happen, you'll notice it everywhere.

The project update that creates immediate alignment, the meeting where everyone leaves knowing exactly what happens next, or the leader who walks into confusion and somehow leaves with everyone seeing the same picture. In each of these examples, the leader purposely creates a shared sense of understanding.

None of this means accepting weak thinking or poor preparation. You can still probe, challenge, disagree, and expect follow-through. What you're showing people is that they don't need to arrive with certainty in order to contribute something valuable.

Practice that consistently enough and your team will learn something important about you: It's safe to bring you what they know, what they think, what they question, and what they don't understand yet.

That's the kind of psychological safety that gives you a more honest view of your business.

If this unwritten rule resonated with you, share it with a manager who’s trying to reach the next level.