The managers I’ve rated most highly over the years all shared one habit: when they didn’t know something, they just said so. No bluffing, no vague hand-waving. “I don’t know — let’s find out.”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I’ve been leading projects myself, and the temptation to bluff is real. When someone asks you a question in a meeting and five people are waiting on the answer, “I don’t know” feels like failure. It isn’t. Most of the time it’s the strongest thing you can say.
Bluffing gets found out#
Software moves too fast for anyone to hold it all in their head, and engineers can smell a bluff from across the room. The first time your team catches you pretending to know something, they quietly downgrade everything else you say. Whereas a manager who admits a gap and then goes and closes it earns the opposite: people trust their actual answers, because they know a real answer when they hear one.
It’s a starting point, not an answer#
The trick is what comes after. “I don’t know” followed by nothing is just shrugging. What good managers do next is ask better questions — “how does this compare to what we’re using now?”, “what breaks if we’re wrong about this?” — and then point those questions at the right people. Every team has someone who practically lives in the database, someone who knows all the ugly frontend edge cases. You don’t need to know everything; you need to know who does, and to actually ask them.
Decisions come out better#
Decisions in software tend to stick around, so it’s worth being honest about which parts you’re sure of and which parts you’re guessing. Admitting the gaps up front means you gather what’s missing before deciding instead of after, and it gives people who disagree with you room to say so — which is exactly when you most need to hear it. Once you’ve decided, explain the why. And if it turns out you were wrong, say that too. Nothing kills a team’s honesty faster than a manager who can’t admit a bad call.
None of this is complicated. Ask questions, listen to the people who know more than you (there are always people who know more than you), and be upfront when you’re guessing. “I don’t know, but let’s find out” has done more for my credibility than any answer I’ve ever bluffed my way through.