You’re Paid to Have the Answers, But Where Do You Take the Questions?
Soraya Shaw MSc is the founder of BrainShaw®, one of the UK's first Applied Organisational Neuroscientists, keynote speaker, author, and co-host of Brainy Podcasts. She also created Authentic Beauty, Brains & Confidence and The Brainy Brains of Mindsville®, extending the BrainShaw® vision from boardrooms to future minds.
The meeting went well. You answered the questions, made the decision, and gave everyone a clear direction. People left reassured that somebody knew what came next. Then the door closes, and a rather different conversation begins. Did I miss something? Was that really the right decision? Am I seeing this clearly, or simply seeing what experience has taught me to expect?
It is one of the curious contradictions of senior leadership. As responsibility increases, so does ambiguity, yet the freedom to expose uncertainty can decrease. Your team wants confidence. Your board wants judgement. Clients and colleagues want reassurance.
So where do you take the thoughts that are not yet ready to be said out loud?
Your brain doesn't become more rational because you're senior
We often talk about senior decision-making as if it were principally a cognitive activity, gather the information, weigh the evidence, and make the judgement.
Applied Organisational Neuroscience gives us a more useful picture.
Thinking does not operate separately from emotion, memory, bodily state, or context. What we notice, how we interpret information, and how confident we feel about a decision are influenced by previous experience and by what the brain believes is happening around us.
This matters because senior leaders are often rewarded for appearing rational, composed, and certain. Emotion can be treated as something to suppress so that clearer thinking can take over.
But emotion is not the opposite of rational thought. It is part of the biological context in which rational thought takes place.
A challenge to your position may therefore register as more than new information. It may also affect status, confidence, or professional identity. Previous failure can make a familiar situation feel more threatening. Recent success can create confidence that is not necessarily supported by the current evidence.
That does not make leaders irrational. It makes them human.
The interesting question is not whether emotion is affecting a decision. It is how.
A leader may believe they are assessing a situation objectively while their brain is simultaneously drawing upon memory, emotion, context, and internal signals to construct what feels like the most convincing interpretation.
Recognising that can change the quality of critical thinking.
Instead of simply asking, “Is this argument right?” we can also ask, “Why am I reacting so strongly to it?” Am I dismissing this because the evidence is weak, or because accepting it would require me to reconsider something in which I am personally invested?
Those are not therapeutic questions. They are questions about decision quality.
Your status is affecting other brains too
There is another complication. A senior leader's status influences not only their own thinking but the thinking of everybody around them.
People continually make judgements about social safety. A colleague may spot a weakness in your argument but soften the challenge. Someone may have an alternative explanation but decide this is not the moment to raise it. A team member may spend more cognitive effort anticipating how their contribution will be received than examining the idea itself.
Nobody has to say, “Don't disagree with me.” Hierarchy can do some of the work.
From an Applied Organisational Neuroscience perspective, this matters because perceived social threat can influence attention, emotional regulation, and cognitive flexibility. If part of someone's mental capacity is being used to manage interpersonal risk, less may be available for curiosity, challenge, and exploratory thinking.
The result is a paradox, you can surround yourself with very intelligent people and still receive less of their intelligence than you realise.
This is why simply telling leaders to “invite challenge” is not enough.
People learn from what actually happens when somebody disagrees. Does the leader become curious or defensive? Does the atmosphere change? Is the person who disrupts consensus treated as useful or difficult?
Over time, brains learn the unwritten rules. A better question for leaders might therefore be, "What is my behaviour teaching the people around me about whether it is safe and worthwhile to disagree?"
Confidence is not the same as certainty
We have also created a rather unhelpful mythology around successful people, that once someone becomes sufficiently senior, doubt should somehow disappear.
It doesn't. Nor should it.
Doubt can make us revisit evidence and examine assumptions. The problem is not that capable leaders question themselves. It is having nowhere intelligent to examine the question.
Under pressure, the brain does not become more sophisticated because the job title has changed. Cognitive load, fatigue, uncertainty, and emotion influence what we notice and how flexibly we think. Experience, normally one of a senior leader's greatest assets, can also make familiar explanations easier to reach for than unfamiliar ones.
This is why I think the familiar phrase “loneliness of leadership” is slightly misleading. Senior leaders are often surrounded by people. What they may lack is cognitive freedom, somewhere they can test an unfinished thought, challenge their own assumptions, and reconsider a position before yesterday's certainty becomes tomorrow's organisational direction.
Good judgement rarely arrives fully formed. It develops through reflection, contradiction, and exposure to perspectives that disturb our first answer.
Protecting the quality of leadership thinking
All of this becomes more important as technology gives leaders access to unprecedented amounts of information and increasingly sophisticated answers.
More information does not automatically create better judgement. Fluency is not wisdom. Speed is not discernment.
The quality of the decision still depends upon the human brain interpreting what it receives, bringing knowledge, experience, emotional awareness, and critical thought to the evidence in front of it.
Senior leaders therefore do not always need another person telling them what to do. Sometimes they need conditions in which assumptions can be exposed, emotional responses recognised, alternative interpretations explored, and certainty tested before it becomes action.
When one person's judgement can affect hundreds or thousands of others, protecting the quality of that thinking is not an indulgence. It is an organisational asset.
Perhaps confidence needs redefining too. Not as always knowing the answer, but as being able to remain open while the answer is still emerging, to recognise what may be colouring our judgement, and to hear challenge without automatically experiencing it as threat.
Because when everyone comes to you with their questions, understanding what is shaping your own answers may be one of the most important leadership capabilities you develop.
Read more from Soraya Shaw
Soraya Shaw, Applied Organisational Neuroscientist
Soraya Shaw MSc is the founder of BrainShaw® and one of the UK's first Applied Organisational Neuroscientists. After more than twenty years leading international teams and global brands, she turned to neuroscience to better understand what enables people, organisations and society to flourish. Today, she explores how human capability is becoming the defining competitive advantage of the 21st century through her speaking, strategic thinking partnerships and BrainShaw® ecosystem, including Brainy Podcasts, Authentic Beauty, Brains & Confidence, and The Brainy Brains of Mindsville® children's book series. Her mission is to prepare human intelligence for the next century.
