A Year Is Enough to Know What You Don't Know
There’s a version of this post I almost wrote — five clean lessons, neatly packaged, wrapped up with a bow. That would be a lie dressed up as wisdom. So here’s the messier, truer version.
A year ago, I stepped into this role believing that if I worked hard enough, communicated clearly enough, and cared deeply enough, things would largely work out. They did — but not in the way I expected, and not without costs I hadn’t planned for. This isn’t a victory lap. It’s a field report from someone who’s still finding their footing, written for anyone whose year looked something like mine.
The Title Changes. The Doubt Doesn’t.
Nobody tells you that the moment you step into leadership, the internal monologue gets louder, not quieter. You’d think authority brings confidence. Instead, in those first months, I second-guessed decisions I’d have made without blinking as an individual contributor.
What I’ve come to understand is that this kind of doubt isn’t about competence — it’s about context. You’re no longer accountable only for your own output. You’re accountable for the conditions in which other people do their best work. Nobody has done that exact job, for this exact team, before. The discomfort isn’t a sign you’re wrong for the role. It’s a sign you understand its weight.
The shift for me came when I stopped chasing certainty and started practicing honesty instead — with the team, about what I didn’t know; in retrospectives, about where I’d gotten it wrong. There’s a quiet credibility in saying “I got that wrong” before someone else has to say it for you.
Deciding in the Middle of Chaos
I expected clarity before I acted — full understanding, buy-in from everyone, a team that understood why before I moved. That almost never happened. Watching my fellow leads and mentors operate through genuinely messy situations, I noticed they rarely waited for the room to catch up before deciding. Often times one would gather what they could, make the call, and let understanding follow — usually through steady, repeated communication rather than delayed action.
I had to unlearn the instinct to explain everything first and act second. A team frozen by the search for total clarity loses more than one that moves and corrects course along the way.
But there’s a companion lesson here I learned the harder way: moving fast isn’t the same as making progress. For a stretch this year I mistook constant reprioritizing and putting out fires for agility. It wasn’t agility — it was rather lack of clarity dressed up as urgency. Deciding decisively in chaos only works if you’re deciding from a clear objective, not reacting to whatever is loudest that day.
Silence Is Never Just Silence
One of the most underrated leadership skills — and one I learned the hard way — is reading what people don’t say.
There’s often an unspoken culture of pushing through. People don’t always raise a hand when they’re stretched thin or unclear on direction; they just slow down, go quiet, stop asking questions. Early on, I mistook that quiet for alignment. A meeting with no objections felt like consensus. A “yeah, I’ve got it” seemed fine. I wasn’t creating the conditions for people to say the real thing.
I started paying attention differently — to energy shifts in one-on-ones, to who’d gone quiet for a week, to offhand comments that were actually signals. Leadership turned out to be less about being heard and more about learning to listen at a different frequency.
“If You Don’t Own the Narrative, Someone Else Will”
I quote this because I got it from a mentor. A lesson that cost me the most sleep… Silence around a decision, a strategy, or even around who you are as a leader doesn’t stay empty — people fill it in, with assumptions, half-truths, whatever story feels most convincing at the time.
For me, this showed up most sharply in the gap between team expectations and company direction. When priorities shifted, or where direction from above didn’t line up neatly with what the team hoped for, that gap didn’t stay quiet — it turned into frustration or quiet resentment if I didn’t step in and speak to it directly. The same was true of conflicts, whether between team members or across departments. Left unaddressed, they didn’t resolve themselves; they hardened into “how things really are” stories that got harder to undo the longer I waited.
It took me longer than it should have to accept a simple truth Dale Carnegie put better than I ever could: when dealing with people, remember you’re not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion. I used to think a well-reasoned explanation was enough to close a gap in understanding. It rarely was. People didn’t push back because the logic was flawed — they pushed back because they felt unheard, overlooked, or unsure where they stood. The narrative someone builds about a decision has far more to do with how it made them feel than whether it made sense on paper. Once I started leading with that in mind — acknowledging the feeling in the room before defending the reasoning — the same conversations that used to stall started to move.
Which ties directly into something else I learned: the hardest conversations were also the most necessary ones. I have a natural pull toward harmony, and in leadership that became a liability — I’d delay a difficult conversation about performance or misalignment, telling myself I was waiting for the right moment. Usually I was just being comfortable, while the situation quietly got worse. The fear of a hard conversation is almost always worse than the conversation itself, and honest, direct, and kind — in that order — is more humane than vague and delayed.
Not Every Problem Is Mine to Solve
There’s a version of leadership that’s essentially high-speed problem-solving, and it can feel very productive: someone brings an issue, I think fast, offer a fix, the problem disappears. Except that isn’t leadership — it’s dependency-building.
The more meaningful shift was resisting the reflex to fix and asking better questions instead: What have you tried? What would you do if I weren’t here? Slower, sometimes frustratingly so. But the team that comes out of that process thinks for itself and doesn’t need me in the room to make decisions.
You Can’t Scale on Empty
Around the midpoint of the year, I hit a wall. Nothing dramatic — just a creeping flatness. Work that used to energize me started to feel like obligation.
Leadership can be quietly brutal on the person holding it. You absorb pressure from above and below, hold worries that aren’t the team’s to carry, and are expected to be steady when everything around you is moving. What I learned, later than I’d like, is that sustainability isn’t a personal luxury — it’s a strategic asset. A leader running on empty makes worse calls and models the exact burnout they’re trying to prevent.
The journey so far
If I’m honest, I understand leadership less now than I thought I did a year ago — but I understand it more truthfully. I know where I’m still developing, which assumptions didn’t survive contact with reality, and how far the leader I want to be still sits from the one I am right now.
That somehow feels like progress. There’s no point where the pressure lifts and the answers become obvious. What changes is your relationship with uncertainty — your willingness to decide without full clarity, speak plainly before silence gets misread, and hold onto the objective even while the path keeps changing shape.
One year in. Still learning. Still here.
