One of the things that sucks about being CEO is that even if you couch your thoughts in a million conditionals, "I think", "What do you all think", etc. etc., f

One of the things that sucks about being CEO is that even if you couch your thoughts in a million conditionals, "I think", "What do you all think", etc. etc., folks will inevitable take some or all of what you said as The Law™. Heck, it might've just been a silly idle thought you never thought anyone would take seriously. Someone will take it seriously. You might say, "Don't take this seriously." Someone will still take it seriously. Here's the thing, though: if you can be misunderstood you will be misunderstood. As those often-microscopic misunderstandings compound, people lose a sense of direction. As a founder you'll be repeating yourself and the core values and mission of the company over and over and over again until you want to throw up. This becomes more true as the company grows. A small company often operates more like a hive mind where there's a huge amount of implicit, shared understanding. My personal strategy is this. In a normal situation if I have a clear idea of what I think should be done, get the key stakeholders into a room to Solve Problem X. Insist that before they get into the room they think about some ideal ways to solve Problem X. If necessary, constrain the solution space by giving high level priorities. Once in the room, have folks share their thoughts. As CEO you should grill their ideas as intensely and rigorously as possible. You should have a fuller set of facts than they do (hopefully), which means you should be able to see holes they don't. Most of the time -- assuming you've hired smart people -- your idea or something close to it is one of the ideas that staff brings up. It might even be an improvement on your idea. If that happens, great! You're done. Nobody needed to know you had the same idea and Jane Doe Staffer gets credit for a good idea. More often than you'd expect, someone else brings up an idea that simply never occurred to you in the first place. This idea would never have surfaced if you started the conversation with your thoughts. This is win-win-win. The good idea wins. Jane wins because she was empowered to come up with a good idea and saw it realized, which means she'll be excited to do it again in the future. The team wins because they see you're the kind of person who accepts and integrates good ideas. As Harry Truman said, "It's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit." If the idea doesn't come up then you might introduce your own or guide the conversation in a way where folks in the room think of it, e.g., there's some fact you have that nobody else does. This is my strategy for normal situations. In exceptional situations, e.g., there's something incredibly urgent, different rules apply. Your staff will be much more inclined to follow your lead in that situation, though, if they see and understand it as an exception. But if you walk into a room and bring up your idea first, it sets the tone and inevitably everything will be a variation on whatever you said. Even worse, the folks in the room will take what you said as The Law™ even if you didn't intend it to be that way. As a CEO or founder your words inherently carry more weight than anyone else's.