Why is the third opinion so important? Good leaders faced with tough issues get a lot of input from all kinds of people around them. They get people who hopefully have the expertise and the resources to help solve the problem, people who have insight into what's going on and who have a vested interest in the outcome. Those are called second opinions. If you're a CEO, you want your head of marketing, your head of sales, and your head of manufacturing to have incredibly passionate vested interests in the outcomes of decisions. Most of the work of leadership is getting the best team of second opinions around you and marshaling them to go somewhere together.

It turns out that for the executive - whether the top person or middle person or early leader - only being in dialogue with people who have a vested interest makes you isolated in certain kinds of thinking. It's very important to also have access to a trusted network of third-opinion advisors so that you do the full realm of thinking. The third opinion is where you seek the right expertise from people with an outside perspective and no vested interest in the outcome. That's the distinction. For many people I work with, it's not that I'm better than their people. But I help them analyze complex choices, and they know they don't have to figure out my spin or agenda.

So you can't completely trust your colleagues? When you're talking to second opinions, it's very hard to sort out what people are saying in their own self-interest and what they're saying that's really objective. I'm not talking about bad and devious people. We're all organizational people, and it's not wise in organizational life to always tell the unvarnished truth.