On the Power of “I Don’t Know.”

Welcome to Millennial Manager Mondays! In the interest of resurrecting this newsletter, I’m going to commit to posting on the first Monday of the month. Have a topic you’d like to hear about? Drop it in the comments below.

Red Flags

I have a lot of mental red flags I scan for with organizations, both as an employee and as a consumer. “We’re all a family here!”, 2 a.m. emails being the norm, and “the customer is always right” are all among them. Today, I want to talk about “I don’t know” and how banning it sets both your team and your customer up for failure.

I once worked at a shall-not-be-named company with two policies that still make me bristle. The first: agents could never end a call with a customer, no matter what (more on this in another issue!). The second: agents were not allowed to say “I don’t know” to a customer.

I’m sure the philosophy behind this policy was to encourage the team to be resourceful and creative in finding solutions, but the actual result was that agents were so afraid to be reprimanded for saying “I don’t know” that they either talked in circles until the customer ended the interaction or they straight up told the customer incorrect information. In the short term, this reflected positively on the team, as high-level data showed a large percentage of resolutions. But if you dug into that data, you’d see that these customers often wrote in multiple times with the same question and communicated directly that they had lost trust in the brand.

“I Don’t Know” in Practice

Let’s look at an example of an interaction where this comes into play. Imagine you’re calling tech support. You’re a smart consumer: you’ve read the FAQs, googled solutions, and maybe even watched a YouTube video or two. You get on the phone with an agent, and lo and behold, this issue is one they’ve never seen either! You’ll likely get one of three responses as the next step:

1. “I don’t know, I’ll call you back.”

2. A litany of technical phrases and blame-placing that does not solve your problem.

3. “I don’t know, but let me escalate this to my internal technical partners, and I’ll follow up with you with an update by the end of the day tomorrow.”

Number three is obviously the ideal response, but let’s break down why that is.

Response number one acknowledges that your problem is a difficult one (even the agent doesn’t know!) and humanizes the support but doesn’t actually provide any solution or set an expectation for the next steps. This leaves the customer in limbo, unsure of when or how their issue will be addressed.

Response number two makes you, as a consumer, feel like an idiot, does not resolve your problem, and likely decreases your perception of the brand (you’re probably going straight to the detractor range when you get that NPS survey, aren’t you?).

Response number three acknowledges the challenge, humanizes the support team member, and provides clear expectations for the next steps: what is going to happen and how long it is going to take.

While “I don’t know” is an important phrase, it’s not the crux of the interaction. The real power is in the follow-up: “Here’s what I’m going to do next.” This is when your team gets to flex their creativity, problem-solving, and empathy.

Cultivating Curiosity + Vulnerability

Here’s the thing: “I don’t know” is scary! It’s scary when you’re called on in chemistry class to complete the equation (just me?). It’s scary when you’re asked to make a decision. It’s scary when someone who looks up to you asks a tough question. Our job as leaders is to create a space where curiosity and vulnerability are rewarded, and the best way to do this is by modeling these behaviors ourselves.

There’s constant pressure to always have an answer, fill the silence, and project confidence 100% of the time. But the real power lies in not knowing, in listening, and in asking for help. The best leaders are human, and humans are messy and imperfect.