By Dominick Miserandino, CEO, RTM Nexus
I was talking recently with Kathy Donovan Wagner on The Richard Retailer, and she asked me a question I get constantly: what makes someone a good leader? My answer surprised her a little, because it’s the opposite of what most people expect. We tend to think leadership means knowing everything, having the answer, being the person in the room with the confidence to say “here’s what we do.” I’ve found the exact opposite is true. The best leaders I’ve met, and I’ve now interviewed several hundred of them, share one trait: they’re comfortable knowing nothing. They just know who to ask.
The rolodex is the skill
I joke that one of my only real skills is calling the right expert when I don’t know something. That’s not false modesty, it’s genuinely how I’ve built almost everything I’ve worked on. When I ran AdoramaPix, we identified a customer segment that was Orthodox Jewish, and I had no idea how to reach them properly. So I sat down with the team and said, teach me. What are the big holidays? What matters here? It turned out nobody was bidding on ad space around one of the major holidays, which was a clear opportunity sitting in plain sight. I only found it because I was willing to say I don’t know this, please explain it to me.
The same thing happened years earlier when my niece Kimmy called to tell me about this new thing called Facebook. I remember thinking, what in the hell are you talking about, this makes no sense. I made her explain it to me like I was five. That instinct, to ask rather than pretend, is the same one that’s served me through every shift since: social media, mobile, now AI.
Confidence isn’t the same as competence
I’ve watched plenty of leaders fake knowing everything, and it never works. It just delays the moment when the gap between what they claim to know and what they actually know becomes obvious, usually at the worst possible time. The leaders who last are the ones who double down on not knowing instead of covering for it. Saying “I don’t understand this, walk me through it” isn’t weakness. It’s the fastest path to actually fixing the problem.
This shows up constantly with retailers navigating AI or tariffs right now. The common thread among people struggling isn’t that the technology or the policy is too complex, it’s that they never ask the basic question out loud. I’ll speak at a conference, someone will watch a vendor demo, and afterward they’ll come find me and ask, “what did he just say?” instead of just asking the vendor directly. Starting from that basic, unglamorous question, how do I actually use this, is where progress starts. Not from pretending you already know.
Openness over ego
What I’ve noticed, watching people succeed versus stall, is that the differentiator is almost never intelligence or resources. It’s willingness to ask. During COVID I started mentoring retailers almost compulsively, in English, Spanish, Italian, French, whatever anyone needed, because I noticed something specific: the people who reached out and asked for help grew their businesses faster, just by virtue of having asked. Not because I had magic answers, but because the willingness to say “I don’t know, help me” is itself the skill that compounds over time.
The people who don’t ask aren’t unintelligent. They’re comfortable. Not knowing feels uncomfortable, so a lot of people stay stuck rather than sit in that discomfort long enough to ask a question that might make them look uninformed. But that discomfort is exactly where growth happens. The retailers, executives, and leaders who are willing to feel a little exposed by asking are consistently the ones who move forward.
What this means in practice
If you’re leading a team, a company, or even just yourself through the current moment, the practical version of this is simple: build a habit of asking rather than performing certainty. Call the five people who know more than you about the thing you’re stuck on. Sit with your own customers and just listen, rather than assuming you already understand what they want. Let your team see you ask questions instead of only issuing answers.
None of this is about humility for its own sake. It’s a genuinely more effective way to lead, because it gets you real information faster than pretending ever will. The best leaders I know aren’t the ones with all the answers. They’re the ones with the best questions, and the confidence to ask them out loud.
This piece grew out of a conversation on The Richard Retailer with Kathy Donovan Wagner, available here.