Great Leaders Invite Dissent
Strong leaders hear "yes" much too often, or they simply hear nothing when people really mean "no." Leaders make better decisions when they create an atmosphere that invites dissent, writes Michael Roberto of Harvard Business School in his new book Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer.
Many senior management teams do not engage in open and candid dialogue about business issues. Managers often feel uncomfortable expressing dissent in the presence of a powerful, popular, and highly successful chief executive. The quality of decisions suffers when conflict and debate are missing within a management team. Imagine if someone had said "no" to Ken Lay, Hank Greenberg, or Richard Scrushy?
In his book, Roberto describes the toll on organizations of a culture of appeasement. He dissects the consequences of not saying no and shows why, under the right circumstances, dissent helps promote corporate ethics and effective corporate governance. He then shows the way to overcome barriers to candid dialogue in organizations and explains why executives also need to build consensus in their organizations so that managers will work hard and cooperate with one another to implement the decision. Finally, he outlines a fair and open process for making more effective decisions.
The objective is to help business leaders stimulate constructive conflict in their organizations and, thereby, to make better decisions. Roberto argues that many leaders fail to make and implement decisions successfully for a quite fundamental reason — they tend to focus first and foremost on finding the "right" solution when a problem arises, rather than stepping back to determine the "right" process that should be employed to make the decision. They fixate on the question, "What decision should I make?" rather than asking, "How should I go about making the decision?"
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