#2 Why it’s so hard to embed a feedback culture series

Donald Trump said he wanted honesty and “the truth,” right up until that truth threatened his authority. When it did, the response was swift: attack, discredit, remove.

Elon Musk regularly talks about radical honesty. But a challenge that slows momentum or questions his decisions tends to be treated less as a contribution and more as friction.

At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg spoke publicly about transparency and psychological safety, while struggling to respond when internal feedback challenged the foundations of the business or the conduct of its leaders.

Different industries. Different personalities. The same pattern.

If your reaction right now is to debate whether these leaders are good or bad, you’ve already missed the point. This isn’t about morality or politics. It’s about power – and what happens when feedback collides with identity, authority and legacy.

In each of these cases, feedback wasn’t rejected outright. It was conditional.

Information that helped with execution was welcomed. Ideas that improved outcomes without requiring personal change were encouraged. But feedback that questioned judgment, exposed blind spots, or disrupted a leader’s self-image was met with resistance. Sometimes publicly, more often quietly.

This is what conditional openness looks like.

Leaders believe they are open to feedback because, in many situations, they are. What they underestimate is how quickly people notice the boundary. Not the spoken one, but the emotional one. Which is revealed through defensiveness, justification, or withdrawal.

So when leaders say they want honesty, what they often mean, without realising it, is: ‘Tell me the truth, as long as it doesn’t cost me anything’.

It’s a quiet contradiction at the heart of many failed feedback cultures. Feedback is invited, but only within limits that are never stated and rarely examined.

If you don’t think people notice. Think again.

If you want to understand why leaders say they want feedback but struggle when it’s about them, join Georgia Murch for our FREE online event Why feedback is hard to land in your workplace. More info and registration here.