Leading Without Certainty: When the Expertise Is Not Yours
By Sophie Makonnen
Nobody expects a surgeon to also run hospital finance, or an airline's chief executive to know how to fly the plane. Yet in leadership, we often hold ourselves, and each other, to that exact standard. Somewhere along the way, being in charge started to mean knowing everything. It does not, and it never did.
Every leader eventually sits in a room where someone else holds more expertise than they do, on the exact question they are about to decide. This is not a gap to apologize for. It is the normal condition of the role. No single person can carry the depth of knowledge that every decision a leader faces actually requires, whether the subject is financial risk, technical methodology, or a policy question far outside their own training.
What separates a sound decision from a shaky one, in these moments, is not the leader's own expertise. It is what they do about the gap. Do they accept the first confident answer that reaches them, or do they go looking for enough of a base to stand on? That question sits at the centre of what follows, in two stories that did not resolve it the same way.
When I Stopped Asking
Years ago, I sat at the centre of a financing decision that came down to a simple-sounding question with a complicated answer: lock in the value of the funds early, or let it shift over time as the money was disbursed. The first option meant converting everything upfront and holding it steady, easier to plan against, safer in a sense. The second meant leaving the value tied to the exchange rate at each stage of disbursement, better if conditions improved, worse if they didn't. And conditions, at that particular moment, were not favourable. They had been, not long before. They weren't now.
I wanted the first option. The colleague responsible for the technical analysis did not. She pushed hard for the second, confident enough that she framed my preference as one that risked leaving the client worse off. The rest of the team, capable people, experienced people, stayed quiet. Not agreeing with her, not agreeing with me either. Just neutral. When we brought both options to the client, I did not raise my concern. Not because I'd changed my mind. Because I had reached the edge of my own technical grounding, and hers sounded surer than mine felt.
They chose her option. The currency moved the wrong way. The project ended up short of funds it had counted on, and the shortfall had to be covered elsewhere, at real cost.
She never acknowledged it. Not to me, not in a one-to-one, not in any way that named her part of what happened. She acted as though none of it had occurred. Meetings continued, work continued, and for a while I started wondering if I had understood the situation correctly, whether I was overstating what I remembered disagreeing about. Then someone else said it plainly, quietly, that things might have gone differently if they had listened to me. I needed to hear that confirmation, even as the person in charge.
I lost more than a favourable outcome that day. I lost my trust in her judgment, not because she'd been wrong, being wrong happens, but because she never owned it.
Looking back, my mistake wasn't caution. It wasn't respecting her expertise over my instinct, either. It was stopping there. She was not the only technical opinion available to me. Because of the way the organisation was structured, she reported to someone else for her technical work, not only to me, and I could have brought in her supervisor or one of her peers in headquarters or in another part of the institution, before a decision was made. This would have allowed me to check what I didn't know against someone else who did. I didn't. I accepted the only expert in the room as if she were the only expertise available.
The Circle I Widened
I once believed we should start supporting a specific capacity the organisation I worked with would need years down the road, well before the need became urgent. My boss disagreed. His reasoning wasn't unreasonable on its face, the need itself was still a distance off, so why make it a priority now. I pushed back. Building something like this properly takes years on its own, long before it's actually needed, and starting early wasn't premature, it was the only way to be ready in time. He wasn't convinced. He said no, and didn't reopen it.
This time, I didn't stop there. I spoke with people outside my organisation who had handled something similar elsewhere, and with colleagues internally who had worked on comparable efforts in other contexts. None of that expertise was in the room when he said no. His answer was not careless. It was incomplete because the relevant knowledge had not yet been gathered on either side, mine included.
With a broader base behind me, I kept building the case, through other parts of the organisation that could still move it forward. It took longer than I would have liked. Eventually, what I'd been arguing for became a formal requirement attached to a larger initiative, not because I'd insisted, but because the work by then made its own argument.
Taking a Decision as a Leader Is About Information
Caution wasn't the problem in the first story. Settling for the information in front of me was. Being careful, in that moment, meant pausing to question my own certainty, which, in fairness, I did. What I didn't do was treat her confidence as a starting point rather than a conclusion. There's a difference between listening to the one expert in front of you and mistaking their input for everything you needed to know to come to a decision. I treated the view of the most knowledgeable person in the room as if it were the only informed view available. It was not. I had access to other people and other sources.
The second story carried the same gap, authority to decide, not the depth to be certain, but a different response to it. Instead of accepting one answer as the full picture, I went and built a wider one. None of that expertise was in the room when my boss said no, which meant his answer wasn't wrong so much as incomplete, resting on the same limited base mine had rested on in the first story, just from the other side of the disagreement. That's the same instinct behind reaching sideways to a colleague who might have already faced something similar, just applied earlier, while a decision was being taken rather than after a problem had already stalled.
Sounding sure and being right are not the same thing, though they're easy to confuse under pressure, especially when the person speaking has real credentials behind them. Between the two stories, what changed wasn't my confidence. It was whether I treated the information in front of me as the full picture, or as a starting point still worth checking against something wider.
None of this was about gathering information for its own sake. It was about having enough to actually stand behind the course of action I was proposing, and to know, before defending it, that it could hold up against more than my own read of the situation.
This isn't only a personal habit; it reflects something Henry Mintzberg found in decades of studying what managers really do. His research pushed back on the idea that management means working from complete information before acting. What he found instead was closer to the opposite: managers operate constantly under incomplete, fragmented information, and the real skill isn't eliminating that condition, it's how much effort they put into building a better basis for the decision before committing to it.
Mintzberg and Frances Westley describe three legitimate approaches to decision-making: Thinking First, Seeing First, and Doing First. Not every situation calls for building a wider base before acting (what they call Thinking first). Sometimes moving on intuition (Seeing first) or trying something small and adjusting is the more sensible route (Doing first). But not all decisions allow for that type of flexibility or room to explore. When the numbers involved are real, when the outcome touches the lives of people in decisive ways, gathering enough to stand behind the call isn't caution for its own sake, it's the only responsible way to use the authority you've been given.
The limits of widening the circle
Looking beyond the people already in the room does not mean consulting indefinitely. Another team is waiting for guidance. A board meets tomorrow. Leaders are often called to act without perfect information, and waiting too long carries its own cost. Sometimes the circle only widens as far as the clock allows.
Wider consultation cannot remove every kind of risk either. A currency moves the way it moves. A government changes direction following an election. A competitor makes a move nobody saw coming, or a natural disaster reshapes priorities overnight. The point is not to eliminate uncertainty. It is to judge whether another perspective could materially change the decision and, if so, whether there is still time to seek it. That judgment is part of the decision itself.
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