CEOs don’t realize their haters make them better leaders

By Beth Kowitt

THE TITANS of corporate America have had enough of their critics.

At Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Chief Executive Officer David Solomon has who criticized his leadership and leaked to the press about problems in the bank’s consumer lending business.

At Meta Platforms, Inc., the grew jealous of how Elon Musk evaded criticism — leading to what insiders called “Elon envy.” Zuckerberg is now channeling that Musk energy, less willing to take advice or listen to employee concerns over policy changes around issues such as diversity, equity, and inclusion and content moderation.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. on an internal webpage announcing the bank’s five-day-a-week return-to-office (RTO) policy after dozens balked. And CEO Jamie Dimon who asking him to reconsider , “Don’t waste time on it. I don’t care how many people sign that f**king petition.” Employees who don’t like it can get a job elsewhere, he’s said.

Alphabet, Inc.’s Google made big changes to its , neutering what, for more than a decade, had been a forum for employees to express displeasure with their bosses and corporate policies.

Quashing dissent appears to be the next step in the CEO playbook for re-exerting authority after a pandemic that shifted power into the hands of workers. As CEOs return to , they have only become more emboldened — perhaps even inspired — by a White House with zero tolerance for anyone unwilling to toe the party line.

We can all understand the impulse to silence critics. They can slow decision making, create conflict and decimate morale. Admit it: We think they’re idiots and annoying troublemakers.

But there are good reasons that everyone — and especially CEOs — should not just tolerate dissenters but encourage them. That’s the argument Charlan Nemeth makes in her 2018 book In Defense of Troublemakers. The retired University of California, Berkeley psychology professor has made studying the value of dissent her life’s work, and she summed it up to me this way: “Fear consensus and welcome dissent.”

Consensus holds a power over us that is difficult to break. We believe so deeply that the consensus opinion must be right that found that people follow the majority as much as 70% of the time — even when that majority is wrong.

But the bigger problem is what that group-think does to our own thinking, she argues. We have a harder time seeing alternative solutions and problems that could be right in front us. We adopt the strategies and mindset of the majority and look for information that supports its position. That all leads to bad decision making.

Everything changes when we are presented with a dissenting viewpoint. It breaks the majority’s hold by broadening our thinking. We consider more information, options, and problem-solving strategies. We become more original, curious, and independent.

“Dissent stimulates the kind of thinking we know is related to good decision making that, frankly, you can’t teach people,” Nemeth told me.

In just one of many examples in her book, Nemeth cites a study of the Supreme Court’s decisions that analyzed its written opinions for “integrative complexity” — the ability to see and process different perspectives and ideas. The researchers found that when the Court’s majority faced a dissenting opinion, the integrative complexity of its written opinions was high. But when the Court was unanimous, its written opinions were less complex and more one-sided.

Perhaps Nemeth’s most important conclusion is that dissent has value even when it’s wrong. In the 1950s, psychologist in which participants were shown two slides side by side. One slide pictured a single line meant to act as a standard, and the other slide had three lines. The subjects had to pick the line on the second slide that was the same length as the standard. The answer was so obvious that alone they had no problem picking the correct line. But when they were told a unanimous group had picked one of the incorrect lines, 37% of agreed with the majority’s incorrect answer.

However, building upon that work found that if just one person breaks from the group and picks the other wrong line, agreement with majority’s incorrect answer dropped from 37% to 9%. “Even if a dissenter is wrong, and even if she is not an ally, she is of major value because she breaks the majority’s power,” Nemeth writes.

Dissent changes opinions, even if we don’t acknowledge or realize it. Nemeth told me people will resist publicly agreeing with dissenters, even when they’ve privately been persuaded. We may have seen a flavor of that . Executives who criticized Solomon’s consumer lending expansion are gone, but the board launched a review and the bank is now exiting the consumer business.

In reality, leaders shouldn’t worry that much about quashing dissent; it’s already quashed. One study Nemeth points to found that around when they see problems because they think they’ll be ignored or fear the consequences of breaking with the majority.

That’s a statistic that should frighten the CEOs more than any critic.

BLOOMBERG OPINION