One of the best ways to manage yourself in this situation is to get people focused on the desired outcome. When people are asking, “What should we do next?” or customers or media are asking, “What is your specific plan to solve this supply chain/architecture/product issue?” (and you have no idea what they are even talking about), you can say “Help

The path to success is not to make sure you know everything. Sure, you need accurate, deep knowledge about the key factors that drive your business. But you will never get to the point where you know the answer to every question. The fear of not knowing every detail about everything is one of the big hazards that gets you stuck, as we discussed in

Remember, your job is to see that the work gets done, not to do all the work yourself. You are a human; you are supposed to be bad at some things. Don’t try to cover these up or just accept the fact that you are failing at them. You are the boss. It is up to you to change and build the organization that will thrive and deliver with you as the

The more clear you can be about your true desired outcome, the more clear you can be in the moment about whether or not you are wasting your time. You can ask, “Is my role building capital to achieve my desired outcome or degrading it?” It lets you make judgments at different points to see if what you are doing in the moment is helpful, neutral, or

If you talk about how you solve problems at a lower level in the organization, that won’t get you very far in your executive interview. Instead you need to be talking about how you will lead the people who solve those kinds of problems. Demonstrating that you will work at the right level in the new job is critical.

Deal with what is overwhelming privately. Don’t cancel meetings at the last minute; don’t act rushed and impatient. Don’t get upset or defensive when people do things that throw you off course. Just say, “Let me take that input and get back to you.” Then go off privately and scream, get frustrated, rework or not. Go back calm and in control.

In fact, being cautious about what you are doing is guaranteed to make it worse. I have thought about this every time I was in a situation where I was not as comfortable or as confident as I would have liked to be about my role, my performance, my argument, or my task, and I can tell you, acting confident anyway makes a huge difference. Just going

His message: Don’t ever back off, even when you are not confident. It never helps to second-guess yourself and approach a performance apologetically or tentatively in case it might not work out. Backing off never makes your performance better.

There’s a hard reality we all need to deal with in our careers: even if you do everything right, you can still get stuck. Why some get their breakthrough comes down do two things: imagination and fearlessness. The combination of these two things is what allows those who make it to get beyond what every human faces from time to time—lack of