Saying I Do Not Know Was the Most Credibility-Building Thing I Did at Work

I worked in data analytics at a technology firm in Thiruvananthapuram and by my mid-twenties had developed, in the way of analytical people in professional environments, a very efficient system for producing an impression of certainty that was calibrated above my actual certainty level in most situations. I did not lie outright.

I used hedging language that implied more confidence than I had, asked questions that positioned me as already partially knowing the answer, and in meetings responded to questions in ways that were adjacent to the truth rather than directly against it when I did not know the answer well.

This is a remarkably common professional behaviour and I had refined it to an art over three years. The moment it stopped was accidental and instructive. At 26, in a meeting with a senior client who asked me a specific technical question about a modelling approach, I was about to deploy the usual hedge when something - tiredness, possibly, or a moment of genuine impatience with my own performance - produced a direct sentence instead: I am not certain about that and I would rather get you an accurate answer than give you a confident one I have to correct.

The client, a technically sophisticated person, said simply: that is very helpful, thank you. My manager, watching from across the table, caught my eye in a way I could not quite read in the moment.

After the meeting she said to me that it was the most credible thing she had seen me do in six months. I had expected the acknowledgment of ignorance to cost me something in how I was perceived. It produced the opposite.

What I understood from that moment, and from the year of more deliberate honesty about uncertainty that followed, was that the performance of confidence was costing me something I had not been tracking: the trust of people who could sense the performance even if they could not name it.

Genuine confidence, I learned, includes the confidence to not know something. It is the pretending to know that signals insecurity.