Your job isn't to know the answer.
It's more about your ability to figure out the answer.
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Years ago, I was a few months into a new role and felt completely lost.
I’d made it to the title/ level I’d been chasing for years. But somehow I felt more confused and unfulfilled when I got there.
Being in a new role, there were so many things I felt like I was learning on the fly. A lot of my previous playbooks that had helped me be successful, both my growth playbooks and my playbooks for adding value as a member of a team, didn’t seem to apply in this new environment.
It was messing with my head a little bit
I was starting to worry that I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. And if I wasn’t good, it made me confused about why I had been successful in the past. My mind was twisted into a pretzel, and I was feeling all kinds of imposter syndrome.
So I hired a professional coach to help me figure it out.
A few months into our work together, she asked me if there was anyone I looked up to professionally. I told her about my old boss, “James”.
James worked incredibly hard. Was very direct, but kind. He’d push you hard and you’d run through walls for him. He was also a dad who seemed to have a good work-life integration. He was the first executive that I really admired.
But the thing I admired most… James had to make a lot of tough calls in his role, and he always seemed to make the right calls.
My coach immediately challenged that statement:
“Andrew, how did James know those were the right decisions when he made them?”
I thought about it. He didn’t. Obviously he didn’t. He made the best decisions he could with the information he had.
(and if you’ve ever worked with a coach, you can imagine the mindfuckery it took to get me to that conclusion.)
Then she said something that rewired how I think about my value as a professional:
“Your job as a leader isn’t to know the answer. It’s to figure out the answer.”
She kept going.
“Nobody knows all the answers. And if you did, you’d be in a role that extremely boring and beneath you. More importantly, when you know the answer, you can solve a small number of problems. When you can figure out the answer, you can solve an infinite number of problems. Your value is that you’re the right person to solve these problems. Focus on that.”
A lot of my imposter syndrome walked out the door that afternoon.
And that reframe has served me ever since, but nowhere more than in the first few months of a new role.
You show up expecting to get wins on the board fast. You open your bag of playbooks from the last company. And a few weeks in, you realize something uncomfortable: the context is completely different. The playbooks that made you successful don’t plug in one-to-one.
That’s the moment many of my coaching clients start panicking. They start wondering if the company hired the wrong person.
They didn’t.
They hired you because you’re the one who can figure it out. The playbooks are a bonus, not the job.
I actually had a chance to chat about this exact tension with Barron Ernst on the podcast recently. Barron’s a multi-time Head of Product with a background in growth, product, and marketing. Total badass. Like my old boss James, a pretty cool dude.
He told me about the time he was hired to launch a streaming service in Sub-Saharan Africa. Flew halfway across the world, armed with every Silicon Valley playbook he picked up over the years. He’d been hired as the expert.
A few weeks in, a teammate asked him if he’d heard of “the movie guy.”
Turned out most people in the neighborhood got their shows from one local guy with good bandwidth who torrented episodes, burned them to DVDs, and walked them door to door.
That was the real competition. A guy with a DVD burner.
None of Barron’s playbooks were built for that market. He spent the next few weeks wondering if they’d hired the wrong person.
He eventually made the reframe.
He wasn’t there to apply the old playbooks. He was there to figure out what the new playbooks needed to be. Showmax became the dominant streaming service in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The first 6 months were brutal. But he figured it out. Because that’s what he was actually hired to do.
If that story resonates, you’ll love the full conversation. Link below.
And if you’re in the messy middle of this yourself - in a new role where your old playbooks not fitting, wondering if they picked the wrong person - reach out. It’s one of the most common things I work on with clients.