Feedback, innovation and collaboration are essential drivers of success. Yet many organizations struggle to build the open culture necessary to nurture these drivers.
Instead of being honest about their perspectives, admitting mistakes or lifting the lid on what might be really happening within the organization or wider industry, teams can quickly default to the comfort zone of telling leaders what they think they want to hear.
So, how can leaders create an open environment where team members feel able to tell them what they need to know, but don’t want to hear?
1. Create psychological safety and challenge toxicity
A core ingredient in getting teams to speak up – especially when it’s uncomfortable – is psychological safety, argues Vidya Murali, scale-up leader, coach and author of How to Survive in a Scale-Up Business.
To build psychological safety, Murali says leaders must actively challenge toxic patterns such as bias, bullying and poor management. Left unchecked, these behaviors erode trust, discourage candor, damage wellbeing and push employees to disengage. Issues then surface as gossip or rumors.
“Without psychological safety, employees may claim everything is fine when asked directly,” Murali warns, “because you haven’t made it safe to share.”
Leaders can shape their organization’s safety climate through micro behaviors and everyday actions. These include acknowledging contributions, inviting dissent and responding constructively to feedback. Leaders who admit mistakes, recognize what they don’t know, ask for help and show vulnerability create permission for others to do the same.
“If you think you have no time to focus on psychological safety under pressure, think again,” Murali says. “Your actions affect your team’s wellbeing – and building safety is a performance driver, not a perk.”
2. Be a role model for candor
“If the truth can’t reach you, it can’t help you,” says Jim Steele, founder of consultancy Holistic Performance Lab and an award-winning speaker. “So, invite the uncomfortable truths before they find you.”
Steele argues that if you want your team to start being honest with you, you must start by role modeling that behavior yourself. “Admit when you’ve been wrong, when a decision didn’t land or when you’re uncertain,” he says. “Vulnerability from the top doesn’t weaken authority; it strengthens trust.”
Rather than making clichéd statements like “my door is always open,” Steele recommends creating specific avenues for candor. “In every meeting, carve out a ‘red flag round’ where the team’s role is to challenge the proposed plan and surface potential risks,” he suggests. “When someone speaks up, reward the behavior publicly, even if the idea doesn’t fly, so others see it’s safe. Also, be curious, not combative. If your body language tightens or your tone sharpens, you’ve just told everyone that honesty is dangerous.”
Steele believes that high-performing teams thrive on unfiltered feedback. “They don’t hide the bad news, they use it as a catalyst for progress,” he says. “The faster the truth gets to you, the faster you can act.”
3. Make check-in meetings a habit
“Many leaders fear that open conversations will unleash a Pandora’s box of complaints,” notes Nic Marks, a statistician, speaker and author of Happiness is a Serious Business. “In reality, creating a regular, contained space for dialogue is one of the most powerful ways to build trust and surface what’s unsaid because people know they have that opportunity in the diary to say what they need to.”
Whether they are held on a one-to-one basis or as a collective, Marks believes that purposeful meetings can transform team dynamics. “When they are held at the same time every week, meetings build momentum and generate valuable data on team sentiment,” he says, “which helps leaders spot when team happiness may be dipping or when to ask deeper questions.”
If leaders want their teams to open up, they must go beyond the first “How are you?” and dig deeper to create space for difficult conversations, Marks explains. It is often the follow-up question that teases out what is below the surface.
“Whether it’s a short weekly check-in or a deeper quarterly reflection, these conversations help teams take ownership of their happiness and performance,” says Marks, “giving leaders the truths they need to hear.”
4. Use failure as a learning opportunity
“In order for team members to tell you what you don’t want to hear, mistakes and failures must be safe subjects,” says Ivanna Rosendal, author of Maneuvering Monday.
“Mistakes and failure aren’t perceived as safe by default, so it is necessary to embed team-specific practices into the workplace culture to make them something employees don’t shy away from sharing. We need failure if we want to grow, innovate and learn together,” Rosendal explains.
Rosendal suggests that when things go wrong, your team should perform a ritual to celebrate the failure. One way to put this into practice is to introduce the Museum of Failure, where the team comes together to evaluate something that didn’t go to plan. “The mistake is openly shared, then categorized according to whether it is a bad outcome or a bad decision, and key learnings are extracted,” suggests Rosendal. “Then the mistake, and the openness to share, are celebrated.”
What about customers?
It’s not just their teams that leaders need to hear the truth from. They need to hear it from their customers, too. Depending on their role within the organization, it can be hard for leaders to get close to their customers – which is where the social media team comes in. The social media team is often the most valuable, yet most ignored, source of unfiltered truth, argues Tom Miner, author of Social First Brands.
“Social media, as a profession, is consistently misunderstood, maligned and undervalued by leadership,” explains Miner. He believes that social media teams should instead be viewed as strategic partners because they know more about what makes their audience tick than anyone else in the organization.
“In a chronically online world, an organization’s social team provides real-time insights into customer behavior, industry trends, market movements and changing employee expectations,” argues Miner. He adds that social channels need to be treated as “hearing aids, rather than microphones.”
What’s more, a social listening culture also provides a safety net for your team to speak up. “It’s a classic case of ‘don’t shoot the messenger,’” Miner says, “because your team is merely representing the views of consumers.”
Why you need your team to tell you what you don’t want to hear
Getting your team to tell you what you don’t want to hear isn’t easy, but it’s critical to being an effective leader. If you only hear the good news, you don’t have a real perspective of what’s going on. This means you can’t make informed decisions and you risk getting bad surprises.