One of the things I struggle with most junior and senior colleagues is their inability to work with the unknown. It seems that many people expect that everything has to be laid out and there are no unknowns. However, as people progress in their careers they amass experiences, recognize patterns in the world, and become domain experts. Great colleagues who reach this stage are able to work with the unknown.
To progress your career and be a leader, be comfortable with the unknown. Leaders I respect and enjoy working with can take a single sentence or question, and can expand on it considerably. Their ability to fill in the gaps in what was said and not said during a conversation, meeting or email chain is one of the traits that makes them so great at their jobs. They’re able to do this by leveraging a huge pool of experiences (data), that they’ve boiled into thoughts (information), that get abstracted to insights (knowledge), to allow them to work with the unknown (wisdom) much more accurately.
Ahmad Sadeddin 