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You’ve probably watched a leader make a decision recently and thought: did anyone in that room push back?
And if they did, did it change anything?
What the environment does
Most leadership failures that make the news have a similar pattern. An accumulation of smaller decisions, each of which looked reasonable inside an organisation that had gradually stopped providing honest feedback. The information was there. The signals where there. Whether it reached the right people, and whether those people felt safe enough to act on it, is where things get interesting.
You don’t need a front-page failure to recognise it. Most people reading this will have seen a version of it up close.
What the data shows
A Deloitte survey asked executives whether candid discussions were a feature of their organisation’s culture. 94% said open dialogue was critical to success. 12% believed their organisation actually had it.
Leigh Plunkett Tost, Francesca Gino, and Richard Larrick ran four experiments on how power affects advice-taking. Same result every time: feeling powerful causes leaders to discount advice, even from recognised experts. Kelly See and colleagues tracked the downstream effect: power raises confidence while reducing accuracy. The most senior person in the room tends to be simultaneously the most certain and the most wrong, and the people around them have usually worked this out.
Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that a single voice of disagreement in a group improves collective decision accuracy, even when that person turns out to be wrong. It forces the group has to actually think through the problem rather than agree on the first comfortable answer. Strip that voice out and the quality of decisions degrades, often without anyone noticing because the process felt smooth.
How the room gets shaped
Governance structures help with some of this. Independent directors, whistleblower protections, escalation paths. None of them fully reach the day-to-day reality of how information flows around a senior leader.
What tends to happen is more subtle. People around a senior leader gradually learn what lands well and what doesn’t. Which concerns get received as useful input and which mark the person branded as difficult or “not being a team player”. Over time, without anyone deciding this is the policy, the information reaching the leader becomes increasingly curated. The leader, working from that curated picture, makes decisions that look reasonable, given the information they have.
I’ve sat across the table from boards trying to understand why a capable leader they trusted made a decision that was obviously wrong in hindsight. The question they almost always ask is “why didn’t they see it?” Who in that leader’s immediate circle was positioned to tell them? But the more revealing question would be: why didn’t they?
The one structural fix
The research on executive mentoring keeps returning to the same need: someone outside the organisation, with no stake in the outcome. Suzanne de Janasz and Maury Peiperl spent two years studying 45 CEOs with formal mentoring arrangements. The feature those CEOs described as non-negotiable was total confidentiality. A conversation that sat entirely outside the political reality of their organisation
84% of those CEOs said their mentors helped them avoid costly mistakes. Most of the leadership failures worth studying had no equivalent relationship anywhere near the decisions that caused them.
The uncomfortable bit
We watch high-profile failures and reach for explanations about the individual. The arrogance, the recklessness, the compromised judgement. What the evidence suggests is an environment that has gradually stopped providing the friction that catches bad decisions before they compound.
Who in your life right now could change your mind about something you believe today, and would?
Most people find that question harder to answer than they expect.
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