You’re Not Smart Enough to Lead Alone
"Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed." (Proverbs 15:22) There's a strange thing that
“Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.” (Proverbs 15:22)
There’s a strange thing that happens when people get promoted. The higher they climb, the fewer people they ask for advice. It makes sense on the surface. You earned that position because you make good decisions. Asking too many questions might look like weakness.
But Proverbs 15:22 reveals why leaders need advisers more, not less, as they gain authority. The verse points to counsel (multiple advisers, plural) as the difference between success and failure.
How Pride Distorts Reality
When you succeed at something difficult, you develop a relationship with your own judgement that borders on religion. Your track record becomes evidence that you see things others don’t. And you do. But that same track record can blind you to what you’re not seeing.
Pride isn’t just arrogance. It’s a structural problem in how you perceive reality. Pride tells you that seeking counsel means you don’t have the answer. It reframes humility as weakness and certainty as strength. Every question becomes a referendum on your competence.
The isolated leader begins seeing dissenting voices as obstacles rather than correction mechanisms. They start selecting for agreement rather than insight. Their inner circle shrinks to people who think like them. This isn’t malicious. It’s the natural drift of an unchecked ego meeting the intoxicating drug of being right.
Why Isolation Compounds Error
Isolation doesn’t just limit information. It fundamentally distorts your reasoning process.
When you work through a problem alone, you have an intuition, build a rationale around it, find supporting evidence, and develop conviction. This feels like rigorous thinking. But you’ve essentially had a conversation with yourself where every participant already agrees with you. This is precisely why leaders need advisers who challenge their thinking.
Now contrast that with exposing the same thinking to five different advisers. One spots the assumption you didn’t realise you were making. Another points out the consequence you didn’t consider. A third asks why you’re framing it this way instead of that way. A fourth shares a story about someone who tried something similar.
Your idea either gets stronger through refinement or reveals itself as unworkable before you’ve bet the company on it. Either outcome is vastly preferable to discovering six months in that your plan had a fatal flaw.
The leader in isolation doesn’t have access to this error-correction mechanism. They refine their thinking in an echo chamber of their own biases. They interpret every warning sign through a lens that confirms what they already believe.
This is how intelligent, capable people make catastrophically bad decisions. Not through stupidity, but through isolation and pride creating a feedback loop where conviction substitutes for wisdom.
The Mentorship Architecture of Success
Behind every thriving entrepreneur is a network of mentors. Not a mentor. A network. Understanding why leaders need advisers begins with recognising that no single person can provide all the perspectives required for sustained success.
Mentors give you pattern recognition you haven’t earned yet. They’ve seen your film before. When you’re six months into a strategy that feels promising, they recognise it as the setup for a disaster they lived through a decade ago. When you’re panicking about a problem that feels existential, they recognise it as a normal developmental stage every company goes through.
This saves you from the specific kind of mistakes that end things. The mistake that kills your runway. The partnership that destroys your culture. The key hire who creates chaos. The pivot that abandons your only real advantage.
Mentors also give you permission to change your mind. When you’re surrounded by people who only know the current version of you and your company, changing direction feels like failure. But a mentor who’s watched you evolve can tell you “this isn’t working, and here’s why it’s wise to shift” in a way that registers as insight rather than defeat.
There’s another layer. Mentors absorb the emotional turbulence that comes with building something difficult. Having someone who’s been there, who can say “yes, this is terrifying, and yes, you’re handling it reasonably well” isn’t soft-skill fluff. It’s load-bearing infrastructure for your decision-making capacity.
Many Advisers, Not Group Consensus
The verse says “many advisers” but this requires careful interpretation. You’re not building a committee to make decisions by vote. You’re building a system of distributed intelligence around your decision-making.
Each adviser brings a different lens. One has deep technical expertise. Another understands markets and timing. A third has failed at what you’re attempting. A fourth has succeeded. A fifth asks the naive questions that cut through expert blind spots.
You’re not averaging their input. You’re triangulating towards truth. Where do they agree? That’s probably solid ground. Where do they all raise the same concern from different angles? That’s the thing you’re underestimating.
This is why “many” matters. One adviser might be wrong. Two might share the same blind spot. Three might all come from the same context and miss what’s unique about your situation. But many advisers, genuinely diverse in experience and perspective, create a system that’s harder to fool. This multiplicity is exactly why leaders need advisers from different backgrounds and disciplines.
The Pattern of Preventable Failure
Most business failures don’t happen because someone made a wild, reckless bet. They happen because someone made a decision that seemed reasonable at the time, with the information they had, from their particular vantage point.
The leaders who crash are usually the ones who spent months perfecting a strategy in isolation. By the time they launch, they’re so invested they can’t see what’s wrong with it. They’ve confused internal coherence with external validity. The plan makes perfect sense given their assumptions. They just haven’t questioned whether those assumptions map to reality.
The leaders who succeed deliberately seek out people who will poke holes in their thinking. They test ideas early and often. They’re not afraid to hear “this won’t work” because they’d rather hear it in a conference room than in a quarterly earnings call.
What This Demands of You
Before committing to a major direction, ask yourself: who would see the downside I’m missing? Who has failed at something similar? Who will tell me the truth even if it’s not what I want to hear?
Then actually ask them. Not in a way where you’re looking for approval, but in a genuine way where you’re testing your assumptions. “Here’s what I’m thinking. What am I not seeing? Where does this break?”
This requires a particular kind of courage. You have to be willing to look uncertain in front of people whose respect you want. You have to be willing to hear that your idea has serious problems. You have to be willing to update your thinking rather than defending your original position.
Some of the best counsel comes from unlikely sources. The person who just joined sees things the veterans have gone blind to. The adviser from a completely different industry asks questions that wouldn’t occur to people in your space. The person who thinks differently catches gaps in logic your brain automatically fills in.
The Real Work of Leadership
Leadership isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about making the best possible decisions with imperfect information under time pressure.
Proverbs 15:22 names something every experienced leader learns eventually: you can be smart and still be wrong. You can be experienced and still miss something critical. You can be confident and still fail. This ancient wisdom about why leaders need advisers remains as relevant today as it was three thousand years ago.
But when you build a practice of seeking counsel (real counsel, not just validation) you dramatically improve your odds. You catch problems earlier. You see opportunities you would have missed. You make better decisions because you’re working with a more complete picture of reality.
The strongest leaders aren’t the ones with all the answers. They’re the ones who know which questions to ask, and who to ask them to. They’ve made humility structural rather than aspirational.
Plans fail for lack of counsel. Not for lack of intelligence, ambition, or effort. Just counsel.The question is: who are your many advisers? And are you humble enough to actually listen to them?
