One of the strangest risks of becoming more senior is that people can become increasingly careful with you at exactly the point when you most need them not to be. Nobody announces that this is happening. There is no meeting where the team agrees to soften difficult news before it reaches you. It happens quietly. A concern is rephrased. A disagreement is saved for later. Someone decides that a detail is not worth mentioning. Another person waits to see which way the conversation is going before saying what they really think. Eventually, a leader can find themselves surrounded by intelligent, decent people and still be working with an edited version of reality. The uncomfortable part is that the leader may have helped create it without ever intending to.
Years ago, when I was leading in Uganda, I learned something about this in a way I did not expect. My youngest son was very young at the time and, to put it politely, not always inclined to follow instructions. He had a habit of wandering off. His class teacher, a Ugandan colleague, would regularly tell me what a lovely boy he was. Then one day I found him somewhere on our large campus where he clearly should not have been. I took him back to the classroom and discovered that this was not an isolated event. He had been running off before. I remember feeling disappointed that I had not been told, both as the leader of the organisation and as his parent. I even ended up keeping him away for a couple of days, partly because his behaviour needed addressing and partly because everyone involved probably needed a break.
With distance, however, the more interesting question is not why the teacher failed to tell me. It is why I expected telling me to have been easy. The cultural context mattered enormously. I was the senior leader. I was also white, working in a country where race, status and inherited expectations around authority could make challenging someone in my position particularly difficult. On top of that, I was the child’s father. I might have believed that I was approachable, and I certainly wanted people to be honest with me, but none of that removed the power sitting in the relationship. Looking back, I can see that an invitation to speak honestly would not automatically have outweighed everything experience and culture might have taught that colleague about speaking upwards.
That distinction has stayed with me. Approachability and openness are not the same thing. An approachable leader may be friendly, visible and easy to talk to. People may happily stop them in a corridor, come into their office or share ordinary problems. The harder test is whether those same people believe they can bring something the leader will not enjoy hearing. That is where declarations such as ‘my door is always open’ become fairly meaningless. People do not decide what is safe by reading the slogan on the door. They watch what happens to the person who walks through it with bad news.
If the response is anger, defensiveness, blame or an immediate attempt to prove the messenger wrong, the lesson travels further than that single conversation. People learn. They may still talk to the leader, but the information changes on its journey. The sharp edges are removed. Context is withheld. Problems arrive later, once they are impossible to hide, or they arrive dressed as something less threatening. This does not require a particularly unpleasant leader. Most of us can become defensive when someone tells us something that exposes a mistake, challenges our judgement or contradicts what we thought was happening. I know I can be stubborn. Twenty years of leadership have not magically removed that from me. Self awareness helps, but self awareness is not the same as perfection.
One habit I have found useful is very simple. When someone brings me something difficult, particularly when everything in me wants to respond immediately, I try to begin with thank you. I am not thanking them because I necessarily agree. I am recognising that they chose to bring the information to me. Then, if I can, I resist the temptation to settle the argument in the first few seconds. Sometimes the person will be right. Sometimes they will be wrong. Sometimes we will simply see the situation differently. Psychological safety cannot mean that every concern is validated as correct. What matters is whether disagreement with the message becomes punishment for bringing the message.
That distinction becomes particularly important when the same challenge keeps appearing. My instinct has generally served me well over the years, but that can itself become dangerous. A history of being right can quietly become a reason to assume that you are right again. When somebody repeatedly sees something differently from me, I try to gather evidence: other perspectives, conversations, whatever objective information exists. But even that only works if the people around me are genuinely prepared to challenge me. ‘Hopefully someone will tell me if I’m wrong’ is not much of a safeguard if everyone has already learned that telling me is exhausting.
I have deliberately tried to build teams containing people who will question me. One colleague understood particularly well that there were occasions when pressing me harder would simply make me dig in. She would make her point clearly and then leave me with it. In one case, I had been dealing with a member of staff whose personal circumstances I understood in considerable depth. That knowledge was influencing the amount of latitude I was giving them after professional problems had emerged. My colleague saw it differently. She believed the matter needed to become formal sooner than I did. At first I resisted. I thought the personal circumstances justified more patience. She did not have access to everything I knew, and some of it was not mine to share.
But she also had something I did not have: distance. I was close enough to the person’s circumstances that compassion was beginning to interfere with my judgement about accountability. My colleague made her case and gave me time. I sat with it. Eventually I realised she was right. The interesting part was not that one of us had better information. We had different information and different vantage points. Her challenge compensated for something I had become less able to see clearly myself. That is one of the reasons disagreement can be so valuable. It is not simply opposition. Sometimes another person’s perspective is the missing piece in our own field of vision.
I would love to say that the lesson is to eradicate defensiveness and stubbornness, but I do not think that is realistic. Leaders are people. We will have bad moments, make poor decisions and occasionally respond less professionally than we should. The danger is when self awareness becomes an excuse: ‘Everyone knows I’m stubborn, so they know how to handle me.’ It is not somebody else’s responsibility to manage a leader’s ego. At the same time, relationships do develop their own understanding. People who know us well may recognise that our first reaction is not necessarily our final position. The important thing is that challenge still has a genuine route to influence. If people learn that disagreement can never change anything, eventually the disagreement stops arriving.
This is not only about difficult feedback. Leaders can lose access to other people’s thinking in much more ordinary ways, particularly in meetings. Some people formulate their thoughts while they speak. Others need to listen, leave the room and think before they know what they really believe. I belong more naturally to the second group. I have sat in meetings feeling pressure to contribute before I was ready because I knew that if I waited, the quickest or most confident voices might shape the direction before my own thinking had properly formed. The problem is not that those early speakers are talking too much. Their ideas may be excellent. The problem begins when speed acquires authority.
The first coherent contribution can easily become the reference point for everything that follows. A leader nods enthusiastically, asks interested follow-up questions or says how much they like the idea. Nothing has formally been decided, but the room has changed. The person who is still thinking is no longer contributing to a neutral discussion tomorrow; they may now feel they have to overturn today’s emerging consensus. That is why telling someone, ‘You don’t need to answer now, come back to me tomorrow,’ only matters if tomorrow genuinely remains part of the decision. Equal opportunity to speak is not necessarily equal opportunity to influence.
I do not think there is a perfect piece of body language that solves this. Genuine interest is genuine interest, and people will interpret it differently according to their confidence, status and history. What feels like healthy enthusiasm to one person can feel like ‘decision made’ to somebody else. The stronger safeguard is structural. If the decision does not need to be made today and you have told people that thinking time is available, then keep the decision open. Do not give people until tomorrow and quietly decide this afternoon. Otherwise the offer of time is little more than theatre.
Silence creates another trap. It is remarkably easy to convert ‘nobody objected’ into ‘everybody agreed’. They are not the same thing. Someone may be silent because they agree, but they may also be processing, uncertain, lacking confidence, reluctant to challenge authority or simply waiting for an opportunity that never arrives. Those very different realities can look identical from the leader’s chair. I do not think the answer is to become better at interpreting silence. It is to stop treating silence as an answer and check instead. One phrase I use constantly is ‘help me understand’. Sometimes I will ask someone in the room. Sometimes I will deliberately wait and speak to them privately. The point is not to force contribution. It is to remain curious about what the absence of contribution actually means.
There is, of course, a limit. Consultation cannot continue indefinitely. Leadership eventually requires judgement and a decision. I tend to stop when I am hearing repetition rather than genuinely new information, but only after making a purposeful effort to gather the perspectives that matter. There is a significant difference between ‘I have heard enough’ and ‘I have heard enough from the people who find it easiest to speak’. The goal is not unanimity, and it is certainly not to make every decision by committee. It is to reach the point of decision without confusing convenience, speed or apparent consensus with a complete picture.
Even then, we will get things wrong. Looking back at my own mistakes, some happened because I did not have enough information. Others happened because the information was available and I did not give it enough weight. Those are different failures. One concerns whether reality reached the leader; the other concerns what the leader did when it arrived. We need to guard against both. But if I discovered that somebody had genuinely felt unable to tell me something important, I would find that particularly difficult. Not because it damaged my image of myself as approachable, but because it would tell me something about the relationship I had helped create.
I hope my first response would not be, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ That question is understandable, but it quietly places the problem back with the person who stayed silent. I would rather begin somewhere else: ‘I’m sorry I’ve made you feel this way. Can you help me understand what I did, or what I failed to do, that made it difficult to tell me?’ There may be an uncomfortable answer. There may also be factors I could never completely control: culture, hierarchy, previous experiences, confidence or circumstances far beyond one relationship. But leadership gives us enough power over the environment that we cannot dismiss our part in it.
Perhaps that is the question senior leaders need to keep returning to. Not simply, ‘Am I approachable?’ and certainly not, ‘Why aren’t people speaking up?’ The more useful question is harder because it turns the attention back towards us: what happens around me when somebody disagrees, hesitates, arrives late with an idea, or tells me something I would rather not hear? We may never know everything people are choosing not to tell us. That is precisely why the absence of bad news should never make us too comfortable. The quality of the truth that reaches us is shaped, in part, by what people have learned will happen when they tell it.
If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.