Culture Shifts When Leaders Stop Pretending

HR leaders are expected to have the answers. About the culture, about AI, about the business. Nobody says the expectation out loud, which is part of why it is so hard to put down.

Keeping it up has a quiet cost. A leader who never admits a gap teaches the team to hide theirs, which is the reverse of how psychological safety is built. The answer the leader needed was usually in the room the whole time.

On April 9, Jeffrey Fermin, hosting for AllVoices, put that problem to two people who have lived it. Susanna Hunter, VP of HR at Salesforce, supports a customer success organization of 10,000 people in 35 countries and was approaching ten years at the company. Rebecca Taylor, head of community and content at AllVoices, spent about ten years as an HR practitioner and nine more building an HR tech company she cofounded.

Jeffrey opened by asking the chat what people do at work when they do not have the answer. Taylor admitted to frantic searching before asking anyone for help, a habit she is working to unlearn. Hunter called herself a phone-a-friend person. One attendee wrote that she just says it.

Why does admitting you do not know make you a stronger leader?

Because the people closest to the work usually hold the answer, and a leader who is busy looking certain never asks them. Hunter learned that the hard way.

Hunter holds the HR business partner role for the executive who runs that customer success organization, and she leads a team of partners spread around the globe. Two years in a row, the executive gave her the same feedback. She was failing to bring her global team together. She came across as disconnected, she did not have the right information at the right time, and the executive was hearing different things from different people.

Hunter spent the year between those reviews trying to fix it alone, on the belief that setting the strategy and finding the solution was her job. The second review told her none of it had worked.

It was almost like I give up in some ways. I give up trying to be perfect and trying to have all the answers. I don’t know what to do here. - Susanna Hunter, VP of HR at Salesforce

What she did next is the part to copy. At an off-site with the whole global team, Hunter realized that the people around her had been regional partners for their entire careers. She told them she did not know how to fix the problem and that she felt she was failing. Then she asked four questions and stopped talking:

• What is driving you crazy?
• What am I getting wrong?
• What works for you?
• What has worked for you at other companies or with other leaders?

Hunter called what followed one of the most powerful conversations she has been part of, and she has made a practice of admitting what she does not know ever since. Taylor argued that the alternative is not confidence. It is self-deception.

You have to admit uncertainty because, otherwise, you’re just pretending that the things that you think you know are true. - Rebecca Taylor, head of community and content at AllVoices

Taylor tied that to how HR reports upward. For much of her career, the pressure was to describe the function through what was going well: people are happy, people are engaged. The friction stays whether anyone names it or not. Leadership teams, she said, increasingly ask for the real story, because the price of not knowing arrives later as turnover.

How do you make admitting uncertainty a habit?

Treat it as a muscle, and use it in ordinary meetings instead of saving it for an off-site. An attendee asked how to keep doing this once the team is no longer in one room. Hunter answered that the room was a forcing function, not a requirement. A regular team meeting works, and so does a video call.

The harder part is internal. Hunter named the voice that asks whether she is admitting it too often, and her answer is that the fear does not survive what happens next. Nothing bad follows. People answer, because people like talking about what they know.

It also creates a lot of safety for other people, whether it’s your manager, your peer, your employee, your business partner, to also say, oh, thank god. Can we all stop pretending? - Susanna Hunter

Her method is small. She goes to a subject matter expert, admits the topic is one she is supposed to understand, and asks for the explanation a fifth grader would get. The expert answers, then asks a question back about her field. Hunter’s point was that one exchange builds two things at once, a safer relationship and a shared habit of learning.

Research supports the instinct. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the term team psychological safety in the 1990s, counts asking for help among the learning behaviors that carry interpersonal risk, and ties teams that feel safe taking those risks to better performance.

Taylor used the moment to redraw what vulnerability means for a leader. The word had always sat badly with her, because people hear it as showing emotion in front of the team. Her version is narrower.

You say, hey, I don’t actually know this thing. We’re going to figure it out together. I need my team around me to do it. That’s braver than saying, I’m really sad about this thing, and I need people to be around me for it. - Rebecca Taylor

Employees respond to that kind of admission, Taylor added, because it carries a request they can act on. Hunter noted that the urge to fake an answer is strongest when the stakes are high, which is exactly when a call to someone who knows is worth the most.

How can HR lead with confidence when the pressure to know everything is real?

Write down what you do not know, then close the gaps in the open. Hunter’s example was a briefing on the business she supports, delivered to the company’s chief HR officer on a short timeline. Preparing for it exposed real gaps in her knowledge, and her confidence came from getting organized about them.

I basically wrote down, here are all the things that I feel iffy about or the things that I don’t know about at all or the things that are just mental tumbleweeds when I try to come up with the answer. - Susanna Hunter

Then she sorted the list by where each answer lived:

1. What a search engine or an AI tool could answer.
2. What required asking a person.
3. What already sat in a deck somewhere.

Every answer raised new questions, and the notes grew into a 50-page document. Hunter shared it with her team on the assumption that she was not the only one missing those pieces. Asked later what had been on the list, she said much of it belonged to other functions: recruiting in a specific country, which meant finding a recruiter there, and how the customer base had shifted over time. She also had her finance partners walk her through the profit and loss statement until she knew it cold.

Taylor had the same experience earlier in her career. As a recruiter hiring salespeople, she booked a weekly meeting with finance to learn how commissions were calculated, because strong candidates asked hard questions about pay.

It’s not my job to know the commission structure in and out like that. I don’t manage these people. I don’t calculate it. But it made me a much better recruiter, and I placed better salespeople. - Rebecca Taylor

First she had to drop a story she had long told about herself, that she was not a numbers person. An attendee put the lesson bluntly in the chat: talking to finance is the biggest career hack there is. Hunter added one caveat. What she learned for the briefing was out of date almost as soon as she presented it, and it still made her better at the job.

Does an HR leader need to be fluent in AI already?

No, and Taylor doubts that anyone is. She had just come back from the Transform conference, where the pressure on HR leaders to show AI fluency was hard to miss: what was built, what was automated, how well it went. Conference stages rarely show the pieces that went wrong along the way.

I don’t think anyone really is very fluent in it yet because it changes so fast and so frequently. So even if you’re the most skilled person in it, tomorrow, Claude can have a whole update that changes everything about how whatever thing that you built works. - Rebecca Taylor

Claiming fluency, she argued, closes a leader off from learning. What lands better is what Taylor calls learning out loud: showing that you are working the tools into your stack and saying plainly what you are still figuring out. Her favorite session at Transform was the one where the people on stage admitted they were not experts.

Hunter came at the same pressure from another direction. Her advice was to stop treating AI as a rival.

Lean on it and don’t feel like you have to compete with it because you have a wonderful human brain that does wonderful human brain things, and that is okay and that is a gift. - Susanna Hunter

When an attendee asked how the panel was preparing for AI agents, Taylor answered with the work she knows best. Much of an investigation is documentation, and an agent can assemble scattered emails and notes into a summary and pause for a person to review it. The conversation with the employee still needs a human, a point AllVoices has explored in a session on where human judgment still matters in employee relations.

The agent isn’t taking over the role. It takes over a lot of the work so that me being in the work, my brain is more present in the actual conversation. - Rebecca Taylor

What changes when a leader shifts from authority to curiosity?

The leader talks less, and the team’s own fixes go in. After the off-site, Hunter implemented what she had heard, and she was careful to say that none of the ideas were hers.

Listening had a cost. Hunter described an initial sting at the thought that she had let everyone down. It gave way to relief, because the fixes were simple and would have been available a year or two earlier if she had asked.

The tone of the channel mattered as much as the plumbing. Hunter told the team what she wanted to see there.

We don’t just want super polished work updates. We want the raw stuff. We want the, I don’t know how to solve this. Just throw it all in there and keep it going. - Susanna Hunter

The last change was the one only she could make.

I stopped talking as much, and I stopped posting as much, and I really just encouraged the group to get that going too. And the shift was immediate. - Susanna Hunter

The executive who had given the hard feedback noticed. Hunter said the next round was better, that she felt more informed, and that the team felt connected in a way it had not before.

How do you hear the truth when employees will not say it to a leader’s face?

Model it from the top, then build a channel that does not depend on anyone’s courage. Taylor started with the modeling. Hunter’s team opened up because the person with the title went first.

You can’t expect it from other people if you’re not willing to do it yourself. - Rebecca Taylor

Modeling has limits. Not every leader is comfortable admitting a gap, and many employees are not comfortable giving direct feedback to a manager, let alone to someone above that manager. Taylor’s answer is infrastructure: standing channels for employee feedback, so that themes surface without anyone having to raise them in a meeting. Her example of a theme worth catching was a team where nobody could say what the goals were.

A channel like that has to separate signal from noise. A complaint about the color of the uniform shirts can be filed away. A note that a colleague made a strange comment, sent only so that someone knows, is a signal. Taylor’s advice for the second kind is to ask a teammate what to do with it.

During the session, Taylor noted that AllVoices runs this way internally. After every all-hands meeting, employees get a link to submit questions and feedback, anonymously if they choose. Leadership and HR follow up one to one, and a theme that keeps appearing goes on the agenda for the next all-hands. An attendee recommended team retrospectives for the same purpose.

What to say the next time you do not have the answer

Say so, name who might know, and ask. That is the whole method, and Hunter’s account suggests it gets easier each time. She wishes she had started sooner.

I wish that I could go back to myself earlier in my career and say, you are allowed to not know now. You’re allowed to not know in five years, in ten years, in twenty years. - Susanna Hunter

The practical version is short. Before a high-stakes meeting, write down what you are unsure of and sort it by who can answer. Ask your team what you are getting wrong, then stop talking. Put the conversation in one place everyone can see. Learn the numbers from the people who own them.

The last piece is the one a leader cannot do alone. Some of what you most need to hear will not be said in a meeting, however safe you make it. AllVoices builds anonymous reporting for employees to cover that gap, so a concern someone is unwilling to raise aloud still reaches the people who can act on it.

Nobody on Hunter’s team was waiting for a leader with every answer. They were waiting to be asked.

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