The Discipline of Not Having the Answer Yet

Starting a new leadership role comes with an interesting tension. You were hired because of what you know, because you have experience, instincts, ideas, and a track record of making things better. Then you arrive, and one of the smartest things you can do is resist the urge to prove all of that immediately.

I recently started a new role as Senior Associate Vice President of Digital Engagement at The Humane League. I came in with more than 20 years of experience across marketing, fundraising, advocacy, digital engagement, and organizational growth. I have opinions. I see patterns quickly. I naturally start connecting dots and imagining what could be possible. But right now, I am doing a lot more listening than talking, and that is very intentional.

There is a particular kind of pressure that comes with joining an organization as a senior leader. You want to contribute quickly. You want the people who hired you to feel confident they made the right decision, and you want your team to feel good about your leadership. It can be tempting to start offering solutions almost immediately, especially when you see things that feel familiar from past roles.

But every organization has a history you were not there for. Processes exist for reasons, even when those reasons are no longer especially useful. Teams have relationships, constraints, successes, frustrations, and institutional knowledge that will never show up in an onboarding document. You cannot understand an organization by looking at an org chart or sitting through a week of meetings.

So my first job is not to change things. It is to understand them.

I want to know what is working and why. Where people feel stuck. What has already been tried. What the data says and what it does not say. Where teams collaborate naturally and where the seams are showing. I also want to understand what supporters experience across the organization, not just what individual channels or teams report about their piece of the work.

Most importantly, I want to understand how the people closest to the work think about it. That means asking a lot of questions without turning every answer into an opportunity to demonstrate expertise. There is a real difference between listening to understand and listening long enough to tell someone what you already think.

I have always been a strategist at heart. I tend to zoom out, look for patterns, connect seemingly separate pieces, and ask where all of it is ultimately leading. But good strategy requires context. Without context, pattern recognition can become assumption, and experience can become a liability if it convinces you that because something worked somewhere else, it must be the answer here too.

One thing I have become more convinced of over time is that seniority should make you more comfortable saying, “I don’t know yet,” not less. That is not indecision. It is knowing the difference between having an instinct and having enough information to act on it.

Of course, listening cannot become an excuse for avoiding decisions forever. Leadership eventually requires choices. There will be things I want to strengthen, rethink, connect, build, or stop doing altogether. But those decisions will be better because I did not rush to make them before I understood the foundation underneath them.

The goal, at least for me, is not to enter a new organization and leave my fingerprints on everything. It is to understand what the organization is trying to accomplish, help people do their best work, and figure out where my experience can genuinely make the whole system stronger.

Sometimes leadership means having the answer. Sometimes it means being secure enough to know you do not have it yet.