Leadership is therefore influenced twice. First by the quality of a leader’s understanding, and then
by the quality of the action that emerges from it.
Most leadership development focuses on the second influence. We teach leaders to communicate
more effectively, make better decisions, manage conflict, inspire others, and navigate change.
These are important pursuits, but they occur after something even more fundamental has already
taken place. They shape leadership responses more than they shape the perceptions from which
those responses emerge.
Imagine constructing a building by concentrating exclusively on its architecture while assuming the
foundation will somehow take care of itself. No matter how elegant the design, its strength will
always depend upon what lies beneath it. Leadership is remarkably similar. Communication,
influence, strategy, coaching, and decision making are the visible structure. Understanding is the
foundation upon which they stand.
This perspective does not diminish the importance of leadership behaviors. Quite the opposite. It
explains why they matter. A well-crafted message cannot compensate for a flawed understanding
of the situation. A decisive leader who misunderstands the problem simply reaches the wrong
destination more efficiently. Even extraordinary influence serves little purpose if it persuades
people toward an incomplete understanding of reality.
Leadership action is the visible expression of understanding.
If that statement is true, then improving leadership requires more than refining behavior. It requires
expanding the understanding from which behavior emerges.
The Invisible Work of Understanding
One reason understanding receives so little attention is that it is largely invisible. We see decisions,
but not the thinking that produced them. We hear conversations, but not the assumptions that
shaped them. We evaluate outcomes yet rarely examine the interpretation from which those
outcomes emerged.
This invisibility creates a paradox. The less visible something is, the easier it is to overlook, even
when it shapes everything around it. Trust works this way. So does culture. Understanding belongs
in the same category: it quietly determines the range and quality of leadership action before that
action becomes visible.
That may explain why two experienced leaders can observe the same meeting and reach entirely
different conclusions. One hears silence and assumes agreement; another hears the same silence
and recognizes uncertainty, caution, or exclusion. One sees resistance and diagnoses attitude;
another sees the same behavior and asks what concern or loss the resistance may be protecting.
Their leadership diverges long before either responds, because their understanding has already
taken different paths.
This distinction matters because leaders do not respond to reality exactly as it exists. They
respond to what they believe reality to be. When that meaning is incomplete, outdated, or
inaccurate, even strong leadership behaviors struggle to compensate. When interpretation
improves, familiar behaviors often become more effective because they are aimed at the right
problem. Perhaps, then, one of the leader’s most important responsibilities is not simply making better
decisions but continually improving the understanding from which those decisions emerge.
Why Understanding Becomes Limited
One of the great challenges of leadership is that no leader sees every variable, hears every conversation, or fully appreciates every perspective. We lead with imperfect information, limited experience, and finite time. The question is not whether our view is partial. It always is. The more
important question is whether we recognize that limitation.
Experience complicates this reality. As leaders gain experience, they also gain confidence. They
learn to recognize patterns, anticipate outcomes, and draw upon lessons from previous successes
and failures. These are invaluable leadership assets. Experience allows leaders to navigate
complexity with greater speed and often with greater wisdom. Yet experience carries an often-overlooked risk.
The patterns that once helped us understand today’s challenges can quietly become the
assumptions that prevent us from seeing tomorrow’s realities. Familiarity encourages efficiency,
but it can also encourage certainty. We begin to recognize situations before fully observing them.
We complete conversations before they are finished. We explain problems before all the evidence
has emerged. In doing so, we may unintentionally substitute past understanding for present
understanding.
Every experienced leader has likely encountered this moment. A decision that once appeared
obvious becomes questionable after new information emerges. A trusted employee reveals
concerns no one anticipated. A strategic initiative falters not because people lacked effort, but
because different groups understood the problem differently. These moments are often described
as failures of execution or communication. Sometimes they are. But just as often, they reveal
something deeper: the original understanding was incomplete.
This is why humility occupies such an important place in effective leadership. Humility is not
uncertainty or indecision. Nor is it a lack of confidence. Rather, it is the recognition that no matter
how much we know, there is always more to understand. It creates space for questions that
certainty never asks and welcomes perspectives that assumptions often dismiss.
Curiosity turns that humility into practice. Curious leaders resist the temptation to arrive too quickly
at conclusions. They ask one more question, seek one more perspective, and remain open to the
possibility that their first interpretation may not be their best one. They understand that improving
their view of reality is not an interruption to leadership. It is leadership.
Seen through this lens, leadership is less about possessing the right answers than about
continually pursuing a better understanding. Decisions still matter. Action still matters. Results still
matter. But each of these ultimately reflects the quality of the understanding from which it emerged.
Leaders cannot eliminate uncertainty, but they can continually improve the lens through which
uncertainty is viewed.
What Understanding Requires
To expand understanding, leaders must first become more precise about what they are trying to expand.
Understanding is more than possessing information. Leaders can have access to extensive data
and still misunderstand what is happening around them. They can know the numbers, recognize
the people involved, understand the formal structure of an organization, and possess years of
experience without fully grasping why a situation is unfolding as it is. Knowledge gives leaders pieces of the picture; understanding helps them see how those pieces fit together. Reframing is the discipline of asking whether a different arrangement of those pieces reveals something the first view obscured.
That distinction matters because leadership rarely occurs in circumstances where facts alone
provide an obvious answer. Leaders work within systems of people, relationships, histories,
expectations, competing interests, and changing conditions. What appears to be one kind of
problem often turns out to contain several others. Understanding asks leaders to move beyond what is immediately apparent and examine context, perspective, experience, and meaning.
Context matters because information rarely carries meaning independently of the circumstances
surrounding it. A declining performance measure may signal failure in one organization and
intentional transition in another. Silence in a meeting may indicate agreement, uncertainty,
disengagement, or simply a preference to listen before responding. The observable fact may be
the same. Its meaning depends upon the larger picture in which it appears.
Perspective matters because no leader occupies every position within an organization. The view from the executive office is necessarily different from the view of the frontline employee, customer, community member, or new hire. Each perspective reveals aspects of reality that others are less able to see. None possesses the entire picture.
This is not a problem to be solved as much as a reality to be recognized.
Leadership does not require leaders to abandon their own perspective. It requires them to
recognize that their perspective is one contribution to a larger understanding. The willingness to
consider what others see does not weaken judgment; it gives judgment more from which to work.
Experience matters because leaders inevitably interpret present circumstances through what they
have encountered before. Experience provides patterns, lessons, and instincts that can make
judgment faster and more sophisticated. But experience is most valuable when it informs
understanding rather than determines it. Yesterday can help leaders interpret today without
requiring today to look exactly like yesterday.
Meaning matters because leaders ultimately must move from information to interpretation and
from interpretation toward a coherent view of what is happening and why it matters. New
information may alter that view. Another perspective may challenge it. Experience may reveal that
an assumption was mistaken.
Understanding, then, is developmental: leaders understand with what is available now while
remaining willing to understand differently tomorrow.
This is the distinction that matters most. Effective leaders are not those who achieve complete
understanding before acting; such a standard would make leadership impossible. They are leaders
who act from the best view available while remaining willing to revise it.
Reframing Understanding Before Action
This proposition rests on three commitments.
Intentionality recognizes that deeper understanding rarely happens by accident. Leaders naturally
accumulate experience and information, but accumulation is not the same as expansion.
Expansion requires the willingness to question, reconsider, listen, explore, and revise what
previously seemed settled.
Discipline recognizes that this work cannot be reserved for moments when leaders happen to feel
curious. If understanding shapes leadership action, then examining and expanding understanding
must become part of the continuing work of leadership.
Expansion recognizes that the objective is not to discard what leaders already know, but to
enlarge the picture.
To reframe something is not necessarily to declare the previous frame wrong. It is to recognize that
another frame may reveal something the first could not.
A manager who first frames missed deadlines as a performance issue may respond with pressure
and accountability. If that manager reframes the same pattern through the lens of role clarity,
resource constraints, or competing priorities, different actions become visible. The purpose is not to
avoid accountability, but to ensure accountability is aimed at the real issue.
Expanding understanding is not endless reflection. Leadership eventually requires judgment,
choice, and action. Organizations cannot wait for perfect clarity because perfect clarity rarely
exists.
The goal is wiser action, not perfect understanding.
Still, a call for deeper inquiry can become an excuse for delay if leaders confuse understanding
with avoidance. The discipline is developing the best view reasonably available, acting with
humility, and learning from what action reveals.
In practice, leaders expand understanding by asking better questions before deciding, testing the
assumptions beneath their first interpretation, seeking perspectives that may contradict their own,
watching what action reveals, and reflecting afterward on what should be revised. These practices
make understanding a leadership discipline rather than a private intuition.
Leadership becomes not a straight line from knowledge to decision, but an ongoing relationship
between understanding and action in which each has the potential to improve the other.
In practice, this means pausing before moving from problem to solution, asking what resistance
may reveal before trying to overcome it, and treating disagreement as a possible source of missing
perspective rather than merely an obstacle to progress.
Putting Understanding into Practice
If expanding understanding is part of the work of leadership, it cannot remain only an idea. It has to
influence how leaders approach decisions, conversations, and action. This does not require
slowing every decision or turning leadership into endless analysis. It requires creating deliberate
moments in which leaders examine what they think they understand, test that understanding
through action, invite perspectives that may change it, and learn from what follows. In practice, this
can occur through four connected disciplines.
Establishing the Diagnostic Pause
The first is a deliberate pause between observation and execution. This need not be lengthy.
Sometimes it may last only a few moments before a conversation, decision, or communication.
What matters is interrupting the natural tendency to move directly from what we observe to what
we believe should be done.
Three questions can create that pause: What assumptions am I making about this situation?
Whose perspective might be missing from my interpretation? What else could this behavior,
information, or circumstance mean?
These questions do not prevent action. They improve the interpretation from which action begins.
A leader may ultimately reach the same conclusion, but the conclusion has now been examined
rather than simply accepted. The pause becomes a small but repeatable discipline for expanding
the picture before deciding what to do with it.
Testing Understanding Through Action
Understanding will never be complete before action. Leaders eventually have to decide, communicate, and move. But action itself can become another source of understanding.
Rather than treating every initial response as a final declaration, leaders can sometimes approach
action as a way of testing what they believe to be true. A pilot initiative, preliminary conversation,
limited change, or feedback loop can reveal whether the assumptions behind a decision hold when
they encounter reality.
This changes the relationship between understanding and action. Action no longer represents the
end of interpretation. It becomes part of the process through which interpretation improves.
When an initial action produces an unexpected response, the question is not simply, “Why didn’t
this work?” It can also be, “What did this reveal that we did not understand before?”
That distinction matters. An unexpected result may expose a flawed solution, but it may also
expose an incomplete understanding of the problem itself. Leaders who recognize that possibility
can adjust more than their tactics. They can reconsider the frame through which the situation was
originally understood.
Making Inquiry a Shared Practice
Expanding understanding also cannot remain entirely inside the leader’s head. Leaders operate
within organizations where other people possess information, experiences, and perspectives they
cannot have themselves. That makes inquiry a collective leadership practice.
Meetings, conversations, and decision processes can be structured to surface what might
otherwise remain unseen. Leaders can ask what others are noticing, invite alternative
interpretations of the same information, seek the perspective of those closest to the work, and
create room for disagreement before consensus forms too quickly.
This does not mean every perspective carries equal weight or that leaders surrender responsibility
for judgment. Leadership still requires decisions. But judgment improves when it has more of reality
from which to work.
A dissenting voice may identify something the majority has missed. A frontline employee may
understand an implementation problem that is invisible from the executive level. Someone
interpreting the same data differently may expose an assumption that everyone else has
unconsciously accepted.
In that sense, curiosity becomes more than an individual leadership characteristic. It becomes part
of how a team works.
Reflecting on What Action Reveals
The cycle is incomplete if leaders act and immediately move on to the next problem.
After action, there is another opportunity to expand understanding. Leaders can return to the
interpretation that originally guided the decision and compare it with what actually happened.
Where was our original understanding accurate? Where was it incomplete? What surprised us?
What did we learn about the people, system, environment, or problem that should change how we
interpret similar situations in the future?
These questions move reflection beyond evaluating whether an initiative succeeded or failed. They
examine whether the thinking behind the initiative accurately represented reality.
That distinction is important because successful outcomes can sometimes reinforce flawed
assumptions just as unsuccessful outcomes can reveal valuable insights. The purpose of reflection
is not merely to grade the action. It is to improve the understanding that will shape the next one.
Over time, these practices form a continuing cycle: pause, test, inquire, reflect, and reframe.
Leaders develop the best understanding reasonably available, act from it, pay attention to what
action reveals, and allow that new information to reshape what they understand next.
Understanding therefore does not simply precede leadership action. It develops through it. 9
Conclusion
This is where the argument becomes more than an interesting way of thinking about leadership. It
becomes a responsibility.
If leadership action is the visible expression of understanding, then leaders have a responsibility to
keep that inner work active. Experience should deepen judgment. Questions should challenge
assumptions. Other perspectives should broaden the picture. Reflection should refine what action
reveals. New circumstances should cause leaders to ask whether what made sense yesterday
remains sufficient today.
Leaders will still need to decide with incomplete information, communicate before every question is
answered, and move organizations forward while reality is still unfolding. But action need not be
leadership’s beginning. It can be leadership’s expression.
We have spent decades teaching leaders how to act.
It is time we spent equal effort helping them understand.
Notes
Gary A. Yukl and William L. Gardner III, Leadership in Organizations, 9th ed. (Harlow, UK:
Pearson, 2020).
Karl E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995).
Karl E. Weick, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld, “Organizing and the Process of
Sensemaking,” Organization Science 16, no. 4 (2005): 409–421,
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1050.0133.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
Bradley P. Owens, Michael D. Johnson, and Terence R. Mitchell, “Expressed Humility in
Organizations: Implications for Performance, Teams, and Leadership,” Organization Science 24,
no. 5 (2013): 1517–1538, https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1120.0795.
Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations.
Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schön, Organizational Learning II: Theory, Method, and Practice
(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996).
Amy C. Edmondson, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,”
Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1999): 350–383, https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999.
Donald A. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York:
Basic Books, 1983).
References
Argyris, Chris, and Donald A. Schön. Organizational Learning II: Theory, Method, and Practice.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996.
Edmondson, Amy C. “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.” Administrative
Science Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1999): 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Owens, Bradley P., Michael D. Johnson, and Terence R. Mitchell. “Expressed Humility in
Organizations: Implications for Performance, Teams, and Leadership.” Organization Science 24,
no. 5 (2013): 1517–1538. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1120.0795.
Schön, Donald A. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic
Books, 1983.
Weick, Karl E. Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995.
Weick, Karl E., Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld. “Organizing and the Process of
Sensemaking.” Organization Science 16, no. 4 (2005): 409–421.
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1050.0133.
Yukl, Gary A., and William L. Gardner III. Leadership in Organizations. 9th ed. Harlow, UK:
Pearson, 2020.