Loudest voice in the room

As a leader, your voice is the loudest in the room. Not literally - but once you share your opinion, others will adjust their thinking to match.

In psychology, this is called conformity bias. People assume you have more information than they do. They doubt their own view. They hold back - they don't want to argue, and they're afraid of being wrong.

You miss the chance to hear solutions you wouldn't have thought of. You miss seeing how your people actually think.

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Jeff Bezos noticed this at Amazon. "I know from experience," he said, "if I speak first, even very strong-willed, highly intelligent, high-judgment participants in that meeting will wonder, 'If Jeff thinks that, maybe I'm not right.'"

His solution: speak last. At Amazon, the most junior person speaks first, then the next most senior, and so on. Bezos calls reshaping their meeting approach "probably the smartest thing we ever did."

When Nelson Mandela was asked how he became a great leader, he said, "Because I learned to speak last." Two things he remembered from watching tribal meetings as a boy: they sat in a circle, and the chief always spoke last.

Simon Sinek puts it simply: "The skill to hold your opinions to yourself until everyone has spoken does two things. It gives everybody else the feeling that they have been heard. And you get the benefit of hearing what everybody else has to think before you render your opinion."

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The practice is simple. State the problem. Ask for their thinking. Listen. Ask questions only to understand, not to steer. Then speak.

You'll get better information. Your team will feel heard. And you might discover that someone else had the answer you were looking for.