I feel like this is gonna sound really dumb, but I was thinking about The Emperor’s New Clothes the other day. It dawned on me that I’d really never understood the meaning that an “innocent child” could say the Emperor has no clothes, but no one else could. I’d thought it was basically that the kid didn’t understand the social norms and just said what was.

And in most ways, that’s true. But the underlying bit – that the social norms are because the king has power and everyone is afraid of the king eluded me. Maybe it’s because I’d always seen versions where the king was basically an idiot, and not a vainglorious tyrant. But the reason people don’t tell the king he’s naked is because they’re afraid of him.

If you have a team, and you want people to bring critical issues to you, you have to build trust with your team more than anything else. You need for people to understand that not only will you not yell at them or embarrass them or harm them in some way if they tell you something you don’t want to hear, you will *celebrate* them and trust them *more*. This is super difficult in practice, because it’s humiliating to be told you’re naked, and it’s very instinctual to get defensive, or even lash out.

But yeah – if you have power, and you rule by fear, everyone will lavish praise on how good your new clothes look. It’ll feel awesome. You will feel great.

Building the kind of trust that allows people to tell you you’re naked is a huge amount of work. The results sometimes feel *awful* instead of great. But the difference? Yeah – it’s worth it.