The other day I went for a walk with a friend who also happened to have spent a good deal of her professional life walking in the shoes of the leader. We were talking about an organization she'd headed up for more than 12 years, a multi-faceted one that among its many complexities had a workforce of over one thousand people, spread across the far reaches of the country. She was describing the challenges of guiding all those people, working to ensure not only that they functioned as a team, but that their work delivered upon their collective mission and with excellence. For a long time, it was a struggle. Until one day change came - not to the organization, but to her understanding as a leader.

"I found that it was better when I didn't know everything," she said. It's one of the wisest and most essential epiphanies a leader can have. It's also the very insight most fight. Knowing why they do is important. More important? Realizing that the luxury of having the time to gradually accept this truth is no more.

Let's be clear: Leadership in any space, and in any time is hard. In an uncertain landscape it's exponentially harder. The data proves this out. Forgetting the added uncertainty of a pandemic for a moment, consider a pre-pandemic study by advisory firm PwC of nearly 2,000 leaders across sectors and across the globe. The study revealed that 4 out of 5 leaders considered the road before them in 2017, and their ability to guide their teams down that road, to be, in a word: "unpredictable." The response wasn't glib or unspecific. On virtually every front - from the ability to recruit talent, to the knowledge of how to handle rapid changes in technological, all the way down to their capacity to predict not just the bottom line, but indeed where revenues would even come from, leaders repeated the word. Unpredictable. It was a stunning admission. And that was before COVID came to town.

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