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THE LEADER WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

Anna Simioni, the former Chief Learning Officer of a European financial institution, didn’t care for studying and hated homework in primary school. She was an attentive student and did well, but would often trade homework with her classmates. She did not suffer from the view that she needed to “know”; she was happy with being “good enough.”

At high school Anna started her own philosophical movement with a small group of friends, who called themselves “Uncertaintists: The people who are not certain.” Their motto was “never be absolute,” because they believed that you could never really know for sure whether you were going or not going to do something that at a certain moment you believe or do not believe. When she went to university Anna was surprised to find that there was little room there for uncertainty. Her professors believed that there was a right and a wrong answer to questions and nothing in between. When she was tested with multiple-choice questions, she always thought that there were at least two possible correct answers, not just one, at least in some cases. Yet, her professors seemed to have no interest in engaging with her thinking. They would say “this is the right answer; the other is wrong.”

Everything changed when Anna began a career in consultancy. As she says: “I think that experience ruined me. I felt I needed to know the right answer for my clients. What drove me to know and increase my expertise was that I was a young woman, attractive and in a predominately male industry. I had a desperate desire to be valued for my competence. I did not want people to say ‘she is here because she is pretty or nice’.” So with her family background, her university and her own expectations of her role, Anna became embedded in a “right or wrong” way of thinking and competence became her key focus.

Anna quickly became considered a “top talent” in her organization. When she was 24, after a psychological assessment, an occupational psychologist told her that she had never seen a profile like hers: she had CEO potential. Anna was flattered and this reinforced her attachment to competence – her drive for competence and her increasing expertise had now been rewarded. She was promoted and won many “best performer” awards. However, her colleagues found her to be rigid in her approach and would call her “the protector of the method.” While they were looking for ways to adapt the methodology to suit their clients’ needs, Anna fought to preserve the approach rather than deviating from it.

By her 30s Anna had built a career on her own expertise and felt more self-confident and entitled to do what she wanted. “At that time I was a difficult friend. My self-confidence and my attachment to my own point of view got in the way of my relationships. I had a very select group of friends and an incredibly close relationship with my core team. They loved my passion and stubbornness, but everybody else outside my core-team suffered. I was too smart, too competent and perceived to be distant.”

Anna got a wake-up call when she did a 360-degree feedback exercise on her role. Her staff rated her 100% competent, but they reported that they did not enjoy working with her. They felt that they had no room to grow, make mistakes or contribute. They believed that their opinion did not matter, since she was always so competent and was always in control, excelling at everything she did. The impact on Anna’s team was clear – they were not motivated to work for her. “My team was, in some way, suffering from my ‘know it all approach’.” When she first read the feedback report, Anna was very upset. “I had great pride in being competent. In fact, I thought it was one of the best things that a manager could be. ‘I would have loved to have a boss like me who was competent and fair!’, I thought. In my view, I was doing the right thing. I was imparting confidence in the staff by telling them that ‘this is the way we need to do things’.”

Anna can now see that her way of relating to her staff caused them to experience anxiety.

“If your manager knows everything and you don’t, it is understandable that you might feel that you will never make it. If you have a manager like that and you feel ‘ah this is difficult’, or ‘this is new and strange in our organization’, then the knowledge of the manager can be disempowering. I wanted to introduce major change because it was needed, but I was hindering the change with my own behaviours.”

Anna’s knowledge and expertise were too distant from the reality of her staff’s experience; she was telling them what they needed to do in a way that made them feel less, rather than more, capable. She has since learned that talking with people when they are anxious distorts the flow of communication. “When there is something complex and difficult to be dealt with we tend to treat people like children: ‘you know what, don’t bother, I’ll tell you how to do it’. We think this is helpful to them. I was really doing this in good faith, thinking that it was useful.”

However, all this time Anna was feeling awkward herself. The only way for her to deal with the anxiety of Not Knowing was to take an “I need to tell you” approach. Her assumption was that this would make people feel secure and help them to be more productive. She explains the pressure she felt in her role to know: “I felt that I was the only one responsible for the results. I wanted to achieve good results; I wanted to do our best. There was a big challenge and the stakes were high. My belief that I was the one carrying the whole thing led me to think that I had to clearly tell my colleagues what to do. I knew what was needed and so it was a matter of ‘follow me’. When this did not yield good outcomes in terms of negative tension, I became disappointed and could not understand why my staff were not motivated to operate the way I thought was the best.”

There are situations when we can know “too much” and this hinders progress. The expectation that the person in charge knows “everything,” as in Anna’s case, can have a debilitating impact on the people around us; it can be anxiety-provoking and disempowering. We limit our learning and growth through a tendency to over-rely on our knowledge and expertise. If we also manage staff, this can be to the detriment of the team since knowledge can end up having a perverse effect, a corrupting influence.

The pressures and demands placed on us by our workplaces contribute to the illusion of knowledge. They increase the propensity for us to become immune to doubts, contributing to many of us having to master the art of sounding as though we know what we are talking about, even if we have no idea. Surrounded by people who seek our approval and depend on us for our expertise, we fall prey to the illusion that we know what we are doing.