# #181 | I Don't Have Answers (and My Team Needs Them Anyway) Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/leman-tech-leadership-podcast-7045357/181-i-don-t-have-answers-and-my-team-needs-them-anyway Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/leman-tech-leadership-podcast-7045357/181-i-don-t-have-answers-and-my-team-needs-them-anyway.md Podcast: [Leman Tech Leadership Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/leman-tech-leadership-podcast-7045357) Published: 2026-07-28T03:30:02+00:00 Episode link: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/181-i-don-t-have-answers-and-my-team-needs-them-anyway--73043336 Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/73043336/181_i_don_t_have_answers_and_my_team_needs_them_anyway.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/leman-tech-leadership-podcast-7045357/episodes/181-i-don-t-have-answers-and-my-team-needs-them-anyway Duration seconds: 1005 ## Resource ▶︎ #181 | I Don't Have Answers (and My Team Needs Them Anyway) In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska tackles a subject listeners have been asking her about for years: what to actually say and do when your team needs answers, and you don't have them. Reorganizations, AI-driven restructuring, rolling layoffs, hiring freezes that appear and disappear without warning (change has become constant, not a rare crisis). Alex names the two instinctive but costly patterns leaders fall into under this pressure: manufactured certainty ("everything's fine"), which quietly destroys trust the moment reality catches up, and silence, which teams read as something being hidden. Both come from the same well-meaning impulse: protecting the team from discomfort. Her reframe is the heart of the episode: that was never the job. The job is helping people hold real information, including the information you don't have yet. Alex applies the Wheel of Conflict in a new way here, splitting uncertainty itself into a structural layer (the actual, sometimes-unknowable facts) and a relational layer (trust, anxiety, whether people feel like a priority) and shows why leaders who try to resolve the second with facts they don't have end up either overpromising or going quiet. The episode closes with a simple three-part script listeners can use starting this week, plus a clear challenge: name the one thing you've been avoiding telling your team plainly, and say it, honestly, this week. Mentioned in the episode: "From Code to People: The CQ Leadership Method That Transforms Technical Experts into Leaders Teams Actually Want to Work For": https://fromcodetopeople.lemanskills.com/ ✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎ LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanska TikTok: @aleksandra_lemanska X: @lemansk… ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/leman-tech-leadership-podcast-7045357/episodes/181-i-don-t-have-answers-and-my-team-needs-them-anyway/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/leman-tech-leadership-podcast-7045357/181-i-don-t-have-answers-and-my-team-needs-them-anyway.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.