Know What's Possible
Learn enough of the work to set credible expectations and solve real problems.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 98%
Know What's Possible is a minimum-literacy standard for credible leadership. The ideal leader has performed the jobs being overseen, but that is rarely possible across every function. The alternative is deliberate homework: read the relevant documentation, observe workflows, interview skilled practitioners, and understand core capabilities, constraints, and trade-offs. The leader does not need to execute every technical task; the goal is to know enough to set feasible expectations, recognize real blockers, and hold an intelligent conversation. This replaces “smoke and mirrors” leadership—motivation and direction without operational understanding—with tangible problem solving. The output is better scoping, more credible delegation, and increased trust from specialists who see that their manager understands the reality of the work.
Origin
Kip Bodner and Alex Lieberman developed this leadership rule on Marketing Against The Grain while contrasting informed managers with smoke-and-mirrors leaders.
Core principles
- 01Leaders need not perform every job they oversee.
- 02Leaders must understand what the work can and cannot achieve.
- 03Relevant homework is more credible than motivational theater.
- 04Technical literacy enables intelligent expectations and conversations.
How to run it
- 1
Map the work
List the specialist functions, systems, and consequential decisions within your scope.
Pro tip Prioritize areas where your decisions can create expensive constraints.
Watch out Do not assume a job title tells you how the work actually operates.
- 2
Study primary sources
Read documentation, inspect workflows, and review representative outputs.
Pro tip Start with the materials practitioners themselves use.
Watch out Executive summaries may hide operational limits.
- 3
Interview practitioners
Ask skilled team members what is feasible, difficult, risky, and commonly misunderstood.
Pro tip Request examples of requests that sound easy but are technically expensive.
Watch out Do not turn the conversation into a test of the employee.
- 4
Test your understanding
Explain the capability and its constraints back to the team and invite correction.
Pro tip State explicitly where your knowledge ends.
Watch out Shallow vocabulary can create dangerous overconfidence.
- 5
Set credible expectations
Use the acquired understanding to scope goals, timelines, and trade-offs realistically.
Pro tip Ask what would need to change to make an apparently impossible outcome feasible.
Watch out Knowing what is possible does not mean demanding every possible thing.
- 6
Solve actual blockers
Apply managerial leverage to decisions, resources, coordination, or constraints the team cannot remove alone.
Pro tip Judge your contribution by whether the team's real work becomes easier or more effective.
Watch out Motivation cannot substitute for removing a concrete dependency.
In the wild
Kip asked a marketing operations team to accomplish something through the Facebook API. Although he could not implement the API work himself, he read the documentation to understand available capabilities. That allowed him to discuss the request intelligently rather than issue a technically uninformed demand.
→ The manager could set a credible expectation and engage the specialist team authentically.
A founder who has never led sales interviews ten respected sales leaders about forecasting, coaching, hiring, and pipeline reviews. The founder compares recurring patterns, tests the findings with the internal team, and uses them to define a realistic leadership scorecard.
→ The founder gains enough functional literacy to hire and support a strong sales leader without pretending to be one.
Common mistakes
Smoke-and-mirrors leadership
Speeches and broad direction cannot compensate for ignorance of the team's concrete problems and constraints.
Pretending to be the specialist
Knowing enough to lead does not make the manager more technically capable than the practitioner.
Learning once
Capabilities and constraints change, so old knowledge can become misleading if it is not refreshed.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for managers overseeing technical or specialist functions they have not personally performed.
Not ideal for
It does not justify micromanaging specialists or pretending shallow familiarity equals professional expertise.
From the transcript
“you need to have the self-awareness to understand that you need to do the homework to truly understand the jobs that you oversee.”
“One of your jobs as a leader is to know what is possible.”
“you don't know how to how you need to know how to do anything, but you need to know what could be done.”
From the episode
Framework Thinking for Success With Alex Lieberman
Alex Lieberman