Leadership and Ambiguity might strike you as on odd theme for a coaching conference. Popular notions of leadership emphasise decisiveness, boldness, a willingness to act - ambiguity sounds such a wussy word, doesn't it - lacking clarity, definition - it's scarcely an aspirational word.

And yet, the coaches in this room have many decades of business leadership behind us (and ahead of us, too, I hope), so we know that managing, sometimes even creating, ambiguity is an important leadership tool.

We know that we live in an uncertain world, and an increasingly litigious world, all of which makes it increasingly difficult for business leaders to be as transparent and straightforward as they would perhaps like to be.

For a CEO with a number of ambitious direct reports, it's important to maintain a certain amount of creative tension between them, but it does make giving them fearless and frank advice about their career prospects problematic.

And that's just one example of the ambiguities that high-potential executives witness. CEOs deal with so many stake-holder groups - all of them needing to be handled deftly, and as their leadership team watch their CEO spinning away, inevitably a certain amount of cynicism starts to creep in.

Very often the people we coach are line managers, and the decisions they make are comparatively straightforward; so, to them, black and white, right and wrong, are yes/no issues.

As coaches, we are frequently consulted as our clients struggle to interpret the ambiguity in their organisation to their direct reports. The language of much that passes for corporate communication is ambiguous, usually by design, and is often not reflected in corporate behaviours. Emerging leaders value the respect of their direct reports, and are frequently embarrassed by the perceived need to spin a corporate message which is at odds with their direct experience.

Indeed, the very skills that caused them to be identified as emerging leaders are usually characterised by technical excellence - that is clear, precise, unambiguous outputs. They've spent their entire business lives so far trying to be totally accurate - devoid of ambiguity, but very often it is their perceived inability to deal with ambiguity that can lead to career stumbles in the next stage of their development.

Problems arise when idealistic talented people pass judgement on their colleagues on the leadership team, and start articulating questions like "Why can't I be a leader without compromising my values", and "How come people who play politics get rewarded, and people who don't, get ignored". These people tend to be characterised by the belief that somehow virtue is its own reward - that if they work hard, and achieve great results, that's all that should be expected of them, and reward and recognition should be automatic.

Now it would be easy to dismiss these idealists as naïve, but in many ways, these people are innate leaders, and exactly the sort of people who really add value to the firm, so it's important they stay motivated and committed.