How do you correct a leader? (3)

There is a strange thing that happens to people on their way up, and almost no one notices it happening to them. It is not that they become arrogant, though some do. It is not that they stop caring, though that happens too. It is quieter and more mechanical than either, and it is this: the higher a person climbs, the less true information reaches them until eventually they are making the most important decisions of their lives on the worst data of their careers.

Consider what actually happens to a single honest sentence as it travels upward through an organisation. A junior analyst notices a problem. She mentions it to her manager but softens it because managers do not love being handed problems. The manager, now holding a softened version, passes it to the director but softens it again because he does not want to look as though his area is struggling. The director mentions it to the vice president as a minor item already being handled. By the time it reaches the person at the top, the sentence that began as “this could sink us” has been sanded down, at every level, by people protecting themselves, into “one small thing we’re monitoring”. No one lied. Everyone adjusted. And the leader, hearing calm where there should have been alarm, feels reassured at the exact moment he should be terrified.

This is the part that makes correcting a leader so much harder than it looks. It is not simply that powerful people are stubborn, though the stubborn ones exist. It is that power itself builds a filter around a person, woven thread by thread out of everyone else’s ordinary self-interest, and that filter removes the truth long before it ever reaches the top. The leader does not experience this as censorship. He experiences it as consensus. He looks around, sees agreement on every face, and concludes, reasonably, that things must be fine.

There is a young ruler from an old story who inherited a kingdom and lost half of it in a single afternoon. When he took the throne, the elders who had served his father counselled restraint: lighten the people’s burden, speak to them gently, and they will follow you for life. But he preferred a second group, the friends he had grown up with, who told him what he wanted to hear: show strength, make the burden heavier, and let them fear you. He liked that answer better. It flattered the image he had of himself. So, he took it, and by nightfall the kingdom had split in two, and the larger half was gone forever. He did not lack advisors. He had two kinds standing right in front of him. He chose the ones whose words felt good over the ones whose words were true, and it cost him a kingdom.

There is another king from the same old world who wanted to go to war and gathered four hundred advisors to weigh in. All four hundred told him exactly what he had hoped: go, you will win. There was one more voice available, a man known for saying uncomfortable things, and the king admitted, openly, that he hated him for precisely that reason. He was finally persuaded to summon him, and the man told him the truth: that the war would end in disaster. The king went with the four hundred anyway. He died in the battle they had promised he would win. Notice what the four hundred were for. They were not there to inform him. They were there to confirm him, and a leader who collects that kind of counsel is not gathering wisdom. He is decorating a decision he has already made.

We can shake our heads at ancient kings, but the same machinery hums inside modern institutions, and it is often more polished for being modern. Whole companies have walked calmly off cliffs their own employees saw coming because the warnings dissolved on the way up. The technology that would have saved them sat in a lab down the hall. The market shift was visible to junior staff years early. The information existed. It simply never completed the climb, because at every floor someone had a reason to make it smaller than it was.

So, if you are trying to correct a leader, understand what you are truly up against. You are not just facing one person’s ego. You are fighting the gravity of the position itself, a force that pulls comfortable falsehoods upward and leaves inconvenient truths stranded at the bottom. That is why persistence matters more than eloquence here and why one brave sentence, said once, so rarely lands. You are not overcoming a bad mood. You are overcoming physics.

And if you are the leader, the lesson is more sobering still. You must assume, as a standing condition of your role, that the truth is not reaching you and that the calm you feel may be the most dangerous thing about your day.

Which raises the question we have been circling for three weeks and will finally answer in the next. If power deafens, and the truth cannot climb on its own, then what does it actually take to correct a leader, and how does a wise leader build a life in which the truth can still get through? That is where we end.

About the author:

Dr Toye Sobande is a strategic leadership expert, executive coach, lawyer, public speaker, and award-winning author. He is the CEO of Stephens Leadership Consultancy LLC, a strategy and management consulting firm offering creative insights and solutions to businesses and leaders. Email: [email protected]