As a different perspective on fake it till you make it, I’ve thought this has been about feelings, not knowledge. It’s for when you have self doubt or imposter syndrome. Not about pretending you have more knowledge than you do but a way to get past the demons in your own head.

I honestly can’t think of any I haven’t been able to take value from. It’s like a Swiss Army knife of tools and the trick is not to pick one like a hammer to use in every case. So I mostly disagree with a dogmatic approach when using any leadership aphorisms.

Thank you @Aina Alive for sharing with us your challenges. I'll share one of my own which is around in-person meetings. We were doing an on-site meeting last week on Wed/Thu/Fri and I was quite anxious about it. While I've learned to love the social interactions and come across as fairly extroverted, that is learned behavior and takes a LOT of energy for me to do. Three days in all day meetings and then going out after for supper and drinks seemed incredibly daunting to me. Part of it is this feeling I have to be "on" all the time. Really thinking of what others are saying and contributing to the meeting and I was running one of the days and just always in my head. Which I likely should learn to do less but so far I'm not very capable. But what I have learned is that my anxiety ahead of time turns into actually really enjoying it too. It still takes all the energy I have and by the end of day Friday I was exhausted and had to spend the weekend alone to recuperate but even with all that, the chance for a deeper connection with my peers and to learn more about how they think and what they value, including things outside of work, is amazing and worth the effort. but not for more than 3 days!!

this is near and dear to my heart. there is a framework given in the book Crucial Conversations and I believe if you learn this framework well, it doesn't just help you in work situations but in everything in life. I was lucky to have a company that taught this course yearly and brought in coaches to teach me how to do this and it has been the most impactful thing on my marriage and my growth. The nice thing is that its a framework for dealing with when there are opposing opinions, high stakes, and strong emotions which covers just about any aspect of difficult discussions. Some overview can be found https://www.news.aakashg.com/p/crucial-conversations-for-pms-and but I would suggest getting the book and reading it over a dozen times or so!

I agree with @Nauman Mithani that first step is to communicate with stakeholders and the team to regroup and plan. But ideally you already were doing this as the deadline neared and the chance of missing it became obvious. Options are to rescope with perhaps a phased delivery, move the deadline, add more people, or work longer hours. Roughly in that order of desired option with adding people and extra hours last since they are often the least effective. And last stage when it’s delivered, sit down as a team and do a retrospective. Why did we miss the deadline? How early did we know and how could we have learned more quickly? And as a manager it’s not about blame but may be a point for accountability especially if the reasons come from negligence of particular team members or is a recurring pattern.

While not actually a business practice, the core to me is communication. It’s so fundamental. A bad design or plan at the start will usually be found and fixed with good communication. The best laid plan or design will almost always fall apart with poor communication. So I like to focus on some basics like meeting structure and agile process as the key points where the team is communicating and get those right. And actually even more basic than communication is trust since without it, you can’t have open and unfiltered communication. Get trust and communication right and most of the rest start to get much easier!