For one company president I worked with, her repeated requests for accountability never came to fruition. She wondered if she was losing her effectiveness as a leader. Then the truth came out, a reason everyone knew but her.

Her employees were terrified to talk to her, much less speak the truth. Her physical presence was intimidating: tall, muscular, angular, seldom smiling. The irony is that, as I would come to know her through my coaching, the woman was a teddy bear. But she was losing battles before she even spoke simply because of her consistently stern facial affect. She didn’t realize that she was creating an unsafe place for real conversations. And it was killing her strategy. The longer she refused to adapt, the higher the cost became.

Your organization may spend enormous amounts of time talking about culture, trust, engagement, and innovation. Yet many workplaces—and many families—are suffering from the same problem: We’re uncomfortable telling each other the truth. Employees avoid giving honest feedback. Managers postpone difficult conversations. Families tiptoe around resentment. Friends drift apart rather than discussing conflict. We’ve become increasingly sophisticated at communicating constantly while also avoiding the conversations that could truly create change.

 But we just don’t want to pay the cost of truth. That’s understandable. Leaders today are navigating AI-driven change, restructuring, economic uncertainty, polarization, and rapidly shifting government policies. Who wants to voluntarily add more conflict or difficult conversations? Yet that uncertainty makes it even more important that uncomfortable information, disagreement, and bad news travel upward rather than getting filtered out. Leaders also need candid feedback about their own behavior and how they’re leading if they’re going to adapt effectively. This leader is representative of the many leaders I’ve worked with across my thirty-five years of executive coaching. They may not have an intimidating presence, but they create environments in other ways where employees don’t feel empowered to share their unvarnished truth about their thoughts, opinions, and beliefs, let alone what’s important to who they are as a human being— their values, aspirations, and feelings. Constant communication may happen—leaders love achieving their KPIs. But consistent real conversations seldom do.

I define real conversations as discussions that are grounded in truth, curious about someone else’s thoughts and feelings, empathetic, and that offer constructive feedback, respectful conflict, and genuine listening. They require psychological safety.

This, I argue, may sit at the core of their strategy failure. Leaders may have tactics and strategies for aligning, growing their customer base, or transforming their company culture. But they avoid the complex, often conflict-filled truthful conversations that would get them what they want.

The central questions you have to ask yourself as a leader are: Do your people feel safe to tell you what they really think and feel? And are you capable of handling their vulnerability and what they say about your opinions and behavior?

If your people don’t feel safe and you don’t feel ready to handle their truth, you’re not alone. This isn’t simply a workplace or communication problem. It’s a human one. Our reactions to conflict, to honesty, and to vulnerability were ingrained into us as children. This is the main theme of my book, The Origin of a Leader: Transforming Family Patterns into Leadership Power. Our childhood patterns resurface in our workplaces, and we give far too little credence to how much who we were still impacts who we are. Some of us had parents who made us feel safe, encouraged us to share our thoughts, feelings, and opinions, and answer the question, “Why?” However, many people learned early in life that conflict meant rejection, created danger or vulnerability, or invited shame, so they avoided it. Those childhood patterns often reappear decades later in boardrooms, marriages, friendships, and communities.

For example, employees who struggle to give feedback up the chain of command may struggle because some leaders they work with, or see from afar, remind them of their parents or patterns of behavior from their childhood. Consequently, they avoid leaning in. To change this, more intimate real conversations are necessary, both from the bottom-up and the top-down.

By intimacy, I mean closeness, familiarity, or friendship. When leaders model truth with intimacy, companies can experience deep, beneficial change. Great leaders need to showcase both. Truth without intimacy can become criticism, while intimacy without truth can become avoidance. To marry intimacy with truth, you have to genuinely care about a person and be interested in helping them address negative patterns from their childhoods.

One of the most powerful ways to get your employees to open up is to lead by example. As a leader, you must first open up about yourself to your colleagues and employees. You must show them, through your words and your actions, that your workplace is a safe place for vulnerability and truth.

This isn’t some pie-in-the-sky, wishful notion. At my firm, we have implemented our robust high performance team process (MCA HPT^TM) with over 258 executive teams since 2004.  Eighteen teams have completed my firm’s new high-performance team survey at two or three points over time, allowing us to assess their progress. The other teams used other team assessments. Our work focuses on strengthening relationships and encouraging greater truthfulness about both business and interpersonal issues. Across those teams, we saw consistent improvement over time.

One pattern kept repeating itself.

Of all the qualities of high-performing teams that we measured, the authenticity and trust scale rose the most when teams revealed their lives to each other and learned how to have real conversations. The gains were positive and meaningful, and some were large enough to be noticed by an outside observer.  Plus, the teams that started with the lowest authenticity and trust scores showed the most gains. By standard measures used to assess the magnitude of behavioral change, those improvements ranged from moderate to large.

In team after team, the catalyst was a leader who courageously shared their childhood life story, plus their greatest joy and sorrow, at the first of many team offsite meetings. When they chose to lead by example, their teams followed. Plus, when a leader first showed vulnerability by asking for feedback, it proved to their team that they could take criticism and feedback. When people learned that it was OK to be open, truthful communication followed.

Typically, though not always, the higher you rise in an organization, the less likely others will be willing to tell you the truth. As a subordinate, they may fear they have too much to lose by sharing truth upward. However, as the leader, it’s your responsibility, both to your employees and your company, to ensure that they feel safe to speak openly. In the same way that a psychologically healthy parent models honesty and vulnerability for their child to feel safe, you must likewise go first in creating the kind of open and honest environment you want your company to be.

Because once everyone feels safe to speak, your strategy can become sharper and more effective. And your people will know they’ve contributed. They’ll truly feel seen, heard, and appreciated.

That intimidating president did eventually change her spots. Though she could never master her persistent scowl, she worked to disarm others as soon as she walked into a room, either by asking about their families, joking about her own behavior, or genuinely asking for feedback. In time, and because of her ongoing work with me to create a psychologically safe space for her company, her employees would even call her out on how intimidating she appeared—a true sign that she was known, appreciated, and respected.

The change speaks to what companies need today. AI is reshaping jobs and decision-making faster than most organizations can absorb. Governments are changing policies and priorities with real consequences for businesses, while political polarization makes even routine decisions more charged. In that environment, leaders cannot afford to be insulated from what others really think. Strategy gets weaker when people are afraid to challenge assumptions, raise concerns, or say what no one else in the room wants to say. The leaders with the greatest influence will be the ones who make that candor possible.

All it costs is going first.

Excerpted from THE ORIGIN OF A LEADER. Copyright © 2026, Pam Mandredo Curtis. Reproduced by permission of Simon Element, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.