You don’t have to be the smartest in the room
How a leader’s need to be right silences their team
When did someone last change your mind in a meeting? Not soften your view, actually change it. When your team talks in a meeting, are they talking to each other, or to you? And when someone pushes back, is your first move to understand them or to win?
Be honest with the last one. Most senior leaders know the answer before they’ve finished reading the question.
Of everything leaders hold onto, being right is one of the tightest grips, and one of the hardest to see. This article looks at where it comes from, what it does to a leadership team, and three practical ways to loosen it.
How being right got you here
Being right is how most leaders got the job. Early in your career you had the answer, you were usually correct, and people noticed. You spotted the flaw in the plan, you knew the numbers, you called it before anyone else. Promotion followed promotion. That isn’t a flaw. It’s a track record, and it was earned.
The trouble starts when the job changes and the grip doesn’t. At senior level the value you add shifts. It’s less about having the best idea and more about making sure the best idea surfaces, whoever owns it. A habit that served you as an expert starts to work against you as a leader. Because it has always worked before, it’s the last thing you think to question.
What a tight grip does to a room
Hold your opinion too tight and you crush the better idea before anyone says it out loud. Nobody tells you this is happening. They just stop offering. The person with the half-formed thought decides it isn’t worth the risk. The person who disagrees decides to raise it later, somewhere else, or not at all.
You can see it if you watch where the eyes go. Every comment is aimed at you rather than at each other. The meeting stops being a conversation between peers and becomes a line of people reporting to the boss, each one waiting for your reaction before the next one speaks.
The room goes quiet and the corridor fills. You walk out thinking the meeting went well. Everyone agreed. Then the real conversation starts without you, in the kitchen, on the walk back to the car, in a group chat you’re not part of. That isn’t a disloyal team. It’s a team that has read your grip and adjusted to it.
Why employees stay silent
Researchers at NYU Stern School of Business interviewed 40 professionals about speaking up at work. Thirty-four of them, 85 per cent, said there had been at least one occasion when they felt unable to raise an issue with their boss, even though they believed it mattered. The most common reasons were fear of being labelled, as a troublemaker or a complainer, and fear of damaging the relationship.¹
Look at what’s missing from that list. People weren’t staying quiet because they feared being wrong. They stayed quiet because of what it might cost them to say it to the boss. That cost is set by the leader, usually without meaning to, through a hundred small moments where being right won out over being curious.
Small ‘v’ vulnerability
So what loosens the grip? Vulnerability, but possibly not the kind you’re picturing. This isn’t about confessional speeches or sharing your struggles at the offsite. It’s small ‘v’ vulnerability. It’s about action, not audience.
Small ‘v’ vulnerability is being confident and curious at the same time. It’s being comfortable enough in yourself to bring others into the foreground. It looks like checking your ego at the door and giving others the floor. It sounds like saying “I want to hear what you think” and meaning it. Sometimes it’s simply letting a silence sit until someone else fills it.
It isn’t abdicating authority or fading into the background. You still make the call when a call needs making. The difference is that the call is better informed, and the people around you know their input shaped it. It’s a small shift. For a leader who has built a career on having the answer, it can feel enormous.
Three things to try in your next meeting
Go last. Hold your view until everyone else has spoken. Then ask yourself one question: can I add anything of substance? If not, say nothing. If you can, say it, and notice whether anyone still feels free to push back.
Ask, then wait. Ask a real question, one you don’t already know the answer to, and count to ten in your head before you say anything else. The first few seconds of silence are the room checking whether you mean it. If you fill the gap, they have their answer.
Change something. When someone’s idea is better than yours, say so out loud and use it. Asking “what do you think?” only means something if the answer can change the outcome. If it never does, the room works that out fast and your questions become theatre.
You’ll know it’s working when you watch who people talk to. When they start answering each other instead of you, the grip is loosening.
What you’d have heard
None of this makes you less of a leader. It makes you the one people bring the real problem to, early, before it’s in the corridor.
Go back to the questions at the start. Pick the meeting you thought of when you read the first one. What would you have heard if you’d waited?
This article first appeared in Hum, Rex Wood’s weekly publication on what makes leadership teams work. Subscribe to Hum.
Rex Wood is co-founder of PerformanceHQ and an executive coach working with CEOs and leadership teams.
¹ Milliken, F.J., Morrison, E.W. and Hewlin, P.F. (2003), “An Exploratory Study of Employee Silence: Issues that Employees Don’t Communicate Upward and Why”, Journal of Management Studies, 40(6).