Monday Myth: Strong Leaders Have Answers

There is a deeply ingrained belief in organisations that strong leaders are the ones who always know what to do.

They see faster.
They decide quicker.
They have the answer when others hesitate.

This belief is reinforced early. High performers are promoted precisely because they solve problems. They unblock situations. They step in when things stall. Over time, the organisation starts to expect this behaviour, reward it, and eventually depend on it.

And that is where the damage begins.

The Myth

The myth is simple:

The stronger the leader, the more answers they should have.

It sounds logical. It feels reassuring. And that is precisely the problem: it has a numbing effect. It quietly erodes scale, ownership, and the organisation’s ability to think for itself.

Because leaders who answer too often do not just solve problems. They reprogram the system around them, and they numb themselves in the process. When leaders keep providing answers instead of aggregating others’ experience, they stop learning. The organisation loses collective judgment, and the leader loses exposure to reality.

What Actually Happens When Leaders Provide Answers

Every time a leader jumps in with a solution, three things happen:

1. Thinking stops early
   Teams learn that incomplete thinking is acceptable because the final answer will arrive from above. Exploration shortens. Debate narrows. People optimise for speed to the leader’s conclusion, not for correctness.
2. Decisions drift upward
   What starts as “just helping” becomes a gravity well. Decisions that could live at the edges move closer to the centre. People stop deciding and start checking.
3. Ownership erodes invisibly
   Nobody explicitly gives up ownership. It simply dissolves. When outcomes are good, credit floats upward. When outcomes are bad, responsibility becomes unclear.

None of this is malicious. It is structural. Systems adapt to the strongest signal, and the strongest signal is almost always the leader.

The Leadership Bottleneck Nobody Wants to Admit

Here is the uncomfortable test most leaders avoid:

What happens when you are not there?

If progress slows dramatically, if decisions pause, if people wait instead of acting, the problem is not the team.

The problem is that leadership has become a hard dependency, when leaders should be continuously learning how to make themselves expendable.

Many leaders mistake this for importance. In reality, it is fragility.

A system that cannot function without constant senior input does not scale. It does not learn. It does not develop judgment. It merely executes proximity to power.

That is not leadership. That is centralised control with better optics.

Why This Persists (And Why It Feels Good)

Answer-driven leadership is seductive because it delivers short-term rewards:

• Faster meetings
• Cleaner narratives
• A sense of competence and authority
• Positive feedback from stakeholders (“You always have clarity”)

But these are local optimisations. They improve the leader’s experience while degrading the system’s capacity over time.

The cost is delayed:

• Teams lose confidence in their own judgment
• Leaders become overloaded
• Strategic work is crowded out by tactical decisions
• Succession becomes impossible because knowledge never leaves the centre

At that point, leaders complain about being a bottleneck, without recognising how carefully they built it.

What Strong Leadership Actually Looks Like

Strong leaders do not withhold answers to appear wise or humble. They withhold answers to force the system to think.

This does not mean silence or detachment. It means changing what you contribute.

Strong leaders:

• Ask questions that sharpen thinking instead of closing it
• Push decisions back to where the context lives
• Accept slower decisions early to get faster decisions later
• Tolerate imperfect outcomes as part of organisational learning

Most importantly, they design conditions where judgment accumulates outside themselves.

This is harder than answering questions. It requires patience, restraint, and a willingness to watch people struggle without rescuing them too early.

That discomfort is the price of scale.

A Simple Reframe

Here is a useful mental model:

• Answers create followers
• Constraints create leaders

If your contribution is always the answer, you are training execution, not judgment.

If your contribution is boundaries, intent, and clear principles, you are building decision-makers.

And decision-makers are the only thing that scales, because mastery, autonomy, and purpose do not emerge from answers, they emerge from judgment exercised in real conditions

The Real Measure of Leadership

The strength of a leader is not measured by how often they are needed.

It is measured by how well things work when they are not there.

If decisions still happen.
If standards still hold.
If people argue well and decide cleanly.

That is leadership.

Everything else is just being the smartest person in the room and calling it impact.

Blunt truth to end on:

If your organisation slows down when you stop talking, you are not leading. You are steering manually.

That may feel good in the short term. In the long term, it is how systems stall.