You Can’t Lead What You Don’t Understand

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.”— Stephen Hawking

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.”— John F. Kennedy

Haven't we all seen this?

Executives get promoted because they are subject matter experts within their domain. Then one day they’re told to lead something completely different: an IT overhaul, an Agile rollout, a data modernization effort. Suddenly, they’re in charge of people who are working on something they don't have direct knowledge of! What is an executive to do? You fall back on something you ARE comfortable with: reports.

The irony is that the more leaders ask for evidence of progress, the less progress they actually get. Because every hour spent preparing a presentation is an hour spent not working on the project. Project managers know this well. It starts with “just a quick update” and ends with a color-coded deck that explains, in great detail, why progress has stalled.

Reports give the illusion of control. Dashboards soothe anxiety with tidy percentages and traffic-light colors. Green means good, red means bad, yellow means “I’ll explain this if you really make me.” I’ve seen projects collapse under the weight of documentation. The documentation was designed for one thing - to reassure people who had no practical knowledge of what they were being asked to approve.

It’s not malice — it’s culture. Organizations equate accountability with documentation because it feels objective. Paper is easy! You can file it, sign it and archive it. Actual results, on the other hand, are unpredictable and require trust. And trust, in many workplaces, is perceived as riskier than failure.

Here’s the real irony: this obsession with reports flies directly in the face of everything we already know about efficient processes. Lean Six Sigma teaches us to eliminate waste. Agile teaches us to streamline communication. Servant leadership tells us to clear the path so teams can deliver. Yet somehow, the higher the stakes, the more layers we add — as if bureaucracy itself were a risk mitigation strategy.

I’ve been there myself. Years ago, I was asked to oversee a major project even though I didn’t really understand what “project management” meant. My instinct was to ask for reports and status updates — not because I didn’t trust the team, but because I didn’t have the background to interpret what I was seeing. The solution wasn’t more documentation; it was education. I became a PMP because I was supervising PMPs. When my program turned security-heavy, I took a CISSP course so I could speak the same language as my engineers. And when I moved into program management, I earned the PgMP to understand the complexity I was managing. The result was night and day — less confusion, fewer unnecessary reports, and a lot more progress.

Project managers don’t resent accountability; they resent bureaucracy dressed up as oversight. They’ll give you all the insight you want — once you let them get back to doing the work you hired them to report on in the first place. The best leaders never stop learning, because the moment you stop understanding the work, you start managing reports instead of the results.

#Leadership #ProjectManagement #ContinuousLearning #LeanSixSigma #Agile #ServantLeadership #PMP #PgMP #CISSP #ProfessionalDevelopment #Management

Coda

I continue to experiment with AI. To this point, it doesn't really save me much time with content creation because nothing it produces is ever fit for use. But it is getting better. Sometimes. I generated the meme at the top of this blog using AI. Can you tell? Of course you can - the protagonist is standing facing the wrong direction in the first frame and has glasses on in 2 of the 3. Why didn't I fix it? I tried, but eventually got frustrated and decided to leave it in and see if anyone noticed! No child would make that mistake, but ChatGPT does! Lets make sure it can draw memes before we put in charge of anything important!