There’s a personality trait I’ve seen with high-quality leaders, a soft skill if you will. I’m not really sure what it is called, but I heard a person one time refer to it as “bandwidth”. But that’s not quite right. Let me try and explain it.

As a senior business leader, you might have dozens if not hundreds of projects and lines of effort underneath you, and you may not be a subject matter expert in all of them. So then what happens when a project manager and a technical lead come to you with a problem, or a status report? Are you able to listen to everything they say, ask some good, probing follow-up questions, and then synthesize the information in your head to actually understand what is going on?

I’ve been a lead over many technical projects, including software development and IT infrastructure. Something newer, that I’m not an expert in, is the inclusion of AI and Machine Learning into these projects. So at a high level its like any other project, and includes IT infrastructure buildout and software product development, but it also now includes additional tasks of training models. I am not an expert in training models, in fact I’m not even a novice at it. But I have had status conversations with the experts, and I am at least able to know enough to understand how this work integrates with the rest of the project, and some of the unique risks and tasks that come with ML (such as access to quality training data, which is now an external dependency and maybe even a security issue, if the training data includes PII for example).

Good business leaders must trust their instincts and be able to make high quality, high velocity decisions. And in order to make these decisions, you need to be able to quickly learn new things, ask the right questions, quickly absorb and synthesize the information, and most of all not be afraid to say you don’t know and ask for more details or explanations.