Return to the throne room one last time, because the man who walked in there did something specific, and it can be learnt.
He had a king who had taken another man’s wife and arranged the husband’s death to cover it. He had every fact. What he did not have was the one thing most people reach for first: an accusation. He did not walk in and say, ‘You are a murderer.’ He told a story about a rich man and a poor man’s stolen lamb, and the king, hearing it, pronounced judgment with his whole chest. Only then did the storyteller close the trap: you are the man. The king had already convicted himself. That is the difference between a verdict and a mirror. A verdict is something you hand a person, and a person can refuse it. A mirror is something they look into, and what they see there is their own.
So here, at the end of a month spent on this question, is what it actually takes.
Earn the right before you need it. You cannot correct a leader you have not first served. Correction runs on a currency, and the currency is trust, deposited in advance through competence, loyalty, and a track record of wanting the leader to win. The person who has covered a gap, delivered under pressure, and defended the leader when he was not in the room has money in that account. The person who has done none of that and arrives with a critique is not making a withdrawal; he is asking for credit he never established. Build the account before the day you need to spend it.
Check your own motive first. Before you say a word, ask honestly: am I serving the mission, or am I discharging something of my own? Resentment, ambition, wounded pride, an old grievance dressed as feedback. Leaders can smell contaminated corrections across a room, and once they detect it, they stop hearing the content and start defending against the person. If you cannot separate the truth from your own irritation, you are not ready to deliver it yet.
Build a mirror, not a verdict. In practice, this usually means questions rather than statements. Can I show you what I saw in that meeting? May I tell you how that decision is landing with the team? What do you think happens if the client hears it that way? Ask permission first; describe what you observed rather than what you concluded; and let the person reach the judgement themselves. Self-discovered conviction holds. Imposed accusation hardens.
Go private first, and stay there as long as you can. The default is one room, two people, no audience. Public correction, even accurate public correction, forces the leader to defend his standing in front of others, and you have then made it about survival rather than truth. There is one exception: when the harm is public and ongoing, silence in private becomes complicity in public, and the correction must reach where the damage reaches. That is a high bar, not a convenience.
Know your ladder before you climb it. Sometimes correction fails, and the stakes are too high to shrug and move on. There is an order to what comes next, and it is worth knowing in advance: raise it again, more clearly. Escalate to someone with more standing. Put it in writing. Decline to participate in what you believe is wrong. Leave. And in the rarest case, when serious harm is being done, and every other door is shut, take it outside. Each rung costs more than the last. Most situations end on the first two. But a person who has never thought about the ladder tends to freeze at the bottom of it or leap recklessly to the top.
Now is the turn this whole series has been walking toward.
Everything above puts the burden on the person with less power, which is exactly where it least belongs. The most reliable answer to how you correct a leader is not a technique the follower performs. It is a condition the leader creates.
Because here is the quiet law of every organisation: a leader is correctable or uncorrectable based entirely on what happened to the last person who told him the truth. Everyone watched. If that person was thanked publicly and their standing rose, honesty just became affordable. If they were frozen out, passed over, or subtly punished for their nerve, the whole room learnt the price, and no one would pay it again. You do not have to silence people. You only have to make an example of one once.
So, if you lead anything, the work is structural, not just personal. Protect and promote the people who bring you what you did not want to hear. Ask for the objection by name and wait for it. Before a big decision, have someone argue the opposite case on purpose. Give people a way to tell you things that do not require courage on the day. Then, when the truth arrives, and it stings, watch your own face, because everyone else is.
The flatterer will always be more comfortable than the truth-teller. But comfort has never once protected a leader from the thing he could not see. Correction is not disloyalty. It is the deepest loyalty on offer. The wise follower learns how to give it. The wise leader builds a world where it no longer takes bravery to receive it.
Dr Toye Sobande is a strategic leadership expert, executive coach, lawyer, public speaker, and award-winning author. He is the CEO of Stephens Leadership Consultancy LLC, a strategy and management consulting firm offering creative insights and solutions to businesses and leaders. Email: [email protected]
