7 Ways to Immediately Open Your Mind to Useful Ideas | Leadership Freak

In other words, if you can recognize that you have blind spots and open-mindedly consider the possibility that others might see something better than you—and that the threats and opportunities they are trying to point out really exist—you are more likely to make good decisions.

What you don’t want to happen is unsustainable stress, or for people to not share failure or tell you when you’re wrong. So you need to actively fight this as the leader by: a) asking for dissent (“does everyone agree this is the right path? Does anyone disagree”? and letting a silence hang until someone speaks) b) reward debate. If someone dissent

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You’ll want to implement strong feedback loops and a work culture where everyone accepts that there’s more than one valid way to look at an issue. This is called dialectical thinking, and successful executives work hard at promoting it, because it’s easier to arrive at the right answer when people feel comfortable respectfully disagreeing with one

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This advice is particularly important for leaders. People pay close attention to the leader’s behavior since they depend on the leader for recognition.77 Studies also show that people look to the leader to initiate change.78 If leaders fail to acknowledge their failures—if there’s a perception that the leader can do no wrong—it’s unrealistic to exp

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