If you’ve ever been a manager, owner, or any type of business leader, you’ve experienced what I call the “drunk on power” phenomenon. I used to joke that one of the biggest dangers in business is the feeling you get from being the boss. Your working world revolves around you. Potential employees cozy up to you. Employees seek out your opinion or approval. Vendors try to get your business. Customers often ask to be part of your network. Everyone laughs a little harder at your jokes, whether they’re funny or not.
The problem isn’t authority itself. It’s what authority does to the information you receive.
The more successful you become, the more this phenomenon can be exacerbated. And as much as you try to stay focused on ensuring you’re making the right decisions for your company, it’s easy to get caught up in all of the accolades when you’ve been making right decisions for years or decades.
Over the years, I’ve started thinking about this as “friction deprivation.” If someone below you in the corporate hierarchy is ambitious to move up, they are going to flatter you. They’re going to tell you what they think you want to hear. And they are going to do so in a way that makes you feel really good about yourself. The subconscious trap is that you start to associate how Greg makes you feel with how good Greg actually is. Eventually, as the Gregs of the workplace get promoted up to the executive level, you’re left with a management team of yes-people, who provide no dissent. They flatter you to try and appear more competent than someone who might otherwise challenge your assumptions. This is as true in small business as it is in the corporate world.
This isn’t just a Fortune 500 problem. It’s a human problem. The larger the organization, the easier it is for information to arrive pre-filtered. Success doesn’t usually make people worse decision-makers, but rather it changes the quality of the information that reaches the top. Atlantic writer Noah Hawley recently penned a story about being invited to Jeff Bezos’s annual campfire retreat, where he experienced firsthand that people like Bezos struggle to even comprehend that someone might have a differing opinion, let alone voice it.
Even as far back as the 1980s, academic research https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/amr.1981.4287977 showed that dissent within organizations makes those organizations stronger – and conversely, organizations without dissent make worse decisions. “Moral reasoning develops through consequences,” writes Hawley. “Experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be.” This happens everywhere: in private business, religious organizations, governments, and more.
In fact, it’s most easily spotted in governments, simply because they exist in view of the public. Authoritarians like Stalin, Hitler, and Hussein ensured the people that served under them simply rubber-stamped their opinions – but those are extreme examples. If we move closer to home, President Warren Harding utilized the “Ohio Gang,” a collection of cronies from his home state, to staff his administration in the 1920s. That led directly to the Teapot Dome Scandal, and what would become judged as arguably the worst president in American history. And plenty of modern presidents have filled their cabinets only with people who agree with them. I don’t dabble in political opinions, but from a leadership and management perspective, nothing good can come out of that practice.
On the other side, you have leaders like Abraham Lincoln, who developed what has become known as his “Team of Rivals.” After a bitter primary fight, Lincoln offered his three key rivals high-up posts in his cabinet, to ensure that amidst a coming Civil War, he would have a diversity of opinions and feedback for the difficult years ahead. While it made for testy meetings, there’s no question the added friction gave Lincoln the advantage he needed to defeat the Confederacy. The constant disagreement forced Lincoln to examine his own thinking before acting.
And in corporate America, it can happen very slowly over time, resulting in disasters. Think Boeing executives ignoring feedback from lower-level workers about problems with the 737-MAX, or NASA brushing aside fears about the O-rings on Challenger. In a small business, you likely won’t deal with life and death decisions like this, but the repercussions can be existentially bad either way.
“It’s not that the wealthy become evil,” Hawley continues, “It’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back.” When you are powerful enough to fire anyone who disagrees with you, successful enough to financially cover up mistakes, and able to surround yourself with people who tell you how great you are, you lose an essential part of what makes us human: dealing with friction, dissension, and conflict. It’s obviously easy for that to happen when you run a Fortune 500 company, but it’s also surprisingly simple for it to occur in the realm of a small business, when a leader often only has one or two key people around them.
How do you avoid falling victim to friction deprivation? Besides the obvious choice of surrounding yourself with people who give you their honest opinions (and ensuring you don’t punish them for disagreeing with you), leaders need to ensure they remain close enough to the front lines to ensure they are getting honest feedback, rather than living within their own executive bubble.
The best business owners I’ve known all had one thing in common: they constantly opened themselves up to information that might tell them they’re wrong. They read criticism about their company and considered if it was reasonable. They spoke to and visited customers to understand more about them. They walked their own operations regularly, casually chatting with staff they came across. They simply put themselves in places where reality could still push back in a way that those at the top don’t always. They didn’t outsource reality. Good leaders don’t assume that success means they are smarter than everyone else. Instead, they spend each day continuing to seek out information that could help them improve themselves and their company.
Friction deprivation can also happen unintentionally. An assistant begins filtering out what emails you need to see. A supervisor decides you probably don’t need to know about the error that happened, because they already fixed it. Data dashboards replace what you can see with your own eyes. Executive summaries replace context. Oftentimes, people aren’t intentionally or maliciously lying to you. They’re just giving you the version of reality that they think makes the most sense to you.
Keeping yourself involved in friction is difficult, if nothing else because we’re all programmed to avoid conflict and disagreement. But seeking out friction does not mean creating chaos. Rather, it means seeking out what’s actually happening, even if that means getting yourself involved in friction. It can be as simple as hearing rough feedback from a customer, losing a bid to a competitor, an employee quitting because they were unhappy, or getting rejected in some way. The goal isn’t to maximize friction. Constant chaos doesn’t make anyone better. The goal is to preserve the right friction, the kind that keeps you connected to reality: honest criticism, real customers, direct observation. Consequences you can’t explain away.
Humans improve because the world pushes back. Businesses improve because customers push back. Leaders improve because those around them push back. Remove the friction and improvement often stops.
Success doesn’t guarantee wisdom. In many cases, it quietly works against it. The more successful you become, the more intentional you have to be about staying close to reality. Because eventually, the greatest risk isn’t making a bad decision. It’s no longer hearing that it was a bad decision in the first place.