THE HUMAN MIRROR · The Self We Know

Why Success Can Make Self-Awareness More Difficult

Achievement can alter the quality of information that reaches a leader.

What changes after the promotion

A promotion does more than increase responsibility. It can change who challenges your assumptions, how disagreement is expressed and which mistakes people believe are safe to mention. A leader may experience this as increasing consensus. It may instead reflect a changing information environment. This is a risk, not a law of success: many accomplished leaders actively maintain candid relationships.

A capable professional who becomes a senior leader often assumes that the relationships that served them well will continue to serve the same purpose. But the conditions of those relationships have changed. People who once debated the individual as a peer now consider whether their disagreement might affect resources, reputation or future opportunities. Even when the leader has never punished dissent, the position itself may introduce caution. Information is filtered before it arrives: uncertainties become recommendations, concerns become polite questions, and uncomfortable detail disappears into reassuring summaries. The leader may be working longer hours and making more consequential decisions while receiving less unedited information about their own conduct. This does not prove that authority corrupts judgement; it suggests that seniority changes the way evidence is supplied. A leader who wants a realistic picture must pay attention to that supply chain, not merely to their personal intentions.

The information problem becomes sharper when reporting structures are designed to protect the leader's time. Briefing papers compress uncertainty; project updates reduce disagreement to a traffic-light colour; staff raise concerns through managers who may have strong reasons to resolve them before escalation. Each filter can be individually sensible. Taken together, they may remove the very ambiguity a senior decision-maker needs to inspect. A polished dashboard is not evidence that the underlying conversation was candid. The diagnostic question is what was lost in the process of making information concise. This is especially relevant when a team has become skilled at anticipating the answer the leader prefers. Good people can produce an inaccurate picture without anyone consciously deciding to deceive.

Competence can become an identity to defend

Chris Argyris described how highly capable professionals can become skilled at avoiding the embarrassment of failure while remaining committed to learning in principle. The practical difficulty is that professional identity and decision authority often travel together. If being competent becomes synonymous with being correct, a challenge to a decision can feel like a challenge to legitimacy.

Success is frequently built on an approach that worked: preparation, technical mastery, quick pattern recognition or a willingness to take responsibility. Once others reward those strengths, the leader may rely on them more heavily. The danger appears when a method that previously created value becomes too closely linked with a person’s identity. Questioning the method can then sound like questioning the individual. At senior levels the distinction is particularly easy to blur, because decisions are visible and reversals can carry political costs. There is another side: expertise genuinely matters, and constant second-guessing can damage speed and clarity. The goal cannot be endless doubt. It is the capacity to distinguish where experience deserves weight from where a new setting or contrary evidence deserves attention. A strong leader remains accountable for the final call while making room for information that would improve it.

There is also a distinction between having access to a challenge and knowing what to do with it. A senior leader may receive candid advice from a trusted peer, a board member or an external adviser, yet the advice can remain safely detached from the decisions that most need scrutiny. Some leaders become adept at discussing their blind spots in general while leaving their operating practices unchanged. A more demanding test is to trace one contested choice: what evidence challenged the preferred option, which person supplied it, and whether the decision process genuinely allowed revision. This approach can feel slower, particularly when organisational expectations reward certainty. But selective scrutiny is compatible with decisive leadership. Leaders need not invite everyone into every decision; they do need dependable ways to detect when their expertise or confidence is outrunning the information available. That is an issue of governance and judgement as much as personality.

Research provides a narrower but useful warning. Detert and Burris studied how managerial openness relates to upward employee voice in one organisational setting, while Tost, Gino and Larrick examined how a formal leader's subjective experience of power can increase verbal dominance and reduce team communication. Their findings do not mean powerful leaders invariably silence colleagues, nor do they prove that every quiet meeting is unsafe. They offer a mechanism worth testing in a particular setting: when senior people occupy more conversational space, potentially useful information may not be expressed. The remedy must therefore be more concrete than asking leaders to feel less powerful. Meeting design, speaking order and the treatment of objections can either compound or partly counteract that dynamic. For high-stakes decisions, asking people closest to the issue for their evidence before senior interpretations are stated is a reasonable procedural safeguard, although its usefulness still depends on context.

Design disagreement before it becomes urgent

Research on employee voice and silence examines why workers share—or withhold—concerns with people in authority. The relevant leadership question is not simply “Did I ask for feedback?” but “What happened the last time somebody disagreed with me?” A leader can invite challenge and still make it expensive through impatience, public correction or an absence of follow-through.

Inviting people to “challenge me anytime” is not a reliable operating system. It delegates the whole interpersonal risk to the person who disagrees. Better mechanisms assign a place and a purpose to opposing evidence before commitment hardens. For important choices, ask a designated colleague to present the strongest alternative interpretation, and give them access to the facts needed to do the job well. Record a specific uncertainty that would cause the decision to be revisited. When an objection changes the plan, make the change visible without requiring the challenger to become a public hero. When it does not, explain the trade-off rather than treating disagreement as disloyalty. The test is whether material objections arrive early enough to influence a decision. If the first serious warning appears only after delivery fails, the leader may have a reporting problem as well as a judgement problem.

Take a steering-group meeting where a delivery director offers a confident status update and nobody disputes it. A week later a dependency emerges that several participants privately considered serious. A conventional response is to ask why nobody spoke. A more useful review asks when the information became available, whether it had a recognised route into the meeting and what signals made participants believe the risk would be dismissed. Perhaps the chair had cut off detailed questions in previous sessions; perhaps the agenda allowed only green-or-red summaries; perhaps the objection required technical knowledge absent from the room. These are different failures demanding different remedies. The leader still owns the decision, but the quality of subsequent decisions will depend on whether the process can produce an accurate view rather than a reassuring one. Authority should not make uncertainty invisible.

Another trap is mistaking a trusted inner circle for a sufficiently diverse flow of challenge. Trusted advisers can disagree candidly and still share assumptions about the market, the organisation or the leader's strengths. A chief executive may hear disagreement about priorities but little about how their own style changes what managers are willing to say. A useful review therefore distinguishes disagreement *within* the leadership group's accepted frame from information that challenges the frame itself. Who can point out that the meeting is asking the wrong question? Who can report that staff have stopped raising problems? Seniority need not make leaders less curious. It does make curiosity harder to demonstrate through intention alone.

Avoid performing humility

Take one important decision from the past month. List who offered a competing view, who was affected but absent, and which objections changed the final decision. Then ask a trusted colleague what would make dissent easier in the next meeting. The observable signal is not the volume of criticism but whether relevant contrary information reaches the decision while there is still time to use it. A failure mode is turning the exercise into a public demonstration of humility that colleagues are expected to applaud.

There is a fashionable version of executive humility that relies on saying “I might be wrong” while continuing to dominate the conversation. Such rituals may even make disclosure harder, because colleagues are invited to affirm the leader’s openness rather than discuss difficult evidence. Useful humility is procedural. It changes who speaks first, which evidence is documented, how dissent is received, and what happens after a correction. Leaders also need to recognise the boundaries of the approach. Not every team member has equal knowledge of a decision; wide consultation can become delay; and anonymous input may be hard to clarify. The appropriate design depends on the stakes and the expertise involved. What remains constant is a simple question: has seniority made it easier for the leader to receive praise than to receive information that would change their mind?

The higher the authority, the less safe it is to assume that information arrives unchanged. Self-awareness at senior levels is partly a design problem: leaders need channels that do not depend entirely on their own invitations.

References

Chris Argyris (1991), Teaching Smart People How to Learn

Tost, Gino & Larrick (2013), When Power Makes Others Speechless

Detert & Burris (2007), Leadership Behavior and Employee Voice