A founder I work with mentioned, in passing, in a corridor, that he had been reading about a competitor's approach to pricing. He meant nothing by it. He had read an article on a plane.
Eleven days later a working group existed.
He found this funny for about an hour and then found it disturbing, which was the more useful reaction.
The moment it changes
There is a point in a career where your words stop being contributions and start being instructions. It is not marked. Nobody tells you it has happened, because the people who could tell you are the people it happened to.
For most leaders it arrives somewhere between forty and a hundred and fifty people, or on the day the title changes, whichever comes first. Before it, thinking out loud is collaboration. After it, thinking out loud is a directive with deniability attached, and everyone below you has learned to treat it that way because the cost of ignoring one of your musings once is much higher than the cost of acting on ten.
So you adapt. You get careful. You stop floating half-formed ideas in meetings. And that adaptation is correct, it is what the job requires, and it removes the single most useful thing available to a thinking person, which is the ability to say something before you are sure about it and watch what happens to it.
The higher you go, the more your thinking has to be finished before it can be spoken. Which means most of it never gets tested at all.
The second cost
The first cost is to the quality of your thinking. The second is to you, and it is less discussed because it sounds like complaining from a comfortable chair.
Being a signal is lonely in a specific way that has nothing to do with having people around. You are surrounded, constantly, and almost every interaction you have is with someone who is managing their relationship with your position. Not dishonestly. Just carefully, the way anyone sensible manages a relationship with something that determines their year.
People in this situation often conclude something is wrong with them. Nothing is wrong with them. They have correctly noticed that they are no longer being met as a person by anyone inside the organisation, and there is no version of the role where that stops being true.
What actually helps
Not an open door, which does not address the mechanism. The mechanism is your position, and your position is still in the room with the door open.
Three things work, in my experience, and only three.
Being explicit about which mode you are in. A leader who says, before speaking, that the next five minutes are speculation and not direction, gets some of the thinking-out-loud back. It feels awkward and it works, because you have named the thing everyone was already doing arithmetic about.
Keeping at least one relationship that predates the position. Someone who knew you before the title and is therefore not managing it. This is why people who came up with a cofounder, or who kept one friend from the first company, tend to weather the top job better than people who arrived alone.
And having one place where nothing you say is a signal to anyone, because the person hearing it has no stake in your organisation at all. That is most of what I do, and I would rather describe it accurately than dress it up. It is a room where you get to be a person for two hours a month.