When having the answer becomes the problem

Being the person with the answer may have got you the promotion. It can also make you less effective once you get there.

People are often promoted into leadership because of what they know. They solve difficult problems, spot patterns quickly and can be relied upon when something needs sorting out.

Then the job changes.

They are no longer responsible only for the quality of their own thinking. They are responsible for creating the conditions in which other people can think well too.

I was reminded of this while listening to Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill discussing how leaders create the conditions for innovative thinking.

Hill argues that leading innovation is not simply about forming a vision and persuading people to follow it. It is about creating an environment in which people are willing to contribute their own thinking, test ideas and work through disagreement.

She describes a visionary CEO who recognised that his own urgency was getting in the way. He had solutions and wanted to share them. But when he spoke first, he took up the space in which other people might have thought.

He made himself a rule: he would not speak for the first 20 minutes of a meeting.

Only then did the people around him begin offering what Hill calls their "slices of genius".

I have seen this pattern repeatedly during 25 years in technology leadership and now in my coaching work.

A leader sees the answer, offers it quickly and believes they are helping. Usually, they are helping in the immediate sense. The problem gets solved and the meeting moves on.

But something else is being taught.

The team learns to wait. Ideas are edited before they are spoken. People look towards the leader to discover the right answer before risking their own.

Over time, the leader becomes increasingly central. They are consulted on more decisions, drawn into more detail and left wondering why other people are not taking greater ownership.

For many women in technology, this transition has another layer.

Their technical credibility may have been hard won. Being prepared, knowledgeable and reliably correct was not simply how they performed well. It was how they proved they deserved to be in the room.

Stepping back can therefore feel risky. It may feel less like leadership and more like becoming less useful or less visible.

But the shift is not from being capable to becoming vague or passive. Leaders still set direction, exercise judgement and make difficult decisions. Hill is clear that leadership involves acting despite incomplete and ambiguous information.

The shift is in where the leader's value sits.

Less in personally producing the best answer. More in creating the conditions in which the best answer can come from anywhere in the room.

That can begin with a few questions:

• Where do I speak first when I could speak last?

• Do people bring me their thinking, or wait for mine?

• When someone offers an idea, do I explore it or immediately improve it?

• What might my team attempt if they knew I would not step in too quickly?

Restraint can look like doing very little. In practice, it is demanding leadership work. It requires enough confidence to leave space unfilled and enough trust to let someone else's thinking develop without taking it over.

The work is not to become less capable, it's to stop your own capability limiting the room.

Source: Linda Hill, How Leaders Create the Conditions for Innovative Thinking, HBR On Leadership, 24 June 2026.