Scroll through LinkedIn for long enough and you'll soon discover that leadership appears remarkably simple. Your feed quickly fills with provocative hot takes and leadership hacks, many presenting complex leadership challenges with a level of certainty that far exceeds the evidence, experience and nuance behind them.

Five ways to become a better leader. Three mistakes every CEO makes. Seven habits of high performers. Ten signs you've outgrown your organisation. Every problem has a list. Every situation has a simple answer. Every leader knows a secret hack.

Whilst the algorithms seem to reward certainty, leadership rarely does. After twenty five years leading teams across multiple sectors, I've become increasingly suspicious of anyone claiming to have definitive, and often binary, answers to inherently complex problems. Not because they're unintelligent, but because leadership in my experience rarely works like that.

Should leaders be visible? Usually.

Should they empower people? Absolutely.

Should they always trust their teams? Invariably yes, with rare exceptions.

Should they always put customers first? Almost always. Unless doing so compromises safety, breaks the law or creates a bigger problem somewhere else.

That's the uncomfortable reality of leadership. Most decisions involve competing or ambiguous priorities, incomplete information, imperfect options and are often time sensitive. The question isn’t whether there is a cost. It's which cost you're prepared to accept or trade off.

Good leadership is often less about finding the right answer and more about choosing the least worst one. Context changes everything. The right decision in one organisation can be completely wrong in another. The leadership style that inspires one team can frustrate the next. The process that improves performance today may create unnecessary bureaucracy tomorrow.

This is why simplistic leadership advice often feels satisfying to read but difficult to apply. It creates the illusion that every problem has a straightforward solution.

Experienced leaders know otherwise. They know leadership is full of contradictions. Be decisive, but not hasty. Empower people, but maintain accountability. Challenge poor performance, but safeguard psychological safety. Be authentic, but adapt your communication to your audience. Control costs, but continue investing. Deliver more, but don't compromise quality.

Leadership isn't about choosing one side of those statements,  it's about balancing both. Whilst also understanding that balance can change by the day or hour.

Unfortunately, none of that makes for particularly good clickbait. "Well... it depends" is unlikely to go viral. Yet those three words probably explain leadership better than most hot takes ever will.

The best leaders I've worked with weren't the ones with the quickest answers. They were the ones who asked the best questions, assessed and understood the trade-offs and remained agile whilst operating in ambiguity.

Leadership is far more than a collection of hacks. It's judgement, and judgement isn't built through algorithms or absolutes. It's built through experience, wins, losses, reflection and context.