Leadership Is Less About Having Answers and More About Creating Clarity
By Laarni Buhay-Canoy
Over the course of my career, I’ve worn a lot of different hats.
I’ve helped build teams inside startups racing toward growth targets and scaled recruiting functions through periods of hypergrowth. My experience also includes leading teams through uncertainty, layoffs, acquisitions, and organizational change. Today, I work on the agency side, partnering with clients as they build their teams while serving in board leadership roles that require a different lens entirely.
Different environments, different challenges.
Yet the leadership lessons that have stayed with me are surprisingly consistent.
Leadership Is Less About Having Answers and More About Creating Clarity
In fast-growing organizations, uncertainty is part of the job description.
Markets shift. Priorities change. Headcount plans evolve. Sometimes the destination is clear, but the path to get there isn’t.
Early in my career, I thought strong leaders were the people with all the answers. What I’ve learned instead is that great leaders create clarity, even when the answers aren’t fully known.
People can navigate change. They can handle ambiguity. What they struggle with is confusion.
Leadership often comes down to communicating what you know, what you don’t know, and what happens next.
Talent Is a Competitive Advantage, But So Is Trust
Recruiting has given me a unique vantage point into organizations.
Candidates evaluate companies just as much as companies evaluate candidates. They notice how leaders show up. They pay attention to transparency, communication, and follow-through.
The strongest organizations I’ve worked with aren’t always the ones with the biggest budgets or the most recognizable brands.
They’re the ones where trust exists.
- Trust between leaders and employees.
- Trust between managers and their teams.
- Trust that commitments will be honored.
Skills can be developed. Processes can be improved. Trust, once damaged, is much harder to rebuild.
This dynamic is playing out across the hiring market right now, as both sides recalibrate what trust actually looks like in a process that often asks for it before it’s earned, a shift the hiring system’s trust problem gets into in more depth.
Scaling a Team Requires You to Continuously Let Go
One of the biggest leadership lessons from scaling organizations is learning that what got you here won’t always get you there.
The systems that worked for 20 employees often break at 200.
The communication style that worked with a small team may not work across multiple departments.
The leadership behaviors that helped you succeed as an individual contributor may need to evolve when you’re responsible for helping others succeed.
I’ve seen organizations struggle because they continued operating as if they were still a small company.
Growth requires letting go of old assumptions and being willing to build new muscles. Hiring is usually the first place this shows up, since the operating model built for a 20-person company rarely holds up once headcount hits the hundreds.
Great Teams Are Built Through Consistency, Not Heroics
We often celebrate the big wins.
- The critical hire.
- The successful product launch.
- The funding round.
- The major client acquisition.
Those moments matter, but I’ve found that strong cultures are built in much smaller ways.
- How leaders communicate during difficult times.
- How feedback is delivered.
- How decisions are explained.
- How people are treated when things don’t go according to plan.
Leadership isn’t one defining moment. It’s a series of daily choices that signal what the organization truly values.
People Remember How You Made Them Feel
This lesson has followed me from corporate leadership to agency recruiting to board service.
Years later, people may not remember every project, meeting, or quarterly goal.
- They remember whether they felt supported.
- They remember whether they felt seen.
- They remember whether someone believed in them before they fully believed in themselves.
Many of the opportunities I’ve had throughout my career came from relationships built years earlier. Not because everything went perfectly, but because there was mutual respect, trust, and genuine connection.
Leadership is ultimately a people business. That same dynamic tends to show up long after the interview process ends, in whether people actually choose to stay.
The Best Leaders Continue Learning
One thing I’ve learned from working across different industries, organizations, and stages of growth is that leadership isn’t a destination.
There is no point where you’ve figured it all out.
Every new role, team, challenge, and season teaches you something new about people and about yourself.
The leaders I admire most remain curious. They ask questions, seek feedback, and adapt.
They understand that growth isn’t just something we expect from our teams. It’s something we should expect from ourselves.
Final Thought
If there’s one leadership lesson that stands above the rest, it’s this:
Building teams is never just about filling roles or achieving business goals.
It’s about creating environments where people can do meaningful work, grow beyond what they thought possible, and contribute to something larger than themselves.
The organizations, teams, and leaders who understand this tend to create not only stronger businesses, but stronger people.
And in my experience, that’s what leadership is really about.
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