Honest conversations cost less than you think

Whenever I start a new culture change initiative, regardless of where it is or who it’s with, I insist on finding out what employees actually think about where they work. My preference is always to do this face-to-face, for good reason.

In October 2024, HR analytics firm Visier surveyed 1,000 US employees and found that 47% often or occasionally feel pressured to withhold honest feedback when completing engagement surveys. It seems that the exercise built to collect the truth is not reliably getting it. Nearly half (44%) also say their manager would rate their emotional state differently from how they would themselves.

Part of the problem, I feel, is how we define honesty. Most of us take it to mean not lying. A 2023 review, covering nearly 170 empirical articles, treats it as a ‘…process with an intellectual side and a relational side’. The first involves looking for accurate information and updating (this is key, it can’t be built on past information) what we believe. The second involves communicating in a way that helps others understand what is true. 

By that measure, a dodged question or a technically true but misleading statement (the ‘political answer’) falls short, even though neither is technically a lie. These behaviours carry serious costs for relationships and for organisations.

So why do we hold back? Largely I think, it’s because we expect honest conversations to go badly. In a series of experiments, one of which asked participants to be completely honest with everyone in their lives for three days, people overestimated the ‘costs’. 

Honest conversations were more enjoyable for the speaker than predicted, and listeners reacted less negatively than expected. Unfortunately, as humans, we often focus on the immediate discomfort and overlook how useful the information could be. Yet people become more receptive when they can see that the speaker cares about them and wants to help.

The same pattern shows up in teams. In the 1990s, Amy Edmondson set out to test whether better-led hospital units made fewer medication errors. The units with the strongest leadership and relationships reported more errors. She concluded that people in those units felt safe enough to report them, an idea she later developed into her work on psychological safety. Nurses there described mistakes as ‘natural and normal to document’, while nurses in units that reported few errors described an unforgiving environment. A low error count tells a leader very little until they know whether people feel able to report.

The honest conversation most people are putting off will probably go better than they expect, particularly if the other person can see that it comes from care. Leaders who want to hear the truth can begin by being honest themselves and by showing what happens to it once it is raised.