There is something strange about leadership. We expect leaders to have answers. The higher someone rises in an organisation, the less comfortable we seem to become with hearing them say, “I don’t know.”

I have often wondered whether we have got this backwards. A leader who believes he must always be right will eventually surround himself with people who are afraid to tell him that he is wrong. That is a dangerous place for any institution to be.

Leadership, therefore, is not the ability to know everything. It is the ability to make a considered decision while knowing that you may not know everything.

Leadership, therefore, is not the ability to know everything. It is the ability to make a considered decision while knowing that you may not know everything.

The most di?cult decisions rarely arrive with complete information. They come with uncertainty, competing priorities and consequences that cannot be fully anticipated. Waiting for perfect clarity is often another way of avoiding a decision altogether.

Leadership, therefore, is not the ability to know everything. It is the ability to make a considered decision while knowing that you may not know everything. That requires a certain kind of humility.

Not the humility of hesitation.

The humility to listen.

There is a di?erence.

A hesitant leader keeps postponing decisions because certainty never arrives.

A confident leader makes a decision but remains willing to reconsider it when the facts change.

I think that distinction has become increasingly important in public life.

Governments deal with........

© Daily Times