Let's talk about one of the least understood realities of leadership.
Every day, senior leaders make decisions that affect hundreds, if not thousands, of people. And yet they make those decisions without knowing everything.
After all, they weren't in every meeting, they didn't read every email, they haven't spoken to every customer, and they certainly can't personally verify every fact. They might not even be a subject matter expert on the topic at hand.
As you move into more senior leadership roles, this becomes less of a flaw and more of a reality. No one can possibly absorb every detail, attend every conversation, or experience the work firsthand.
Instead, senior leaders rely on people who can take dozens of disconnected facts and transform them into one shared understanding. Having this skill and knowing when to use it will open you up to one of the biggest opportunities you'll have as you move toward Director and beyond.
Thinking about a project you're working on will help you understand how this plays out.
If you're the person closest to the work, you've probably experienced every twist and turn along the way. Things like the vendor issue, the legal review, a timeline change, an unexpected dependency, or the workaround that finally got things moving again.
When someone asks for an update, it's completely natural to tell the story the same way you lived it - from beginning to end.
The problem is that organizations don't make decisions chronologically. Leaders aren't trying to relive the project, they're trying to understand what it all means.
You may have heard them ask questions like these, or even asked them yourself:
Are we still on track?
What changed?
Where is the risk?
Do I need to make a decision?
The best way to answer those questions isn’t by recounting everything that happened. Instead, you need to answer them in a way that creates a shared understanding of reality.
The Unwritten Rule:
Organizations reward people who create shared understanding because it reduces uncertainty.
Most people can recount a conversation or tell you what happened. That’s transferring information.
The person who can distill it and tell you what it means becomes a much more trusted and powerful resource, because they are transferring understanding. They already did the difficult work of interpreting complexity, rather than asking everyone else to do it.
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.
Try this tomorrow:
Before your next project update, don't just ask yourself, "What happened?" Ask yourself, "What's the headline?” Distill it down to one sentence.
Then ask yourself, "Why does that matter?" That’s where your understanding and synthesis - which is your real value - begins to emerge.
Always wait to explain the details that support your conclusion until after you have succinctly articulated what happened and made the connection to why it matters. Better yet, let everyone else ask clarifying questions rather than rushing to provide all of the supporting details. Listening closely to their questions will also show you what they care about.
Challenging yourself to create shared understanding will change how you show up in both 1:1 conversations and in larger rooms. That’s because you’re learning to stop organizing information by the order you experienced it and start organizing it by the meaning other people need. Over time, you’ll stop showing up as a manager who reports information and become a leader who consistently helps others make better decisions. This is a subtle yet powerful change.
And that, my friends, is one of the many subtle shifts that will propel you to Director and beyond.
Until next time,
Andy
ABOUT UNWRITTEN RULES
The next level of your career isn't earned by having all the answers.
It's earned by becoming the person people trust when the answers aren't obvious.
Every Tuesday and Friday, Unwritten Rules reveals what experienced leaders see that everyone else misses—and helps you recognize those patterns in your own work.
If this unwritten rule resonated with you, share it with a manager who’s trying to reach the next level.