A Leader's Pride: The Shrinking Circle

There is a moment in every project meeting that nobody notices at the time.

Someone at the table knows something. A figure that contradicts the working assumption, a deadline that will not hold, a risk no one has costed. That person opens their mouth — and closes it again. Not out of cowardice. Out of arithmetic: in one second they have weighed what the objection would gain the project against what it would cost them personally. The arithmetic came out the wrong way.

The project moves forward. The decision is unanimous. Nobody lied. And yet the meeting has just produced a decision worse than the sum of what the people in the room actually knew.

That moment is exactly where a leader’s pride does its work. Not in a raised voice. In a silence.

What pride is not

We carry a loud picture of pride: the executive who talks over people, who talks about himself, who humiliates in meetings. That pride exists, but it is rarely dangerous. It is visible. It gets named. It tends to correct itself, because everyone around it has an interest in correcting it.

The pride that brings organizations down is a different animal. It is courteous. It is often highly competent. It operates in hard-working people who listen a great deal — and that is precisely what makes it invisible.

Its signature is not how much a person speaks. It is how much the circle has shrunk.

The circle of those whose judgment still carries weight. It tightens by degrees, without anyone ever deciding to tighten it. First you stop consulting the people whose answer you already know. Then those whose expertise covers ground you believe you have mastered. Then those who were wrong once. Then those who take too long to get to the point. After a few years, a leader can have three hundred people reporting to him and four people he genuinely listens to — three of whom think as he does.

He does not notice, because every stage of the narrowing happened for a good reason.

Three reliable signs

The first is a sentence. It takes different forms but always says the same thing: if that were true, we would know. This is the moment you stop assessing information on its merits and start assessing it on its compatibility with what you already believe. What fits gets examined. Everything else becomes noise — and noise is not refuted, it is ignored.

The second is an asymmetry. Ask a senior leader how many people he knows in his organization. He will give you a number. Then ask him how long the person who cleans the offices he walks through every morning has worked there. The silence that follows is not indifference. It is the result of a sorting that happened on its own, between those who register as interlocutors and those who register as scenery.

The third is a shift. The day contradiction stops being received as information and starts being received as a signal about the person delivering it — he is poorly briefed, he is acting in bad faith, he is positioning himself — the mechanism is in place. From then on, every contradictor who persists confirms the diagnosis already made about him. The system is perfectly sealed.

What a three-thousand-year-old text says

Proverbs treats pride with a precision that surprises you when you read it as a decision manual rather than a book of moral instruction.

The best-known verse — pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall — says something that is usually misread. It does not describe a punishment. It describes a sequence. Pride does not cause the fall through some external sanction. It causes it mechanically, by depriving the proud of the very information they would have needed to avoid it.

Another passage is more operational still: in the multitude of counsellors there is safety. This is not a tribute to collegiality, nor a case for more meetings. It is a statistical observation. A decision-maker alone has only his own frame of reference. Each additional counsellor does not add an opinion — he removes a blind spot. The shrinking of the circle is therefore, quite literally, a reduction in the field of vision.

And this one, which belongs on the wall of every boardroom: he that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him. Not a moral failing. Folly — that is, an error in reasoning.

The consultant and the strategist

In The Brooklyn Consultant, two people face each other across a boardroom table. Victoria Sterling is running the restructuring of a failing company: sixty percent workforce reduction, four of seven sites closed, ninety days. David Solomon, across the table, proposes something else.

She counters with her numbers. He counters with his: twelve companies turned around in fourteen years, no layoffs, fifteen thousand jobs preserved.

Her reply fits in one sentence: “Impossible by our models. If it were true, we’d know.”

His answer comes after a silence long enough to be an answer in itself: she only hears what resembles what she already knows.

Victoria Sterling is neither stupid nor cruel. She is excellent. That is precisely why she cannot hear him: her models have been right often enough that she has stopped treating them as models. They have become reality itself.

In the same room, minutes earlier, the head of human resources explained that she knows about a hundred employees — the managers. She is then asked how long the woman cleaning the lobby windows has worked there. She knows the answer: twenty-three years. She is simply surprised that anyone would ask.

That is not contempt. That is a circle that has shrunk.

The only question worth asking

Diagnoses of pride almost always end in exhortation: be humble, stay open, surround yourself with people who differ from you. The advice is sound and completely useless, because nobody believes themselves proud at the moment they are.

There is, however, a test, and it can be checked.

Find the last time someone contradicted you on an important decision. Not a nuance, not a question of method: a contradiction on substance. Find the date. Find the name.

Then look at what happened to that person afterwards.

If you cannot find a recent date, the circle is already small. If you find the date but what happened to that person afterwards was not enviable, the circle is closing and everyone around you understood it before you did.

It is an unpleasant test. It is also the only one that yields true information about yourself, because it does not measure what you think of you — it measures what others have learned not to tell you.

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This essay extends a question that runs through The Brooklyn Consultant — Pride Comes Before The Fall. Chapter one is free to subscribers of the Journal.