In a recent leadership training, one practice stopped me in my tracks:
Leave room for the other voice.
For every decision made during the training, the trainer always left room for the people who disagreed. Not to build consensus, but to be aware of what we have possibly missed and value different viewpoints.
It sounds simple, almost obvious. But as I sat with it over the following days, I realized how I struggle putting this into practice —and how transformative it is when I do.
The uncomfortable truth
We love agreement. It feels good. It's efficient. When someone nods along with our ideas, it validates our thinking and makes us feel competent and heard. But here's what I'm learning: a room full of agreement is often a room full of danger.
When everyone agrees with you, one of two things is happening. Either you've hired people who think exactly like you—which means you're missing perspectives, blindspots, and opportunities. Or you've created an environment where people don't feel safe disagreeing with you—which means you're getting compliance, not commitment.
Neither scenario leads to better decisions. Both lead to stagnation.
Managers love ‘Yes-(wo)men’. Leaders reward dissent.
Simon Sinek makes a distinction that cuts to the heart of this issue: Managers love yes-men and yes-women—people who nod along and follow orders without question. Leaders actively seek out the people who will challenge them.
Simon's advice for when someone challenges you is deceptively simple:
Thank you. Tell me more.
Even if it stings.
Especially if it stings.
These six words do something powerful. They reframe challenge as contribution. They signal that this space is safe for truth-telling. They acknowledge that being challenged doesn't diminish you—it sharpens you.
But to be honest: I find this hard. When someone says, "I think you're making a mistake," our instinct is often to defend, to justify, to explain why they're wrong. We feel the sting of criticism. Our ego bristles. And in that moment, we have a choice.
Do we shut down the other voice to protect our idea? Or do we lean in, knowing that the discomfort we feel right now might be saving us from a much bigger problem later?
The simple metric
It made me remember a diagnostic question that David Marquet poses in Leadership is Language:
How much time are you talking versus letting others talk?
It's almost embarrassingly simple. But it's also brutally revealing.
Think about your last meeting. Who spoke the most? If you're the leader and you dominated the conversation, you didn't leave room for the other voice—no matter how much you believe you value input. You filled the space that others needed to think, to process, to find the courage to disagree.
Marquet's insight is that the ratio of talking to listening is one of the clearest indicators of whether we're actually creating space for other voices or just performing the idea of it. You can say all the right things about wanting diverse perspectives, but if you're talking 70% of the time, the math doesn't lie.
This isn't about being silent or passive. It's about being intentional. It's about recognizing that every minute you spend talking is a minute someone else can't. And often, the insights you most need to hear are sitting quietly in the minds of people who are waiting for you to stop talking long enough to let them in.
What leaving room looks like
Leaving room for the other voice isn't passive. It's not just tolerating disagreement when it happens to arise. It's actively creating conditions where dissent is welcomed, expected, and rewarded.
In practice, this means:
In meetings, it's pausing before you share your opinion and asking, "Who sees this differently?" It's noticing who hasn't spoken and creating space for them. It's being willing to sit with silence long enough for the quieter voices to gather their courage. And crucially, it's tracking how much you're talking versus how much others are talking—because if you're dominating the airtime, you're not leaving room, no matter what you tell yourself.
In decision-making, it's deliberately seeking out the people who you suspect will disagree with you. It's asking, "What am I missing?" and genuinely wanting to know. It's acknowledging that the best decisions emerge from tension, not consensus. And it's resisting the urge to fill every silence with your own thoughts.
In conflict, it's resisting the urge to win the argument and instead getting curious about what's underneath the disagreement. It's recognizing that someone who challenges you cares enough to engage—and that's a gift, not a threat.
In culture-building, it's telling stories about times when someone's challenge prevented a mistake. It's promoting and rewarding people who have the courage to speak truth to power. It's modeling vulnerability about your own limitations and blindspots.
Your choice
Here's the beautiful thing about this kind of leadership: it's not about your job title or where you sit on the org chart. It's about the daily choice to see people as humans rather than resources, to build trust rather than demand compliance, and to create an environment where people can do their best work.
Every interaction is an opportunity to lead. Every moment when someone says, "I have a different perspective," is a chance to practice saying, "Thank you. Tell me more."
The question isn't whether you have the authority to lead this way. The question is whether you have the courage.
Because leaving room for the other voice requires courage—the courage to be wrong, to be challenged, to admit you don't have all the answers. It requires the humility to recognize that the person disagreeing with you might be the one saving you from yourself.
A commitment
Since that training, I've been paying attention to how often I actually leave room for other voices—not just in theory, but in practice. And I'll be honest: I'm not where I want to be yet. There are still moments when my ego gets in the way, when I defend instead of listening, when I'm more attached to being right than to getting it right.
But I'm learning. And that learning starts with a simple commitment: the next time someone challenges me, I'm going to take a breath, feel the sting, and then say, "Thank you. Tell me more."
Not because it's easy. Because it's how we get better.