I used to think leadership would feel a lot more… official.
You know what I mean?
I thought becoming a leader meant eventually reaching a point where you had all the answers, knew exactly what to say in every situation, and walked into every room completely confident in your decisions.
Maybe there was a nice office involved… definitely a really good blazer.
Somehow, I assumed the older and more experienced you became, the more natural everything would feel.
Well.
I have some news.
That’s not really how it works.
After more than a decade in marketing and communications – and now running an agency, leading a team, and working with clients every day – I’ve learned that leadership is much less about having all the answers and much more about being willing to navigate the questions.
The longer I’ve been in leadership, the more I’ve realized that there isn’t really a finish line where you suddenly feel like, Okay, I’ve officially figured this out.
There are still hard conversations. Still decisions that make me pause. There are still days when I’m learning right alongside the people I’m leading.
And honestly? I think that’s okay.
Here are a few things I thought leadership would be like versus what I’ve learned it actually looks like.
I Thought Leadership Meant Having All the Answers.
Leadership actually looks like knowing when to say, “I don’t know.”
This one took me a while.
There is a lot of pressure to appear confident when you’re the person in charge. Confidence is important! But pretending to know something you don’t know isn’t leadership.
Sometimes the most helpful thing you can say is:
“I don’t know yet. Let me look into it.”
Or:
“I need to think about that before I make a decision.”
Or even:
“I was wrong about that.”
Those statements don’t make you less of a leader; they make you a trustworthy one.
Your team doesn’t need you to be a walking encyclopedia. They need to know that when you don’t have the answer, you’ll help find it.
There’s also something powerful about showing your team that learning doesn’t stop once you become the leader.
In marketing especially, things are constantly changing. New platforms, new technology, new customer expectations, new challenges. I don’t expect myself to know everything, and I don’t expect my team to either.
What matters is being willing to ask questions, learn, and keep moving.
I Thought Leadership Meant Being the Most Confident Person in the Room.
Leadership actually looks like making room for other people to be confident.
This is a big one.
When you’re a leader, your job isn’t to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room. It’s to create a room where other people can contribute their expertise, too.
Some of the best ideas I’ve heard have come from people who weren’t the loudest person at the table.
I’ve learned to pay attention.
Who hasn’t spoken yet? Whose perspective are we missing? Who has experience with this that I don’t? What would happen if I stopped talking for a minute?
Sometimes leadership is knowing when to take the lead, and sometimes it’s knowing when to get out of the way.
I Thought Leadership Meant Giving People Answers.
Leadership actually looks like teaching people how to think.
When you’re leading a team, it can be tempting to solve everything yourself.
It feels faster.
Someone comes to you with a problem, and you immediately tell them what to do.
Done.
Except… that doesn’t really help them grow.
One of the biggest shifts in my own leadership has been learning to ask better questions.
What do you think? What options have you considered? What would you recommend? What’s holding you back? What would you do if I weren’t here to answer this?
That last one is especially important because the goal isn’t to build a team that needs you for every decision; the goal is to build a team that becomes stronger because you lead them.
I Thought Leadership Meant Keeping Everything Together.
Leadership actually looks like admitting when things are messy.
Running a business is messy. Leading people is messy. Marketing is messy. Life is messy.
There are good weeks and hard weeks. Projects go sideways. Plans change. Someone has a difficult day. A client throws you a curveball. Something you were sure would work… doesn’t.
Leadership isn’t pretending none of that happens.
It’s learning how to move through it without making everyone else panic.
That doesn’t mean you have to be emotionless; it means you can acknowledge what’s happening and still help people figure out what comes next.
Sometimes the most reassuring thing a leader can say is:
“Okay. This didn’t go how we planned. Let’s figure it out.”
I Thought Leadership Meant Always Being Strong.
Leadership actually looks like being human.
This might be the biggest lesson of all.
I care deeply about the people I work with.
I care about my team, about my clients. I care about doing good work and building something meaningful.
And I’ve learned that caring about people doesn’t make you a weaker leader – it makes you a more connected one.
There is room for real life. There is room for hard conversations and also room to celebrate. There is room to say, “Today is a lot.” And there is room to be ambitious without being a robot.
I don’t think we need more leaders who are trying to look perfectly put together all the time; we need leaders who are trustworthy enough to be real.
I Thought Leadership Meant Being the Person Everyone Came To.
Leadership actually looks like building people who can lead, too.
This is something I think about often. If everything has to go through you, you don’t have a leadership problem. You have a bottleneck.
Your team should be growing.
They should be learning how to make decisions and should be trusted with responsibility. They should eventually be able to do things you once had to do yourself.
That’s not losing control; that’s leadership working.
And yes, it can be hard.
It means letting people do things differently than you would. Allowing someone to make a mistake you could have prevented. It means resisting the urge to jump in because you know exactly how you would handle it.
But if you never give people the opportunity to grow, they never get the chance to surprise you.
I Thought Leadership Would Feel More Certain.
Leadership actually looks like making decisions without perfect information.
This might be the least glamorous part of leadership.
You rarely have 100 percent of the information you want.
You have to make a decision anyway. Sometimes you make the right call, and sometimes you don’t. The important thing is learning from both.
Good leadership isn’t about never making the wrong decision. It’s about creating enough clarity that your team can keep moving forward.
That means communicating. It means explaining the why. It means being willing to adjust. And it means not treating a change in direction like a personal failure.
Sometimes changing your mind is exactly what good leadership requires.
So, What Does Leadership Actually Look Like?
For me, leadership looks a lot less polished than I once imagined.
It looks like listening and asking questions. It looks like having difficult conversations. It looks like trusting people. It looks like admitting when you’re wrong. It looks like making decisions when you don’t have all the information.
It looks like celebrating your team. It looks like protecting your people. It looks like holding people accountable. It looks like giving people room to grow.
And yes, sometimes it looks like sitting in your car for five minutes before walking into a meeting because you need to collect yourself.
Real leadership isn’t about becoming someone who never gets overwhelmed… It’s about learning how to lead anyway.
And maybe that’s the part I wish someone had told me earlier.
You don’t have to become a completely different person to become a leader. You just have to become more intentional about how you show up.
The best leaders I know aren’t the ones who have everything figured out; they’re the ones who make the people around them feel capable of figuring things out, too.