When nobody has to tell you you're wrong

I was talking recently to a founder and CEO about honesty.

He has an open-door policy and means it. He wants people to challenge him, bring him bad news and tell him when they think he is wrong. But he also knows there is a flaw in the arrangement: he is still the CEO.

The door may be open. The consequences on the other side of it are harder to judge.

A CEO can say, with complete sincerity, “I want you to disagree with me.” The person sitting opposite still has to decide whether this is one of those occasions when disagreement is genuinely welcome, or merely welcome in principle.

Nobody has to be frightened of the boss for this to happen. Most people are simply good at reading a room. We notice what lands well. We learn which subjects produce irritation, which objections get waved away, which people seem to advance and which slowly disappear from important meetings.

Then we adapt.

The adaptation is often so slight that nobody would call it dishonesty. A concern becomes a suggestion. A strong objection becomes a question. Someone who thinks the strategy is fundamentally wrong says they “wonder if we’ve considered another approach”. A presentation arrives with the awkward bits moved to slide 37.

The information is still there. It has just been made easier to receive.

This creates an odd problem for people with power. At precisely the point when your decisions begin to affect more people, your access to what those people really think can become less reliable.

And you may be the last person to notice.

Nobody sends a memo announcing that they have begun managing you. From your side of the table, it can simply look as though there is broad agreement, the strategy makes sense and everyone seems unusually sensible today.

This is why honesty at the top cannot depend entirely on the courage of the people below it. At some point, it has to be designed.

The problem with the open door

The open door is a generous idea. It is also an idea conceived from the side of the door with the power.

The more useful question isn't whether someone is permitted to disagree with you. It is what they have observed happening to people who do.

Think about the last person who challenged an important decision. Were they met with curiosity or irritation? Did you spend the next ten minutes explaining why they had misunderstood? Were they still invited into the next important conversation?

Leaders communicate their tolerance for disagreement in dozens of small ways. People notice those ways and adjust accordingly.

Telling people to “speak up” therefore has its limits. It asks the person with less power to overcome the effects of the power imbalance.

The person with more power can do some of that work instead. One surprisingly useful place to start is to speak last.

If the most senior person in the room opens with, “I think we should go with option A, but I’d really love everyone’s honest opinion,” option A has already acquired considerably more gravitational pull.

Get the opinions before giving yours.

Disagreement can also be built into how decisions are made. Before committing to something significant, ask someone to make the strongest case against it. Ask what you might be missing. Ask what would have to be true for the decision to fail. Find ways for uncomfortable information to reach you that don't depend on someone having unusual reserves of courage that morning. Then pay attention to what you do when somebody actually disagrees.

It is easy to welcome challenge when it is mild, elegantly phrased and ultimately irrelevant. The more useful test is what happens when somebody challenges something you care about, in a way you find irritating, at an inconvenient moment.

People will remember your response far longer than they remember what the company values say about candour.

There is another useful thing to watch: absence.

When was the last time somebody told you an idea of yours was bad? When did a junior person correct you? When did you change your mind because of something somebody several levels below you said?

If those things rarely happen, there are at least two explanations.

One is that you are running an unusually harmonious organisation in which your instincts are consistently excellent. The other deserves investigation.

From the top, a room full of people nodding can look remarkably like alignment. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is adaptation.

And the better people become at adapting to you, the harder the difference is to see.

That matters because leaders can only make decisions from the reality that reaches them. If that reality becomes progressively tidier on its journey upwards, the person with the greatest authority can end up making the most important decisions from the most carefully edited version of events.

You cannot design away power. A CEO is still a CEO. People will still read the room, hierarchy will still matter, and some conversations will always require courage.

That is the part to inhabit.

What you can design are the conditions around it: who gets heard, when the most powerful person speaks, how disagreement enters a decision, what happens to bad news on its way upwards, and what happens to the person who delivers it.

The more power you acquire, the less useful it becomes simply to say that you want honesty.

You have to make it easier to give you.