Your reaction teaches people what to say next time. I worked with a leader who couldn’t understand why his team rarely brought problems to him until they had become urgent. He genuinely believed his door was open. And technically, it was. But when someone did raise a concern, his first response was often frustration: “Why didn’t we catch this earlier?”“How did this happen?”“Who dropped the ball?” They weren’t unreasonable questions. But in that moment, before anyone felt hear