At every level of leadership, honesty is the quiet force that determines whether change connects or collapses.
Pete Mackey, Ph.D.
President & Executive Strategist
Good leadership and effective change management call upon many dimensions of our minds and hearts, besides such fundamentals as a clear vision, a sound strategy, and a good tactical plan worth activating. Honesty, perhaps above all, is essential to bring people along with us, address the doubts of skeptics well, inspire teams across the ups and downs, and show how we’ll do better when we miss the mark.
Honesty is a strategy too.
Yes, presumably it’s a core value for all of us. It grounds character as much as strong, open, and trusted professional relationships. It enables us to understand, listen to, and speak the truth to one another.
But a lack of honesty doesn’t have to mean dishonesty. It also can take less obvious but nevertheless insidious forms. Like:
Avoidance.
Information hoarding.
Affirming an idea or action rather than raising its biggest risks because we’d rather not rock the boat.
Dodging straightforward answers because we’ve come to believe in that office they backfire.
One way or another, when individuals do not feel safe and supported in being honest, especially around hard truths, the enterprise will suffer too.
The cost of avoidance.
Lacking honesty, the team working on strategic change rarely gets truly in sync. It might be a budget issue, creative or personnel challenge, or organizational plan. If honesty isn’t the norm for the team working to meet the goal, a culture of individual and team accountability becomes not simply an impossible goal but seems, dishearteningly, a disingenuous one. Then we resist contributing our ideas, alerting one another to emerging risks, or believing in the goal, let alone the team itself.
Who hasn’t seen leaders focused more on themselves than the cause, leaders who prefer silence rather than hard truths, leaders who take the rhetorical 2” x 4” to someone who tried to offer a tough truth about the community’s likely reaction, the cost involved, or the disconnect of a leader’s plan from the institutional culture?
We all know what happens in those offices: When leaders show that the truth isn’t welcome, in the name of professional survival, others self-silence or fake it, even if the plan will ultimately be worse off. Usually, the quiet continues until it’s too late for the goal, the leader, or even the organization.
The power of being seen.
The flipside is equally true: Honesty can unite us with colleagues at a deep level of values and commitment, free us to bring our best ideas forward with confidence, and strengthen team resilience when predicaments come. The question shouldn’t be: Can we be honest here? It should be: Can high performance survive without it?
Being seen as a full contributor, not merely as a tactical figure in the plan, allows us as professionals to see and speak the truth to one another. Chief Joseph, leader of the Wallowa band of Nez Perce and famed for his “I will fight no more forever” speech, also said, “It does not require many words to speak the truth.”
When a team sees itself not only as change agents but also as safe truth tellers for the cause, the few powerful words of truth can be fearlessly spoken.
Building a culture where honesty thrives.
In a professional context, how do we make sure colleagues know they are seen and heard, that the commitment to honesty is real, and that core goals and values unite us? If this question resonates, I recommend the following books offering practical ways to build honesty into the culture of leadership and change:
Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein – on how genuine curiosity builds trust.
Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott – on how to structure truth-telling dialogue that strengthens teams.
Crucial Conversations by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler – on getting to the story, the truth, behind the perceptions and actions of others.
Together, they remind us where honest leadership begins: with understanding.
