It’s critical that enough true, honest opinion and information make it to leaders for them to be effective and keep their organization fit and healthy. A leader, at whatever level, has to make a real effort to create a culture in which people feel free to commit candor.
As for making sure the right people are challenging you, you have to keep widening and widening your sources — you need to practice “open source management.” You need to get your information from everywhere. This serves three purposes:
1. It increases the chances that you’ll learn something important. The more sources you use, the more certain you can be that you’re being bothered about the right things.
2. It will loosen up your own people. If someone in your closest circle is tempted to withhold information from you, they’ll think twice about this when they realize that someone else might reveal it.
3. People learn from dialogue — it stretches them. I know that I don’t know all that I know until I’m in conversation. Engaging in dialogue with a wide selection of people both inside and outside the organization uncovers knowledge and awareness the leader didn’t even know she had.
I work with CEOs who spend most of their time at breakfast, lunch and dinner engaging employees, clients and investors. It’s not that they like to eat out it’s that they are creating a forum for dialogue.
Pierre Robitaille