A Room Full of Advice: Emerson on Taking Counsel Without Surrendering the Decision
Introduction
If you are a CEO, business owner, or senior leader, you probably don’t have a shortage of people willing to give you advice. You have employees, leadership team members, board members, peers, consultants, accountants, attorneys, friends, and perhaps a coach or peer advisory group. Today, you also have access to more information, data, research, and technology than leaders at any other point in history. Add artificial intelligence to the mix, and there is almost always somewhere—or someone—you can turn to for another opinion.
That can be a very good thing. I have spent much of my career working with CEOs and business owners, and I believe strongly in the value of getting good people around you. None of us knows everything, and other people often see things we don’t see, have experiences we haven’t had, and ask questions we haven’t thought to ask. The challenge isn’t whether you should seek advice. The challenge is knowing what to do with that advice once you receive it and understanding where the adviser’s role ends and your responsibility as the leader begins.
That question led me back to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Who Was Ralph Waldo Emerson?
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, and poet and one of the leading voices of the 19th-century Transcendentalist movement. He wrote extensively about independence, character, friendship, experience, individual responsibility, and the importance of thinking for yourself rather than simply accepting conventional wisdom. His ideas influenced generations of writers and thinkers, but I believe some of them also have something useful to say to today’s business leaders.
Emerson is perhaps best known for his 1841 essay Self-Reliance. The title can lead people to a conclusion that I don’t think is particularly helpful in a leadership context. Self-reliance doesn’t have to mean ignoring other people, rejecting expertise, or assuming you always know best. A CEO who refuses to listen to anyone else isn’t demonstrating particularly good judgment. More often, that person is eliminating one of the most valuable resources available to any leader: the experience and perspective of other people.
What interests me about Emerson is the tension between listening to others and maintaining the independence to think for yourself. How do you surround yourself with smart, experienced people, take their counsel seriously, and remain open to changing your mind without allowing the group to make a decision that ultimately belongs to you? That is not just a philosophical question. CEOs and business owners deal with some version of it all the time.
Advice Is Valuable, but It Has Limits
Think about an important decision you’ve made recently. You may have talked with your leadership team, reviewed the financial information, called someone you trust, spoken with your accountant or attorney, researched what competitors were doing, or asked another CEO who had faced something similar. Each of those sources could contribute something valuable, but each person is also looking at the decision from a different vantage point.
Your CFO may understand the financial implications better than anyone else in the room. Your attorney may understand the legal risk. An operations leader may see implementation problems that aren’t obvious in a spreadsheet. A salesperson may understand how customers are likely to react. Another CEO may be able to tell you what happened when he or she made a similar decision. Good leadership decision making requires you to listen to those perspectives because they can help you understand things you would otherwise miss.
The difficulty is that none of those perspectives necessarily answers the entire question. Someone can give you facts, expertise, experience, options, warnings, and an opinion about what you should do. You still have to weigh those things against one another, decide which risks you are willing to accept, and determine what makes sense for your organization. Ultimately, you are the person who has to live with the consequences of the decision.
That is the distinction I explore in A Room Full of Advice: Emerson on Taking Counsel Without Surrendering the Decision. The objective isn’t to become less dependent on advice. It is to become better at using advice without confusing someone else’s expertise or confidence with your own responsibility to exercise judgment.
Do the People Around You Tell You the Truth?
There is another issue that becomes increasingly important as you move into senior leadership. Having smart people around you doesn’t do much good if they aren’t willing to tell you what they actually think. CEOs sometimes believe they are receiving candid advice when the people around them have actually learned to edit what they say based on how the CEO responds to disagreement.
This is worth thinking about. Who in your organization can tell you that you’re wrong? Who can question an assumption you’ve already become attached to, challenge a strategy you strongly support, or point out that the numbers don’t support the story you’ve been telling yourself? More importantly, what happens when someone does?
If people discover that disagreeing with the leader carries a price, most of them will eventually stop doing it. That doesn’t mean they suddenly agree. It means the leader is no longer hearing what they really think. One of the responsibilities of leadership, therefore, is not simply finding good advisers but creating relationships in which honest counsel is possible.
This is one reason I believe peer relationships can be so valuable for CEOs and business owners. A peer who doesn’t report to you, isn’t competing for your approval, and understands the responsibilities that come with running an organization can often ask questions that people inside the company have difficulty asking. The value isn’t that the peer has the answer. The value may be that the peer helps you see the question differently.
Knowing When to Change Your Mind
Independent thinking also doesn’t mean refusing to change your mind. In fact, one of the tests of good judgment is whether you can recognize when new information, better reasoning, or changing circumstances should cause you to reconsider a position.
Leaders can sometimes confuse consistency with strength. We take a position, communicate it publicly, invest time and resources in it, and then find it increasingly difficult to acknowledge that circumstances have changed. The longer we have defended the decision, the more personally invested we can become in proving that the original decision was right.
Emerson’s thinking raises an interesting challenge here. If you are genuinely thinking for yourself, you have to give yourself permission to think differently tomorrow than you do today. The question isn’t whether you have remained perfectly consistent. The question is whether your current judgment reflects what you now know.
That distinction matters in business because conditions change. Markets change, employees change, customers change, competitors change, technology changes, and organizations themselves change. A decision that made perfect sense three years ago may make very little sense today. Good advisers can help us recognize those changes, but we still have to be willing to reconsider what we believe.
When Your Strengths Start Working Against You
Another reason leaders need honest counsel is that our greatest strengths can eventually create problems for us. Many entrepreneurs succeed because they are unusually persistent, confident, decisive, competitive, detail-oriented, or willing to take risks. Those qualities may have been essential to building the business, particularly during its early years.
The problem is that strengths don’t automatically remain strengths in every situation. Persistence can become stubbornness. Confidence can make it difficult to hear contrary evidence. Decisiveness can become impatience. Attention to detail can turn into micromanagement. A willingness to take risks can become an inability to recognize when the downside has changed.
We are not always the best people to recognize when that transition has occurred. Someone who knows us well and is willing to be candid may see it before we do. Again, the purpose of advice isn’t to turn the decision over to someone else. It is to improve the quality of our own thinking.
Putting Emerson’s Ideas to Work
I didn’t write A Room Full of Advice as an academic examination of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and you don’t need a background in philosophy or American literature to find value in it. I am interested in what happens when we take some of these ideas about self-reliance, friendship, character, consistency, and independent thought and apply them to the decisions leaders actually have to make.
Throughout the paper, I ask you to examine how you seek and use advice. Who are the people you turn to when a decision really matters? What do they know that you don’t? Who challenges you rather than simply confirming what you already believe? Are there people you listen to too much or too little? Are you genuinely looking for another perspective, or are you sometimes looking for someone to validate a decision you’ve already made?
The paper also includes practical questions and exercises you can use individually, with your leadership team, or with a peer advisory group. There are eight questions to work through when you are facing a difficult decision, a structured 90-minute leadership discussion, and an action plan designed to move these ideas from reflection into practice.
My hope is that this paper helps you think differently about the role advice plays in leadership. The objective isn’t to become a leader who needs less input from other people. In my experience, the opposite is usually true. As the decisions become more consequential, you need people around you who know things you don’t know, see things you don’t see, and are willing to tell you things you may not particularly want to hear.
The responsibility that remains yours is deciding what to do with what they tell you. You can listen carefully, ask better questions, seek out disagreement, reconsider your assumptions, and change your mind when the facts warrant it. You can learn from the collective experience of a room full of smart people without asking that room to carry a responsibility that ultimately belongs to you.
That is the leadership challenge at the center of A Room Full of Advice: take counsel seriously, think for yourself, and own the decision you make.