Leadership is the art of pretending you know what you’re doing long enough to figure it out.
Rina learned that during her first major crisis. Her team’s product was late, funding was thin, and investors wanted a scapegoat. Every decision felt like a trapdoor.
She used to envy decisive leaders — the ones who made choices with military precision. But when real responsibility landed on her desk, she realized that every choice comes with casualties. Pick speed, and you sacrifice quality. Pick caution, and you sacrifice trust. Leadership is choosing who and what you’re willing to disappoint.
Her mentor once told her, “A leader’s job isn’t to be right. It’s to stay honest.”
That line haunted her. Because honesty often means uncertainty. It means saying, “I don’t know yet.” And most people don’t want to hear that from their boss. They want reassurance, clarity — certainty wrapped in confidence. But false certainty kills more teams than indecision ever will.
So Rina did the only thing that felt right: she stopped pretending. She told her team the truth — that they’d overpromised, that things were messy, that she didn’t have all the answers. The reaction shocked her. Instead of panic, there was relief.
People don’t need a flawless leader. They need a real one.
From then on, she treated every decision as a shared burden. She brought the team into the process — not for consensus, but for clarity. If the decision failed, it failed collectively. If it worked, the victory was shared.
Years later, when her product finally succeeded, she laughed at how small that success felt compared to the relief of surviving those early mistakes.
She understood something the young version of her never could:
Good leaders don’t make perfect decisions. They make honest ones — and take responsibility when honesty isn’t enough.
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