The Higher You Climb, the Less Truth You Hear

Power gives leaders access to more information. It can also make it harder for people to tell them what they really think.

Years ago, I became responsible for a business in a country with a culture very different from my own. I began noticing a pattern that increasingly frustrated me. I would ask whether something could be delivered by a certain date. The answer was almost always yes. People were enthusiastic and reassuring. And thus, there seemed to be little reason for concern.

But then the deadline would approach, and problems would emerge: dates slipped, expectations had to be revised, and what had sounded perfectly achievable suddenly wasn't.

At first, I interpreted this as an execution problem of overpromising and underdelivering. Eventually, I realized I was misunderstanding what was happening: my colleagues weren't deliberately misleading me. They wanted to please me. I was working in a culture where confrontation was often avoided, harmony was highly valued and authority carried considerable weight. Telling the boss that something couldn't be done—or that his expectations might be unrealistic—was more difficult than I had understood.

The “yes” I was hearing didn't always mean yes.

Sometimes it meant: “This is what I think you want to hear.”

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I thought I was asking a question

That realization forced me to reconsider my own behavior. When I asked, “Can we have this ready by Friday?”, I thought I was asking a genuine question, but was that what everyone else heard?

Coming from the person running the business, perhaps the question sounded much more like an expectation. And in a culture reluctant to challenge authority, saying “No, Friday isn't realistic” required considerably more courage than saying yes and hoping somehow to make it happen.

I had been focusing on their inability to deliver what they had promised but I hadn't sufficiently considered my role in creating the promise.

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That was an important lesson in intercultural leadership. Telling people, “You can always disagree with me,” isn't necessarily enough. Neither is repeatedly asking them to be candid. Culture shapes how people respond to authority. But over time I came to understand that culture was just amplifying something that exists in virtually every organization:

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Power changes what people are willing to tell you.

Organizations edit reality

As leaders move higher in an organization, something paradoxical happens: they gain access to more information, more meetings, more reports and more people. Yet they can gradually lose access to something far more valuable: what people really think: information begins arriving processed, bad news gets softened, and problems arrive accompanied by reassuring explanations. People anticipate how the leader might react before deciding what to say.

Nobody needs to be lying. The organization simply begins editing reality before it reaches the leader.

And the more powerful the leader becomes, the greater the risk.

This is why I have become skeptical when senior executives proudly say, “My door is always open,” or “People know they can tell me anything.” The important question isn't whether your door is open.

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It is what happens when somebody walks through it with something you don't want to hear.

People watch what happens next

Leaders often believe they create openness by asking for it. Even though people don't decide whether it is safe to tell you the truth by listening to what you say. They decide by watching what happens to the people who do: what happens when someone challenges your preferred strategy?; when a country manager tells you the target is unrealistic?; when someone says a project you strongly support isn't working?.

Do you become defensive? Do you explain why they're wrong? Do you subtly punish the messenger?

Or do you become curious?

Every reaction teaches the organization something. And once people learn that good news travels more comfortably than bad news, leaders may find themselves surrounded by increasingly positive information while reality moves in the opposite direction.

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The burden shifts to the leader

My experience taught me that obtaining honest information cannot simply be the responsibility of the people below us. The higher we climb, the more responsibility we have to make disagreement possible.

Sometimes that means asking differently. Instead of “Can we deliver this by Friday?”, perhaps the better question is: “What could prevent us from delivering by Friday?” Or: “If Friday isn't realistic, what date is?”

Sometimes it means deliberately seeking the person who sees things differently. And sometimes it simply means resisting the instinct to defend ourselves when somebody tells us something uncomfortable.

Because authority has a strange effect:

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The higher you climb, the more people listen when you speak. And the harder you may have to work to hear what they really think.