The Leadership Table · The price of always being right: what success hides from those who lead

The more often someone with authority over others is right, the less they are contradicted, and the less they are contradicted, the later they learn what truly matters: the measure of leadership lies in how long it takes for unwelcome news to reach you.

There is a scene that plays out in boardrooms and executive committees with almost liturgical regularity. A serious problem erupts: a key client walks away, a project that has been drifting for months finally runs aground. The CEO or the chair asks, in genuine surprise, how long this has been known. The answer is almost always uncomfortable. It had been known for some time, and by several people. Nobody, it seems, had thought to mention it.

We tend to read that scene as a failure of communication, or of loyalty. I suspect it is something more interesting, and considerably less comfortable for whoever is in charge: the logical consequence of their own success.

Let us call it the latency of bad news: the time that elapses between the moment a problem exists and the moment it reaches, unfiltered, the person with the authority to solve it. Every organisation has this latency. What distinguishes one from another is how long it lasts, and that depends far less on information systems than on the behaviour of whoever sits at the head of the table.

The mechanism is simple, and nobody designs it. A competent leader is right often. Being right, they win arguments. And in winning them, they teach those around them, without ever intending to, that contradicting them carries a price: time, exposure, being shown up in front of colleagues. Nobody consciously decides to hide anything. Each person, individually, calculates that it is not yet worth raising the doubt, that the problem may resolve itself, that it would be wiser to wait for more data. Multiplied across an entire team and over several years, that reasonable calculation produces a result that is anything but reasonable: a leader who is the last to learn what matters most to them.

Hence the paradox in this edition’s title. The more often a leader is right, the less contradiction they receive. And the less contradiction they receive, the more they rely on their own judgement, precisely when that judgement has begun to work with incomplete information. Success does not necessarily make anyone arrogant. What it does, with remarkable efficiency, is hide from them exactly what they most need to know.

The opposing argument deserves to be taken seriously, because it carries weight. A leader cannot, and should not, receive everything. Their attention is the scarcest resource in the organisation, and protecting it is the job of those around them. A good executive team filters, prioritises, resolves what it can and escalates only what genuinely requires a decision from above. A chair determined to hear about everything ends up paralysed or, worse, as the bottleneck of their own company. And not all dissent adds value: some contradiction is noise, opportunism or plain resistance to change.

All of that is true. But every filter has a criterion, and therein lies the problem. A healthy filter holds back the trivial and lets the important through. A degraded one does exactly the opposite: it lets the pleasant through and holds back the important the moment it becomes uncomfortable. That criterion is not set by the organisation chart. It is set by the collective memory of what happened to the last person who brought bad news.

This is the point that tends to escape us when we talk about leadership. We devote a great deal of attention to the capacity to decide and very little to the quality of the information on which decisions rest. No judgement, however brilliant, compensates for data that arrives late. A mediocre leader who is well informed will usually decide better than a brilliant one whom nobody dares to contradict. Nor does intelligence protect against isolation. It often accelerates it, because arguing with someone very clever is, for everyone else, particularly costly.

None of this is confined to chairs and chief executives. It happens to the head of a department, to the partner in a law firm, to the founder of a twenty-person company. It happens, if we are honest, at home. Anyone with authority over others and a track record of being right is exposed. The difference is one of scale: at the top of a company the cost is measured in years of destroyed value and, in a family council, sometimes in a generation.

If the problem is latency, the solution does not lie in asking for more candour, which is what almost every leader does and what almost never works. Saying “I want you to tell me how things really are” changes nothing if the listener’s experience suggests otherwise. Candour cannot be requested. It has to be paid for. And the currency is the leader’s behaviour at the precise moment they receive something they do not want to hear.

Those who manage this latency best share a handful of unglamorous habits. They ask before they opine, knowing that their opinion, voiced first, closes the conversation. They thank people for bad news before debating it, even if they then debate it as hard as necessary. They deliberately seek out someone who does not depend on them, whether an independent director, a peer outside the organisation or a friend with nothing at stake, because they understand that nobody tells the whole truth to the person who signs their appraisal. And they measure something almost nobody measures: how many times, in the past year, someone on their team has changed their mind.

There is a deeper question here, one that goes beyond technique. Accepting contradiction demands a very particular form of humility: recognising the limits of what one can see from where one sits. Authority, properly understood, is not the right to be right. It is the responsibility to decide well, and nobody decides well about what they do not know.

There is a simple test, a single question, that anyone who leads others can put to themselves this week. It requires neither surveys nor consultants, which, coming from the person proposing it, is something of a concession. It asks only to be answered honestly. When did someone on your team last bring you bad news before it became inevitable?