Someone is waiting for you to admit it
Readtime: 3 minutes
I'd been a Manager for about three weeks when I sat down opposite the CFO of a client in an industry I knew very little about.
He asked me a question about his business. Something specific and quite technical.
And I answered it as though I knew.
I did sort of know. I knew the general direction of it, enough to put a sentence together that sounded like it came from someone who had done this before.
He let me finish. Then he asked a follow-up.
The follow-up went a level deeper than I could go, and we both knew it.
I thought I was toast.
The pattern I hadn’t noticed
My promotion to Manager was not the first time I'd decided I had things sorted out. It happened at more or less every level, and each time something arrived fairly promptly to prove me wrong.
What I hadn't noticed was that the pattern was getting more expensive each time round.
When you're junior and you overstate what you know, the people around you often can't tell, or they don’t care. Your manager might, if they're paying attention. But mostly you get away with it, and getting away with it teaches you that it works.
Then you get promoted, and the situation changes. The more senior the person across the table the more they can hear the gap before you've finished your sentence.
So the habit you built when nobody cared follows you into situations full of people who do.
That's the bit I'd missed. I thought I was getting better at it over time. What was actually happening was that the audience was getting better at spotting it.
What I was really spending my energy on
Here's the part I find more uncomfortable, looking back.
The problem in that meeting was not that I didn't know the answer. I doubt the CFO expected me to. I'd been on the client for three weeks.
The problem was how much effort I was spending on looking like I did know the answer.
I was tracking his face. I was steering the conversation away from the areas I was thin on. I was running a second process the whole time, underneath the actual conversation, which was entirely about managing his impression of me.
Which meant I had maybe half my attention left for the thing I was supposedly there to do.
I think this is the real cost, and it's mostly invisible. The gap in your knowledge is finite and closeable. The energy you burn concealing it just keeps going, meeting after meeting, and it comes directly out of the quality of your thinking.
What actually happened next
He called me out on it. Not unkindly, but clearly.
So I told him the truth, which was that I understood the industry reasonably well but I didn't understand this specific part of it.
And then he helped me.
He spent a chunk of that meeting, and a fair bit of time afterwards, explaining things to me. He was good at it, and I learned more in that hour than I would have in a month of trying to work it out on my own.
I'd assumed being found out would cost me the relationship. It turned out to be the fastest way I could have built one. Maybe I got lucky.
When you give off a vague sense that you might not know what you're talking about, you actually make it more difficult for the other person. But a specific, named gap gives them something they can easily respond to. It gives them something to give you.
And I've since noticed that senior people quite like sharing their knowledge. It's one of the few requests they get that costs them almost nothing.
Some of this is unavoidable
None of this means you should walk into rooms announcing everything you can't do.
There is always going to be an element of “faking it” while you're learning something new. You take on the role before you're fully ready, because that's how you become ready. That's fine, and I think it's necessary.
The mistake was going too hard, too early, in front of the one person most qualified to notice.
There's a version of this in most jobs.
Somewhere in your working life right now there is probably a person who already knows exactly where your gap is. They may have known for a while.
And they might be waiting, quite patiently, for you to bring it up so they can help.
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
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