There's a paradox buried in most leadership development programs: they spend enormous energy teaching leaders how to speak — and almost none teaching them how to be spoken to. The 2nd-century CE Buddhist logician Nagarjuna, in his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, argued that our most dangerous delusion isn't ignorance of facts but the subtle conviction that our current vantage point is the vantage point — that we're seeing the thing, not a view of the thing. Modern leadership researcher Amy Edmondson (in her 2018 work on psychological safety) found that teams perform best not when leaders are more confident, but when team members believe their candid input won't be punished. These two ideas land in the same place: the leader who thinks they've already triangulated the truth is precisely the one who destroys the conditions for truth-telling. Today, before your first meeting, notice the moment you feel certain you already know what someone is going to say — and decide to listen as if you don't.

When did you last genuinely change your position because of something a direct report said — and did they know it changed you?

Drawing from Indian Buddhist Philosophy / Organizational Psychology — Nagarjuna (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, c. 150–250 CE) and Amy Edmondson (The Fearless Organization, 2018)