Sixty-five per cent of leaders would rather appear decisive and get it wrong than admit uncertainty and get it right. Read that number twice. It means two out of every three leaders you work with — maybe including you — will choose to look good over being right.
I didn’t invent that statistic. New research from Sam Conniff and Katherine Templar Lewis at Uncertainty Experts found it, studying over a thousand leaders across every sector and seniority level. The ratio holds regardless of gender. This isn’t a story about one bad boss. It’s a story about a system that has trained good leaders to fear the wrong thing.
At the same time, a separate piece of research landed in Forbes this month, arguing that visibility has become the new credibility for senior leaders. Doug Melville pointed to conversations at Cannes about C-suite leaders needing to show up more like influencers. Not for vanity — because clients, employees, and investors no longer want to hear only from brand voices. They want to know what the people running the business actually think.
Sixty-five per cent of leaders would rather appear decisive and get it wrong than admit uncertainty and get it right. Read that number twice. It means two out of every three leaders you work with — maybe including you — will choose to look good over being right.
Put these two findings side by side and you’ll spot the contradiction immediately. We’re asking leaders to be more visible than ever, at the exact moment most of them dread letting anyone watch them get something wrong.
That isn’t a communications problem. It’s a credibility problem, and it sits at the heart of this week’s episode of Impactful Teamwork.
Invisibility never reads as neutral
For decades, senior leaders learned to communicate only after polishing, approving, and perfectly timing every message. The CEO spoke through the annual report. Layers of review handled everything else.
That era is ending, and it’s ending because silence no longer buys leaders safety. When you go quiet, your people don’t assume you’re being careful. They fill the gap with assumptions, and they read your absence as avoidance.
Rob Schwartz, former CEO of TBWA Chiat Day, makes the sharpest point in the Forbes piece: the best CEOs are the best storytellers in the company. Not because storytelling is decoration. Because a story differs from a speech — a speech sounds rehearsed, a story sounds human, and your team can tell the difference in seconds.
Why your brain treats “I don’t know” as a threat
Here’s where it gets interesting. If honest, imperfect visibility builds more trust than polished distance, why do 65% of leaders still choose the performance of certainty over the substance of being right?
Because your brain doesn’t treat uncertainty as neutral information. It treats uncertainty as danger. Leadership writer Marlene Chism draws a distinction I find genuinely useful here. Uncertainty says “I don’t know.” Shame says “it’s wrong that I don’t know.” The moment shame enters the room, you stop operating from curiosity and start operating from protection. You delay decisions to avoid exposure. You shut down input before it can surface the gap you’re already afraid of.
This pattern isn’t just something I’ve read about. I’ve lived it. During the collapse of Arthur Andersen in the Enron scandal, I led a team in real time while every instinct told me to project total composure. I remember standing in front of a room knowing the honest answer was “I don’t fully know what happens next.” Instead, I reached for something more polished, because polished felt safer.
It wasn’t safer. It was just quieter. And everyone else fills that quiet with their own assumptions, same as they always do.
The horse herd never performs certainty it doesn’t have
I watch this same dynamic play out constantly in the work I do with horses, because a horse herd cannot fake confidence. It has navigated uncertainty for millions of years without one animal issuing instructions from the front. Instead, it relies on shared leadership and constant, collective awareness. Attention rotates to whichever horse is best placed to read what the moment actually demands.
Try performing certainty you don’t feel in front of a horse. It won’t work. The herd reads your body, not your job title, and it responds to what’s actually true rather than what you’re projecting. Leadership teams work exactly the same way. They’re just better at hiding it, for a while.
This is a teamship problem, not a personality problem
Here’s the reframe I want to leave you with, because I don’t think this is fundamentally about courage or communication skills. I think it’s about teamship.
When you perform certainty you don’t have, you’re not just managing your own reputation. You’re training your entire leadership team on what’s allowed in the room. If you can’t say “I’m not sure,” nobody beneath you will say it either. Individuals quietly absorb every unresolved question in the business instead of surfacing and sharing it. That’s cooperation, not co-ownership — everyone nods in the meeting, and nothing moves between meetings.
Teamwork is something people do. Teamship is something a group becomes, and a leadership team cannot become anything together while only its leader has permission to look uncertain.
Where to start this week
Find one live decision right now where you genuinely don’t have the full picture, and say so out loud, before you’ve resolved it. Not as a confession — as an invitation. “Here’s what we don’t know yet. Let’s think this through together.”
Then watch what happens to the room.
This week’s episode of Impactful Teamwork goes deeper into both pieces of research. It covers the 74% of transformation programmes that fail because of uncertainty-driven resistance, plus what the data reveals about the 35% of leaders who resist certainty theatre altogether. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or catch it on the website.
So here’s the question worth sitting with before you listen. The next time someone on your leadership team says “I don’t know” — does the room go quiet in a bad way, or does it lean in?
Show Notes
03:14 Visibility Is Credibility
07:03 Imperfect Presence Builds Trust
10:57 The Decisiveness Crisis
13:46 Shame And Certainty Theater
16:56 Where Research Meets Reality
19:02 Teamship And The Horse Herd
20:39 Make Uncertainty Safe
21:58 Weekly Challenge And Close
23:51 Final Takeaways And Next Steps
