The Danger of Surrounding Yourself with Yes-Men

Every major strategic blind spot in your organization is almost certainly hiding in a conversation no one has been willing to have with you yet. 

Episode Summary 

Nobody goes looking for yes-men. What you go looking for is people who are capable, aligned, and easy to work with. But over time, as your position solidifies and your track record grows, something shifts. People around you learn — quietly, often unconsciously — that agreement gets rewarded and pushback gets costly. The result is a curated version of reality that’s been pre-screened for palatability. And the leader has no idea that’s what’s happening. 

This episode examines one of the most underdiagnosed leadership problems in business through two sharp Proverbs and one of the most instructive leadership case studies in all of Scripture — Rehoboam’s catastrophic decision to reject experienced counsel in favor of advisors who confirmed what he already wanted to do. The result split a kingdom. The mechanism plays out in businesses every week. You’ll walk away with two concrete moves to find out what’s not reaching you — before it’s too late. 

What You’ll Learn 

• How echo chambers form around leaders — not through malice, but through the ordinary human dynamics of reward and avoidance 
• What the Hebrew word shāmaʿ reveals about the difference between leaders who appear to listen and leaders who actually do 
• Why “many advisers” in Proverbs 15:22 is a diversity argument, not a committee argument — and what that means for how you structure input 
• The full story of Rehoboam in 1 Kings 12 — why he rejected the elders, what his peers told him instead, and how one afternoon’s decision fractured a kingdom 
• A specific question to ask one person this week that will tell you more about your blind spots than a year of performance reviews 

Scripture References 

Proverbs 12:15 — The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice 

Proverbs 15:22 — Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed 

1 Kings 12:6–16 — Rehoboam rejects the elders’ counsel and follows his peers — the kingdom splits 

Key Quote 

“A room where everyone agrees is not a room with many advisers. It’s a room with one adviser and several echoes.” 

Timestamps 

0:00  —  Hook and Introduction 

1:57  —  Why This Matters in Business 

4:34  —  What Scripture Says 

11:16  —  Illustration 

13:20  —  Application 

15:31  —  Encouragement and Prayer 

Call to Action 

Think about the last time someone on your team told you something you genuinely didn’t want to hear — then listen to this episode. And if you know a leader who’s surrounded themselves with people who mostly agree with them, send it their way. They need it more than they know. 

Profit and Principle  •  Where Sunday’s truth meets Monday’s bottom line. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There is a management failure so common, so predictable, and so consistently catastrophic that you'd think every experienced leader would know how to guard against it. And yet, it happens at every level, in family businesses, in corporate suites, in growing startups, over and over again to leaders who are smart enough to know better. It's the failure of surrounding yourself with people who only tell you what you want to hear. Here's how it almost always starts. You don't go looking for yes men. Nobody does. What you do go looking for is people who are capable, aligned, and easy to work with. And for a while that's what you get. But over time, as your position solidifies and your track record grows, something shifts. People around you, they learn, quietly, often unconsciously, that agreement gets rewarded and pushback gets costly. Not because you're a tyrant necessarily, just because you're human. You respond a little more warmly to people who confirm your instincts. You get a little impatient with people who complicate your thinking. And the teams adjust, slowly, invisibly, until the day you need someone to tell you that your plan has a fatal flaw and everyone in the room is nodding. I'm Daryl. This is Profit and Principle. Today we're talking about one of the most underdiagnosed leadership problems in the business world, and what scripture says about it with uncommon clarity and a real historical example that is almost too on the nose to believe. Here's what you'll walk away with: an honest diagnosis of whether you built an echo chamber around yourself and two specific moves to change that before it costs you something you can't get back. Let me describe the mechanics of how an echo chamber gets built around a leader, because it almost never happens by design. You hire people you like. That's natural and not entirely wrong. Trust and relational chemistry matter on a team, but people like you have a way of becoming people who remind you of yourself, which has a way of becoming people who see things the way you see them. And without realizing it, you've built a room where inputs are all running through the same filter. Then there's the feedback problem. When a leader consistently signals through tone, through body language, through how they respond when someone disagrees that certain ideas aren't welcome, people stop bringing them. It's not a conspiracy, it's basic organizational behavior. Smart people read the room. They figure out which hills are worth dying on and which ones aren't. And they start saving their energy for the battles they think they can win. The result is that the leader gets a curated version of reality, one that's been pre-screened for palatability, and the leader has no idea that that is what's happening. This is how organizations walk confidently off cliffs. Not because the people in them are stupid, but because the information architecture has been shaped over time by a culture that rewards agreement. The leader who had the most authority to change that culture had the least incentive to notice it was happening. Here's the business cost and it's direct. Every major strategic blind spot in your organization is almost certainly hiding in a conversation no one has been willing to have with you yet. The competitor eating your lunch, the operational problem your team has been managing around for two years, the key employee who's quietly been disengaging for months. None of these are secrets to people in your organization. They're just secrets from you. And they will stay secrets until you create the conditions for true telling, or until reality forces the conversation in a far more expensive way. So let's take a look at what Scripture says about this, and we will start out in Proverbs chapter 12, verse 15. And it says this the way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice. Two kinds of people, one sentence, the contrast is clean and unsparing. The fool in Proverbs is not necessarily unintelligent. The Hebrew word here describes someone who is morally and practically deficient in their relationship to wisdom. The fool's defining character isn't stupidity. It's the settled conviction that their own perspective is sufficient. They don't need input because they've already arrived. Their way is right in their own eyes. And the phrase in his own eyes is the tell. It's not saying their way is objectively right. It's saying that they decided it is from inside their own frame of reference, without submitting it to outside scrutiny. The wise person, by contrast, listens to advice. And the Hebrew word used for listens here, it means to hear with the intent to obey, to give genuine weight to what's being said. It's not the listening of someone who lets feedback wash over them while they wait to talk. It's the kind of listening that actually changes outcomes. For the leader, the question isn't whether you have an open door policy or whether you say you want honest feedback. The question is whether the feedback that comes through the door actually changes anything. Do people around you have the evidence that you are doing that kind of listening? Because if they don't have that evidence, the door doesn't stay open for long. Let's move ahead a little bit in Proverbs chapter 15 and look at verse 22. Without counsel, plans fail, but with many advisors they succeed. This is one of the most practically direct verses in all of Proverbs, and it makes a claim that deserves to be taken seriously as a business principle, not just a spiritual sentiment. Plans fail without counsel. Not sometimes without counsel. The Proverb is establishing a general principle about how human decision making works, that no individual perspective, however experienced or intelligent, is sufficient for the full complexity of the most significant decisions. The blind spots aren't a personal failing, they're a structural feature of operating from a single vantage point. The phrase many advisors doesn't mean a large committee or a crowdsourced decision. The Hebrew word for many here carries a sense of abundance or a plurality or a diversity. The picture is of a leader who deliberately surrounds himself with a variety of perspectives. People who see things differently, who have different experiences, who will push back from angles the leader hasn't considered. That's the architecture of good decisions. Notice also what the proverb doesn't say. It doesn't say with advisors who agree with you. It doesn't say with advisors who make you feel confident. With many advisors, the diversity of counsel is part of the point. A room where everyone agrees is not a room with many advisors. It's a room with one advisor and several echoes. Now for our third passage, let's go ahead and move to 1 Kings chapter 12, and let's begin by looking at verses 6 through 8. It says this King Rehoboam consulted with the old men who had stood before his father Solomon while he was still alive, saying, How do you advise me to answer this people? And they said to him, If you will be a servant to this people today and serve them, and speak good words to them when you answer them, then they will be your servants forever. But he abandoned the counsel that the old men gave him, and took counsel with the young men who had grown up with him and stood before him. This is the passage that makes Proverbs concrete, and the story that follows is one of the most instructive leadership case studies in the entire Bible. So here's the context. Solomon had just died. His son Rehoboam is about to be crowned king over all Israel. The people come to him with one request. Lighten the burden his father placed on them, and they will serve him faithfully. Rehoboam asks for three days to consider it, and he consults two groups. The first group is the elders, experienced advisors who had served his father. Their counsel is striking in its wisdom and its humility. Be a servant to this people first. Meet them where they are. Speak good words. Build a relationship before you build power. They're telling Rehoboam something counterintuitive. Your authority will be more durable if it's built on service rather than force. But Rehoboam rejects that counsel. He goes instead to his peers, the young men he grew up with, who had grown up in the palace alongside him, who shared his assumptions and his instincts about power. Their advice is the opposite. Tell the people your little finger is thicker than your father's thigh. Make it harder, not easier. Establish dominance from the start. The text says Rehoboam preferred this advice, and the Hebrew word used means to forsake or to abandon. He didn't weigh both options carefully. He forsook the council of experience in favor of the council that confirmed what he already wanted to know. The result? Well, ten of the twelve tribes of Israel revolt and walk away. The kingdom splits. What had been the most powerful united monarchy in Israel's history fractures in a single afternoon. Because a new king chose counselors who told him what he wanted to hear rather than what he needed to know. And the principle, well, it's devastating in its simplicity. The advisors you choose determine the quality of the decisions you make. And the advisors you choose are shaped by what you're actually looking for when you ask for input. If you want confirmation, you'll get it. If you want wisdom, you actually have to want wisdom, which means being willing to hear things that complicate your plan. I want to bring this close to home with a scenario most of you will recognize. A founder that I'll call Thomas had built a regional retail chain over 18 years, 12 locations, a loyal customer base, and a tight-knit leadership team that had been with him for most of that journey. Thomas was well liked, he was decisive and optimistic by nature, and his team reflected that. They were hardworking, loyal, and deeply brought in to the company's identity. They were also, almost to a person, people who had learned over the years that Thomas made faster decisions when the discussion stayed positive. When someone raised their concern, Thomas would often reframe it immediately. Well, here's why that's actually an opportunity, and move on. Not dismissively, but enthusiastically. It was one of the things people liked about him. He was hard to discourage. The problem was that hard to discourage had slowly become almost impossible to warn. When a major international competitor entered Thomas' primary market, three of the store managers knew from the customer conversations they were having and from traffic patterns they were watching, they knew that it was going to be more disruptive than Thomas expected. Two of them tried in different ways to surface that concern. Both times Thomas reframed it optimistically and moved on. By the time the revenue data made the threat undeniable, Thomas was 18 months behind where he would have been if he had heard those warnings clearly the first time they were raised. He didn't have bad people around him. He had people who had adapted to him. And because he had never intentionally built a culture where hard truth was explicitly valued and protected, the truth found its own way around him through numbers, and much later, at a much greater cost. Raya Bohem had 18 months compressed into one afternoon. The mechanism was the same. So what can you do about it? Well, here are two moves, concrete and actionable this week. And here's the first one. Identify the person most likely to see your blind spots and go ask them. Not in a group, not in a formal setting where power dynamics will shape the answer, one-on-one privately, with someone who has just enough access to know where things were actually struggling and enough trust in you to say something difficult if you create the right conditions. Here's exactly what to ask. What's something I'm consistently missing or getting wrong that you've been hesitant to tell me? Then do the hardest thing. Stop talking. Don't explain, don't reframe, don't express immediate gratitude in a way that closes down the conversation, just listen. Take notes. Let the discomfort settle in. That discomfort is the price of good information, and it's considerably cheaper than the alternative. If you generally can't think of anyone in your organization who would answer that question honestly, that is itself the diagnosis, and you need to start there. Now, here's the other thing you can do. Audit the last three significant decisions you made and identify who you consulted. Write it down. For each decision asked, who did I ask? Did they all share my same basic assumptions about this? Did anyone push back? And if so, what did I do with that pushback? And did I actively seek out someone who I knew would see it differently? Most leaders, when they do this honestly, discover their advisory circle is much narrower than they thought. Not because they're lazy, but because the path of least resistance and decision making is to ask people who are most likely to confirm the direction you're already leaning. Proverbs calls that foolishness. Not failure, but foolishness. And foolishness has a cure. It's called seeking wise counsel deliberately, even when, or especially when, you'd rather not hear what it might say. Here's the honest thing I want to say before we close. Building a culture where true travels to the top is one of the hardest things a leader can do, because it requires you to consistently respond to bad news in a way that rewards the messenger. Every time someone brings you a problem and you react with frustration, or you immediately pivot to why they're wrong, or you marginalize them subtly in the weeks that follow, you're training your entire organization to filter information they bring you. And that training sticks. Now the inverse is equally true. Every time you receive a hardware with genuine curiosity, every time you say, tell me more, instead of here's why that's not right, you are opening the door a little wider. You're signaling that truth telling is safe here, and over time that signal compounds. The best people on your team, the ones who see the most and think the most clearly, will stay and speak because they know you can handle it. Rehoboam couldn't handle it. The elders knew exactly what he needed to hear. He just wasn't looking for that. Don't be Rehoboam. Let me pray for you. Father, I pray for every leader listening right now who is surrounded by people they trust and who may not realize how thoroughly that circle has been shaped by what they've rewarded. Give them the courage to ask the questions they've been avoiding. Give the people around them the courage to answer honestly. Protect them from the particular danger of a run of success that has made them hard to warn. And give them the wisdom of Proverbs to recognize that the way of a fool is right in their own eyes, and to genuinely, actively choose something better. Make them leaders worth following. Not because they're always right, but because they're always seeking what is right. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, I hope you will join us next week for our next episode of Profit and Principle. We're switching gears to a new series, so hope you'll join us for that. In the meantime, head over to our website, profitandprinciple.com. There you will find a blog that further unpacks this content. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter that gets delivered every Monday morning. And there you will find just additional discussions on the topic from today. And then finally, each episode has a one-page PDF that you can download absolutely free. And with those PDFs, you can do them in a small group study if you want with others at work, or you can do them on your own. So all those resources are provided absolutely free. And my goal is that they would bless you in your work. And if they do, if you're finding value from this content, I would greatly appreciate it if you would leave me a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts. So I hope to see you and hear from you next week.