For many leaders the hardest job they have is getting comfortable with not knowing. It is natural to feel like you have to understand everything about the area that you lead. And that’s a feeling that often cascades down through hierarchies. My boss expects me to be able to answer an arbitrary question on the spot, in order to accomplish that I need to be an expert on an increasingly large number of topics. I accomplish this by asking for more and more detailed information from my team, perpetuating this omniscience expectation.

There are two obvious problems with the omniscience expectation (and one non-obvious problem).

Obvious Problem 1: It’s an Asymmetrical Standard. It is always trivial to come up with a new question that hasn’t been anticipated. There is no amount of information you can know to avoid being asked a question you don’t know the answer to.

Obvious Problem 2: It Undermines Psychological Safety. The omniscience expectation breaks down psychological safety as it cascades a profound anxiety through your leaders. To know everything you must be conservative, things must be smaller and tightly scoped, able to be captured in exact detail. (this is also the PGM fallacy. If we could write down in exact language the problem we were trying to solve we would have a computer program)

Non-Obvious Problem: It Focuses Leaders on Trivia. The non-obvious problem with the omniscience expectation is it focuses your leaders on trivia. I don’t know the attach rate of our enterprise partnerships, and I don’t need to know the attach rate. The question isn’t “What’s the attach rate today?”—it’s “Has churn decreased thanks to our new partnership efforts?” If it hasn’t, we persist. If it has, we celebrate and double down. The strategy tells me the answer, not the trivia.

Two (of N) Possible Responses

Two possible approaches to disrupting the cycle that lead to the omniscience expectation and the subsequent anxiety it creates.

Approach 1: Embrace “I Don’t Know”

The first is the hardest: You say, “I don’t know. Here is what I do know ….”. This is a bit different than the standard advice (which also takes courage) on how to say I don’t know which is to say, “I don’t know, I’ll find out, and get back to you on this date.” (closed loop)

Approach 2: The “Mardenfeld” Maneuver

This is an approach to separate a true need for data from “anxiety-driven requests.” And the great thing is that it is plausibly deniable.

Steve Mardenfeld has gone on to have an illustrious career, but once upon a time he was an intern with a sociology degree and a talent for understanding data who ended up building critical aspects of the data and experimentation platform at Etsy. And he had a practice. If you asked him for data he’d share it with you, e.g. in a Google Sheet, and not give you access to read it. If you requested access, great, he would give you access. If you didn’t, then he knew you didn’t really need this information. This was just unmanaged anxiety cascading down the hierarchy. Because the reality is no one is closing the loop on those data requests. I can’t possibly know everything I’m asked, and neither can you, and neither can the person who asked you. So we ask, and then some other request comes in, and we ask about that, and we never loop back for those answers.

And who knows if you forgot to share the permissions because the Google Docs UI is obtuse, or if you shared the permissions, but Sharepoint just forgot like it does 50% of the time, or what.

Challenging the omniscience expectation is important as a leader. You hold space for yourself to be a strategic actor, while protecting the psychological safety of your team. Admitting uncertainity and filtering unneccessary requests aren’t the signs of weakness so many fear – they are leadership tools that allow real creativity, collaboration and growth.