Nobody Has Told You
The Truth In A While.
Your information gets worse as you get more senior, and the research says you also get worse at noticing that it has.
Here is something I have noticed about my own career, and I suspect it is true of yours.
The higher I have gone, the better my ideas have apparently become.
Meetings where I float something half-formed now produce agreement much faster than they used to. Fewer people tell me an approach will not work. When I ask if anyone has concerns, the room is quieter than it was ten years ago.
There are two possible explanations. Either I have become dramatically wiser, or the feedback has changed.
It is not the first one.
Two things happen at the same time
Most leaders understand the first half of this. As you get more senior, people soften what they tell you. A concern becomes a question. A disagreement becomes a request for clarification. Something that would have been said flatly to a peer arrives pre-cushioned, or does not arrive at all.
That part is well understood, even if it is rarely acted on.
What almost nobody accounts for is the second half. At the same time your information is degrading, your ability to detect that it is degrading is also getting worse.
Either you became
dramatically wiser,
or the feedback
quietly changed.
Adam Galinsky and colleagues ran a set of experiments on what power does to perspective taking. In one, participants were simply asked to draw the letter E on their own forehead.
You can do that two ways. Oriented so you could read it, which leaves it backwards to everyone else. Or oriented so other people can read it.
Participants primed to feel powerful were about three times more likely to draw the self-oriented E.
In further experiments, high-power participants were less able to account for the fact that other people did not share their private knowledge. And in another, they were measurably less accurate at identifying other people’s emotional expressions.
Published in Psychological Science, 2006.
Note what the experiment did. It did not select for arrogant people. It briefly primed ordinary participants to feel powerful, and the effect appeared almost immediately.
Which means this is not a character flaw belonging to bad executives. It is what the role does to whoever is in it, including you, and probably including me while I was writing this.
So you have a compounding problem. People are telling you less, and you are worse at reading the room where they are not telling you.
Why staying quiet is the rational choice
It helps to stop treating this as a courage problem belonging to your team.
Put yourself in the seat of somebody three levels down deciding whether to tell you an initiative is not working. The upside is that you might fix it and they might get some credit. The downside is that they contradict a senior person in public, in front of their own manager, about something you appear invested in.
They do not know how you will take it. What they do know is how you took it last time, or how you took it with somebody else, which they heard about.
Given that maths, silence is not cowardice. It is a sensible bet. And every time somebody makes that bet and nothing bad happens to them, the habit sets a little harder.
The praise problem underneath it
There is a second version of this that is more uncomfortable, because it is about what you are seeking rather than what you are receiving.
It is very easy to build a circle of people who make you feel good and to mistake that for a circle of people who make you better. They are not the same group, and the first one is considerably more pleasant to be around.
Praise is not useless. But if the people closest to you mostly confirm what you already think, you have assembled an echo rather than a team, and you did it slowly enough that it felt like good hiring.
The right people sharpen you. That is usually unpleasant in the moment, which is precisely why it is worth checking whether you have quietly stopped inviting it.
The question that does not work
Asking does anyone have any concerns? at the end of a meeting does nothing. It is a closing formality and everybody in the room knows it.
It puts the burden entirely on one person to volunteer, in public, against the apparent consensus, with no cover. Nobody takes that deal.
What works is changing the question so that saying something is the expected behaviour rather than an act of bravery. What is the strongest argument against this? assigns the criticism as a task. If this fails in six months, what will have gone wrong? makes the objection hypothetical rather than personal. Both give people a way to be honest without being the one who objected.
You are not trying to make people brave. You are trying to make the truth cheap.
You are not trying
to make people brave.
You are trying to
make truth cheap.
Improving the quality of what reaches you
- Assign the objection. Ask one named person to argue against the plan before the decision. When disagreeing is the job, nobody has to be brave to do it.
- Go two levels down. The people closest to the work have the most accurate picture and the least incentive to package it. Ask them what is not working, then do nothing punitive with the answer.
- Notice who has gone quiet. Somebody who used to push back and now agrees with you did not become convinced. They made a calculation, and it is worth finding out what caused it.
- Audit your own circle. List the people whose views you hear most. If you cannot remember the last time one of them changed your mind, you have a comfort problem rather than a talent problem.
The honest version
I do not think you can fully solve this. The role creates the distortion, and you cannot stop being senior.
What you can do is stop assuming that the quiet room means agreement, and stop taking the smoothness of your recent meetings as evidence about the quality of your recent thinking.
The most useful thing I have found is simply holding the possibility open. Somewhere in your organisation right now, somebody knows something about your plan that you do not, and has decided the cost of telling you is higher than the cost of letting it play out.
Your job is to make that a worse bet than it currently is.
The agreement in the room is not information. It is the absence of information, and it looks exactly the same from where you are sitting.
Seniority filters what reaches you, and Galinsky’s research shows power simultaneously makes people worse at taking others’ perspectives and less accurate at reading their emotions. That combination compounds. Staying quiet is a rational bet for your team rather than a failure of courage, so the fix is not asking for more honesty but making it cheaper: assign the objection, go two levels down, and notice who used to push back and no longer does.
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Chris speaks to companies, associations, and healthcare organizations on ownership, developing people, and building teams nobody wants to leave. Every program is built around your audience and your goals.
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