THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Confidence

“Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.” - Peter T. Mcintyre

TOPIC OF THE DAY

The Dangers of Deference

Not long ago I sat in on a meeting of the executive leadership team for a global technology company. At the beginning of the session, the CEO quickly flashed a couple of slides on the screen that summarized key aspects of the firm's strategy, saying, "You've all seen these charts before, so we don't have to dwell on them." The meeting then proceeded from there. There was only one problem: None of the other executives had seen those slides before; they had been created by the CEO's strategy director only a couple of days prior to the meeting. Yet not a single person in the room spoke up.

The fact that executive team hadn't seen these charts before doesn't matter. But what matters greatly is the behavior in the room: If senior executives can't correct the CEO on a relatively trivial issue, will they speak up on something more substantial? Moreover, if the C-suite executives defer to their boss to this extent, it is likely that many of them have replicated the pattern with their people. In fact, later that same day one of my colleagues tried to encourage a project leader to clarify the goals for a critical initiative with her C-suite sponsor and was told: "He's a very busy person, and I'm sure he would prefer that we figure this out ourselves."

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