2 Jun 2026
The Most Dangerous Leader Is the One Who Has Never Questioned Their Own Beliefs
We live in a moment when knowing — in the sense of facts, of truth, of what can actually be trusted — has never felt more precarious.
Information is everywhere. So is its opposite. The challenge isn’t access to knowledge. It’s discernment: being able to separate what is actually true from what has been distorted, weaponised, or simply repeated so often it feels true.
But that’s the external version of the problem. The KNOW principle in my book, Queering the Way: Navigating Leadership Ethics from the Margins (https://www.darrenstehle.com/queering-the-way/), is about something more interior.
KNOW is an acronym: Key Notions Of Worth.
Your values, your beliefs, your roles in life — the things that ground who you are as a leader so that others can trust you. Not because you project certainty, but because you are a person of known character, and because you have an ethical code of conduct that others can read, rely on, and be inspired by.
The question at the heart of this principle is deceptively simple: What do you know for certain? And have you ever had a moment where everything you thought to be true — you questioned?
There’s a chapter in the KNOW section called “The Candle and the Courtyard.” It’s about something that happened when I was sixteen.
I was raised Catholic. Devout, even — altar boy, usher, lector. I was seriously considering the priesthood. Far be it for a gay man not to consider becoming a priest… but I digress.
At sixteen, I was attending my sixth and final COR retreat — Christ and Others Retreat. I was one of the support volunteers, not in the front with the participants. At the time, I was quietly coming to terms with being gay — convincing myself I might be bisexual, the way you do when you’re not quite ready to say the thing out loud. I was never bisexual.
In the middle of that weekend, I did what you were supposed to do when you were having a crisis of faith. I reached out to the people in charge and asked for help.
That’s not what I got.
I was told, essentially, to stop asking questions. You’re here to serve God. You’re here to serve the people experiencing this weekend. If you can’t do that, leave.
No compassion. No understanding. No attempt to meet me where I was.
That is not leadership.
I don’t want to give away what happened next — there’s a moment in that chapter I’m keeping for the book. But I want to share what I wrote about it:
“What I did not know then, and could not have articulated at sixteen, was that I had just made my first consciously ethical decision. Not a moral one in the religious sense — not a calculation about right and wrong as the Church defined those terms — but an ethical one in the deepest sense: a decision about who I was and what I was willing to accept as true about myself and about the institutions that claimed authority over my life.
The Church had been telling me, without quite saying it, that there was something wrong with me. That who I was, and who I was only beginning to understand myself to be, was incompatible with belonging.”
That theme — belonging, dignity, and the right of every person to occupy space as fully themselves — runs throughout the book.
Human-hearted leadership doesn’t require us to agree with everyone or like everyone. It does require us to know when our values are compromising someone else’s freedom to exist. And none of us has the right to decide who belongs and who doesn’t.
So here’s what I’d invite you to contemplate today:
* What do you know to be true? Where did you learn your beliefs?
* Who taught you your values?
* Have you ever stepped back to ask, why is this value important to me and is it still serving me as a leader?
Queering the Way: Navigating Leadership Ethics from the Margins launches Thursday, June 4th. Pre-order on Amazon (https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0H2SMRLFV/) or purchase from me directly (https://www.darrenstehle.com/queering-the-way/).
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