By Katherine Beaty
Years ago, I sat in an executive leadership meeting and watched my fellow senior team members make a decision I knew was wrong. During several meetings, I had shared my warnings and recommendations. In the end, the decision went the other way, and the CEO thanked me for my input, saying, “Your objections have been noted.”
Within 18 months, every concern I raised had become a problem the company and its customers were paying to solve.
To this day, I still think about that meeting. What sticks with me is not that the decision turned out to be wrong. No one can see the future, and leaders have to make decisions every day with incomplete information and competing pressures. Sometimes the honest answer is, “I see your point, but the budget is not there today, so we will deal with it if it becomes a problem.” That is a legitimate call. The failure is not in making it. The failure is in never revisiting it.
Incentives matter
I have come to believe that the response of “noted,” and the mindset behind it, erodes company value and slows innovation more than any technological or budgetary gap I have ever witnessed. We talk about leadership as though it were mostly about making hard decisions. I would argue it is at least as much about welcoming information that contradicts a decision you are considering or have already made and dealing with its implications. On that count, most of us, myself included, have a worse track record than we want
to admit.
This problem is not specific to parking or CEOs. It happens in hospitals, software companies, and city governments, and it is not confined to the corner office. Many share the responsibility for the problem, which is exactly why it is so easy to assume it belongs to someone else.
None of this happens because people are bad. It happens because of incentives that quietly reward the wrong behavior. In most organizations, you are not managing toward the best decision. You are managing toward not getting fired. We do not hold ceremonies for the leader who quietly prevented a crisis, because a crisis that never happens leaves no evidence behind.
But we never forget the person who made the wrong call in plain view. When being right is invisible and being wrong is a spectacle, people learn to tell leadership what it wants to hear rather than what it needs to know. Then leaders start to decide from a reality already edited for their comfort.
Silence = lost innovation
So, what does this approach cost? More than the budget line, which everyone can see. It costs trust, because once people learn that raising a concern changes nothing, they have been trained not to tell the truth.
However, the most expensive cost is the one an innovation-driven industry can least afford: the loss of ideas that go unmentioned. The person who gives up on flagging the small problem is the same one who likely would have identified a better way to do the work or thought of a smarter use of a new technology.
Innovation rarely arrives as a grand strategy from above. It almost always starts with someone closer to the work saying, “What if we tried this?” And they are heard often enough to keep saying it. Silence those people once too often, and you lose the next 10 ideas they would have brought you, without ever knowing what they were.
Rewarding honesty
If that is the cost, the harder question is how to build a culture where speaking up is treated as a responsibility rather than a risk.
It starts by rewarding the act, not just the outcome. When someone raises a concern, the decision goes another way, and they turn out to be right, go back and tell them so. Give them the win, out loud and in public. A team that has to be right under its breath eventually decides it is not worth being right at all.
This approach also requires leaders to pay closer attention than most of us do. The person who has gone quiet when they usually have something to say is sending a message. So is the flicker of disagreement that crosses a face when you ask, “What are you seeing that I am not?”
If only one person is ever willing to be the dissenting voice, that is a warning, not a comfort. Either your culture has taught everyone else not to bother, or you have surrounded yourself with people who see their job as agreeing with you. Unfortunately, leaders rarely notice when they are being managed by a team’s desire to please them.
Sometimes the silence has nothing to do with the decision. People may stay quiet because they want the boss to like them. However, a good leader keeps anyone from confusing a difference of opinion with a loss of standing. The rare person who will say, “Hold on, have we really thought this through?” deserves protection, because most people are not willing to take that risk. The goal is not to fill the room with naysayers, but to make sure that when someone has something true and difficult to say, the culture makes it safe to say it.
Lead by listening
Leadership is not about being the smartest person in the room or making the boldest call. It is about building a place where the best thinking can surface, from anyone, at any level, and survive long enough to be heard.
We spend heavily chasing innovation in this industry. Yet most of it already exists as ideas in our organizations, waiting to be spoken by someone who needs to believe the leaders will listen. So, the next time someone complicates a decision you have already made, resist the easiest response. Do not say, “Noted.” Instead, say, “Tell me more.” And be willing to be persuaded by the answer.
That is what listening looks like. It is also where innovation actually starts. And it remains the most expensive thing any of us will ever fail to do.
KATHERINE BEATY is the CEO and president of Beaty Solutions. She can be reached at [email protected].
