The last time someone told you that you were wrong, to your face, unprompted. When was it?

If you have to think hard, that is the whole problem in one question.

Here is the paradox nobody warns you about on the way up. The more authority you gain, the more information flows toward you, and the less of it is true. Not false exactly. Softened. Rounded up. Timed for your mood. People do not lie to power. They edit. And they call it a briefing.

Manfred Kets de Vries, the INSEAD professor who has spent a career inside the psychology of leaders, put it plainly. Unless you consciously invite dissent, reward candor, and tolerate uncomfortable feedback, you risk becoming a prisoner of your own importance.

I have watched it happen to good people. Smart, decent, well intentioned leaders who slowly stopped hearing anything they did not already believe. It rarely looks like arrogance. It looks like comfort.

This is physics, not character

You will not fix this by being a nicer person.

Distance distorts. Every layer between you and the front line is also a filter, and every filter has a career to protect. By the time news reaches the top, it has been through six people who each had a reason to trim the edges.

Then there is the part you do yourself. You smile at good news and frown at problems, and within a month everyone has learned to bring you the first and hide the second. You did not ask for that. You trained it, one facial expression at a time.

The trap is structural. So the way out is structural too. You do not feel your way to the truth. You build the machine that delivers it.

The tell

Want to know if you are already inside the trap? Sit with these.

• What percentage of the news you receive is good news? If it is most of it, someone is managing you.
• When bad news finally reaches you, how old is it?
• When did you last reverse a decision because of something you heard from below?
• Who in your organisation is actually allowed to interrupt you?

None of these are comfortable. That is the signal. Comfort at the top is not a reward. It is a warning light.

What to do on Monday

The fix is not a mindset. It is a set of habits, run on a rhythm until they become the culture.

• Thank the messenger firstSomeone brings you a problem, your first job is to reward the person, not react to the news. Do this once in public and the whole room recalibrates.
• Ask questions you cannot answerIf you already know the answer, you are testing loyalty, not seeking truth. Walk in with a real question and let the silence sit until someone fills it with something you did not want to hear.
• Skip the layerTalk to people two levels down without their managers in the room. Not to bypass anyone. To calibrate what the chain is telling you against what is actually happening.
• Appoint a dissenterGive one person the explicit job of arguing against the decision. Rotate it. When disagreement is a role, it stops being a risk, and people stop paying for honesty with their standing.
• Run the pre-mortemBefore the big call, declare it failed and ask the room why. You will hear every objection that politeness was busy hiding. Failure is always easier to discuss in the hypothetical.

The part most leaders get wrong

They perform openness instead of practising it.

"My door is always open" is not an invitation. It is a test most people quietly decline. Openness is a behaviour, not a slogan, and your people are watching what you do the day after someone was honest with you. Reward candor in the meeting, then go cold for a week, and they will believe the second signal every time.

And do not mistake a quiet room for an aligned one. A team that nods is not agreeing. It is waiting for you to leave. Alignment survives disagreement. Silence only hides it.

The leaders who keep hearing the truth are not the humble ones. They are the deliberate ones. They built the machine that brings them bad news, and they refuse to switch it off just because it happens to be working.

Invite the dissent. Reward the candor. Tolerate the discomfort.

Or stay comfortable, well informed, and wrong.