I said "that's a good idea." An innocuous moment that taught me about leadership authority and the conversation framework that followed.

I was in my first year as an Assistant Principal at a primary school when it happened. A staff member shared an idea in passing. I said, genuinely: "That's a good idea." What I didn't say clearly enough was: but we're not going to act on it right now. Weeks later, I discovered an entire year level had changed their teaching and learning approach. When I asked why, the response taught me a lot about leadership and authority.

"You told us to."

In my mind, I'd given a compliment not a directive. But in that moment, in that role, the distance between those two things had collapsed. I hadn't seen it because I couldn't feel the weight of my own title.

That moment is the reason why I wrote a leadership workbook called Leading from their World and it's the reason I want to share what I've learned about the thing most leadership development programs never quite address: the unintended authority that comes with any leadership role and what to do when it creates a problem you didn't know you were building.

The weight of a title

When you step into a leadership role (whether you wanted the title or it found you) your words stop being just your words. They arrive carrying the weight of your position, amplified by the role you hold, and filtered through every leader the other person has ever worked under before you.

This can be invisible to you and completely visible to the person listening.

Researchers who study organisational psychology describe this as positional power — the authority conferred by a role rather than earned through relationship. Most new leaders know it exists in theory. Very few understand how it operates in practice until a moment like mine makes it impossible to ignore.

The words of a leader are never simply words: They are amplified by the role and interpreted through the listener's experience of every leader who came before you. This is not a communication problem. It is a leadership condition, and it applies to every conversation you have, whether you're aware of it or not.

So, the question is not whether you will have your own version of my "that's a good idea" moment because you will. Every leader does. The question I’ll invite you to lean into is: What will I do when I discover it has happened? Ultimately, how you respond during these leadership moments will define your brand.

Research on positional power and leadership communication is extensive. A useful starting point is Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety at Harvard Business School, her concept of "leader inclusiveness" maps directly onto what I'd experienced without knowing what to call it.

The fork in the road: DBJ or AOG?

When you discover your words have landed differently than you intended (that a casual comment reshaped someone's behaviour, or that good intent produced a confusing outcome) there are two paths available to you.

I call them DBJ and AOG.

Deny · Blame · Justify

The instinctive path.

Deny: "That's not what I said."

Blame: "They misread the situation."

Justify: "I was just being encouraging."

Accept · Own · Grow

The leadership path.

Accept: "This happened on my watch."

Own: "My communication created this."

Grow: "What do I change from here?"

DBJ is a protection strategy. It keeps your ego intact and it makes the other person the problem. There is a kind of comfort in it. I know, because I felt the pull of it in my own moment. The urge to say, “that's not what I said. They misunderstood.”

But DBJ forfeits something critical. The moment you make the other person the problem, you have also made yourself powerless because you cannot fix what you won't own.

AOG is harder because it makes you the variable. AOG is uncomfortable but it works and it will do more for your leadership brand than most other strategies. When you accept that this happened on your watch and own your role in it, you recover something important: the ability to actually change the outcome.

The choice between DBJ and AOG is, in the end, a choice about what kind of leader you want to be when things go imperfectly, which they will.

That's not a prediction. That's the job.

The conversation that follows: Connect, Invite, Validate

Once you've made the AOG choice, you need a structure for the conversation that comes next. These conversations that follow misunderstandings are some of the most delicate a leader will have. In this instance, the other person did exactly what they believed you asked. They may have worked hard on it. They trusted you.

Correcting the situation without making them feel foolish, and without becoming defensive yourself, requires more than good intentions. It requires a framework.

The one I use is called CIV — Connect, Invite, Validate. It's grounded in the research of Dr Kurt Gray, whose work I'll come back to in a moment. Dr Gray likes to point out that CIV spells the beginning of the word "civil," which is a useful reminder of the register you're aiming for.

Connect: Acknowledge their effort and good faith before anything else. They acted on what they understood. That is not a failure, in fact it’s trust. Meet it with warmth, not correction.

"What matters most to you about your work right now?"

Invite: Ask them to walk you through what they heard and decided. Listen with curiosity, for the gap between your intention and their interpretation. Avoid interrogation. Signal safety, not scrutiny.

"I'd love to understand how you're seeing this."

Validate": Name your role in the confusion clearly. This is not weakness. It is the sentence that makes everything else possible. It’s also the one most leaders find hardest to say.

"I wasn't clear enough. That sits with me, not with you."

Try not to treat CIV like a script, rather a posture - a way of entering a conversation that keeps both parties “in the room” long enough to find something real. The order matters. If you lead with Validate before you've Invited, it can feel like a pre-emptive apology rather than a genuine acknowledgement. The sequence does the work.

For those interested in the psychological safety research that underpins why Invite and Validate work structurally, the work of William Kahn at Boston University on psychological conditions of engagement provides a useful foundation alongside Gray's own research.

The harm beneath — what Dr Kurt Gray's research reveals

I want to take a moment with the research that underpins all of this. Understanding it can help you navigate leadership mistakes like mine, but the real power comes from how it changes the way you read your team, approach difficult conversations and the conflicts you've been assuming are about personality.

Dr Kurt Gray is a psychologist at the University of North Carolina and the author of Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground. His work focuses on moral conflict — the kind of entrenched disagreement that feels impossible to bridge.

"At the end of the day, if you dig deep down, it's harm underneath whatever seems to be lying on top." — Dr Kurt Gray

Gray's research reveals something that reframes almost every difficult leadership dynamic I've ever encountered. We don't disagree because we have different values. We disagree because we have different assumptions about who is suffering and what causes harm.

Think about what that means in practice. When a team member disengages, the instinctive leadership read is: Low motivation. Attitude problem. Doesn't care. Gray's research suggests a different question entirely: what harm is this person protecting themselves from?

Maybe it's the harm of being exposed as incompetent in front of peers. Maybe it's the harm of being asked to compromise something they value. Maybe it's the harm of having their contribution ignored one too many times. Disengagement is almost always self-protection. Once you see it that way, the response changes completely.

The typecasting problem

Gray also identifies what he calls the typecasting trap: in conflict, we instinctively cast roles. I am reacting reasonably. They are being difficult. We reduce a whole person to a behaviour and, in doing so, we strip away the very complexity we need to actually resolve anything. Real conversation becomes possible only when both sides feel seen. That is the structural purpose of CIV. Not to make everyone feel good. To create the conditions in which honesty is less dangerous than silence.

Gray also names something he calls competitive victimhood, which is the tendency, in conflict, for both parties to compete to be seen as the one who was most harmed. It isn't manipulative because both people genuinely feel the harm they're describing. As long as both sides are locked in that competition, the conversation goes nowhere.

His antidote is not to declare a winner. It's to concede…even just 1%. To say, “I can see how my approach landed that way,” without making it a full capitulation. That small acknowledgement is often enough to stop the other person needing to defend themselves so fiercely. When the defensive walls come down, the dialogue can begin.

Gray's research is accessible in his book Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground, and through his lab's published work at the University of North Carolina. For leaders who want to go deeper into the psychology of conflict and harm perception, it is essential reading.

Three questions to try this week

Before I point you to the workbook, I want to leave you with something immediately useful. These three questions are drawn from the deep question bank I built as part of my research into Gray's framework. They are designed to open a conversation without forcing it and to help create the conditions for honesty.

Try one of them in your next one-to-one conversation. Notice what it does to the energy in the room.

Question 1: "What's something you're carrying right now that you haven't had space to say yet?"

Question 2: "What would you want me to understand about your experience that I might be missing?"

Question 3: "What would help you most from me right now - advice, space, or something else?"

These questions share a structure. They signal curiosity rather than assessment. They create room for the other person to direct the conversation rather than respond to your agenda. And crucially, they ask about experience — not performance.

Gray's research found that people are far more likely to be honest with leaders who demonstrate genuine curiosity than with those who rely on authority. These questions are not soft. They are structurally different from the performance questions most leaders’ default to and that difference is felt immediately by the person on the other side of the conversation.

One last thing

I have been thinking about that "that's a good idea" moment for years. It taught to be careful about what I say. At a deeper level, though, it has taught me that leadership is a relational act performed in conditions of asymmetric power. An important step to leading well is understanding the asymmetry you're operating in.

The frameworks in this article — DBJ vs AOG, CIV, the harm question — are not a set of techniques. They are a way of seeing. Once you start asking "what harm might this person be protecting themselves from?" before you walk into a difficult conversation, the conversation changes. Not always. But often enough.

The goal is not to never create a "that's a good idea" moment. The goal is to be the kind of leader who, when it happens, moves toward the conversation rather than away from it.

If this resonated, the full framework, a 30-question deep coaching bank, reflection tools and a 30-day integration plan are all in the free workbook: Leading from their World. No course, no upsell, just the thinking.

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Roland Lewis

Leadership coach and consultant. I help leaders have the conversations that change things — without making them adversarial.

rolandlewiscoaching.com