Leadership wisdom found in a LinkedIn post:

Thanks Kimberly!

From a LinkedIn post:  

For 25 years as CEO of WD-40 Company, I opened almost every meeting with the same line.

'"Good day, I'm Garry Ridge.

I'm the consciously incompetent, probably wrong, roughly right CEO of WD-40 Company,

and I need all the help I can get."

People assumed I was being humble for effect.

Most never realized it was the most strategic sentence I said all year.

That line was not modesty.

It was an operating system.

When you are a senior leader, information gets filtered before it reaches you. 

People smile more. They challenge less. Reports get edited. Bad news arrives softer. Sometimes it never arrives at all.

Nobody wants to be the person who hands the boss the hard truth.

So the truth stops traveling.

And you spend quarters making decisions based on a version of the company that does not actually exist.

The introduction line was my structural fix.

By naming my own incompetence first, in public, I changed the rules of the room. People watching me say "I am probably wrong and I need help" learned that being wrong and asking for help were now permissible behaviors.

The signal traveled.

The decisions got better because the information got better.

Here is a diagnostic question I want you to sit with:

Has anyone told you that you were wrong about something important in the last 30 days?

If the honest answer is no, your team has not gone quiet on you.

You went quiet on them."