You can’t be a leader if you don’t have an opinion

“Managers do things right, Leaders do the right things.”

This simple sentence boils down the principle that distinguished leaders from managers. Of course it is not as simple as that because finding out what the “right things” are is usually easier said than done.

“Decision making with impartial information” is the scientific term describing situations when it is impossible to collect and analyze all information to make a decision. Therefore a decision has to be made with “impartial” information.

As a leader you have to do two things:
1) Find out what information you don’t know
2) Form an opinion about the things you don’t know.

Know what you don’t know

Dealing with uncertainty is just a fact of a managers life. But it’s necessary to differentiate between the things you know that you don’t know and the things you are not aware that you don’t know. If you want to be a leader you should try to minimize the things of which you don’t know that you don’t know them. Let others show you their side of a situation, try to see and understand new influences and changes in your industry and get a deep understanding of new technologies that might have an impact on your industry.

At the same time you are learning about all these new domains that might have an influence, great leaders don’t get hung up with understanding and predicting everything and trying to make sense of every little detail. It’s essential to accept that one cannot know everything and some things are simply impossible to predict. Will there be a new competitor in three years that will replace the new product you are planning to develop today? Nobody knows and nobody will ever know. But it is important to have an option about that.

Have an opinion

Since it is impossible to have perfect information for every decision it’s necessary to form a shortcut. And the shortcut when you are unable to have information are opinions: opinions who certain things might play out in the future.

Obviously these opinions can be well-grounded or they can be just superficial, the can turn out to be wrong or they can turn out to be right. Despite the inherent challenges of opinions, they are the drivers that enable decision making and move projects forward.

Opinions can be wrong as well and decisions could be made based on opinions that turn out to be wrong need to be reevaluated. This is only possible if there is a culture that accepts the case that decisions can be overthrown because facts and opinions have changed. It’s not a failure to overthrow a decision, but it would have been a failure to not make a decision at all.

Never try to become a “general manager”

The concept of “general manager” describes the ideas that somebody is able to manage any kind of project or organization without actually having an understanding about the domain because as long as he can apply the right management techniques he can manage any situation.

It turns out that is idea just does not work in reality. If you don’t know what you are managing, you can’t form an well-grounded opinion and you will either be unable to make a decision. There simply are no extraordinary leaders who don’t have a deep understanding of the domain they are managing.