Isolation is a major challenge for top leaders: people tell them what they think they want to hear and are afraid to tell them things that they should know. In this HCI Keynote video, Hal Gregersen of the MIT Leadership Center describes the three common qualities he discovered after interviewing the most innovative business leaders in today’s landscape.

Key insights:

• Ask the right questions to reveal your knowledge gaps; not knowing what you don’t know is one of the top problems faced by leaders.
• Don’t be afraid to be wrong; strong leaders can say “I don’t know” sometimes.
• Embrace discomfort; true innovators get out of their comfort zones and uncover new ideas that might go against the status quo.
• Be quiet! The average pause after a corporate leader asks a question is one second, which implies that they don’t actually want answers.