Can Anyone Tell You the Truth?

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Most of us like feedback.

In principle.

We tell people we value honesty. We tell our teams, “If you ever see something, I want you to tell me.” And we may genuinely believe we are approachable, teachable leaders who want to grow.

Then somebody tells us something.

Something we don’t agree with. Something uncomfortable. Something about us.

And suddenly we remember context. We explain what we meant. We point out what they misunderstood. We remember three occasions when the opposite was true. We notice weaknesses in the person delivering the feedback. We clarify what we were trying to accomplish.

Sometimes every word of our explanation is true—and we may still have missed the feedback.

That is one of the peculiar difficulties of receiving information about ourselves: the person being evaluated is also the person doing the evaluating.

And we are not exactly disinterested observers.

Feedback Is Information Before It Is Judgment

When someone gives you feedback, your first responsibility is not to agree with it, reject it, or even explain yourself.

Your first responsibility is to understand what you are being told.

Some feedback is wrong. Some is incomplete. Some comes from misunderstanding. Some reflects another person’s preferences more than your behavior. Occasionally it comes from someone with an agenda.

Humility does not require gullibility. But neither does discernment require defensiveness.

Feedback is information before it is judgment.

You can receive information without immediately reaching a verdict about whether it is correct. That space between hearing and deciding may be one of the most important disciplines in becoming teachable.

“He who answers a matter before he hears it—this is folly and disgrace to him” (Proverbs 18:13, BSB).

We usually think of that verse as a warning against interrupting someone else’s story. It applies equally well when the story is about us.

What Are You Trying to Protect?

There is a reason feedback can be difficult to hear. It may threaten something we value—our competence, motives, reputation, authority, or simply the picture we carry of ourselves.

Researchers Rachel Ruttan and Loran Nordgren studied what psychologists call defensive information processing—our tendency to deny, distort, or avoid information that threatens how we see ourselves. Across five studies, they found that people with lower self-regulatory capacity were more likely to process self-threatening information defensively. But they found something else particularly interesting: strong self-improvement motivation could counter that defensive response.¹

In other words, uncomfortable feedback can create a contest between two desires:

I want to protect the way I see myself.

I want to become better.

Sometimes we cannot do both.

So the deeper question isn’t whether I like the feedback. It is what I want most when it arrives:

Do I want to protect my current picture of myself, or do I want to discover what is true?

Scripture recognized the distinction long before psychologists named the mechanism. “Do not rebuke a mocker, or he will hate you; rebuke a wise man, and he will love you. Instruct a wise man, and he will be wiser still” (Proverbs 9:8–9, BSB).

The rebuke does not determine the response. The receiver does. The same uncomfortable information can produce resentment in one person and growth in another.

You Cannot See Yourself From Where Everyone Else Is Standing

You know your intentions. Other people experience your impact.

You know why you said what you said. You know the pressure you were under, what you were trying to accomplish, and the seventeen thoughts that preceded the sentence that finally came out of your mouth.

The other person got the sentence.

You know you were trying to move the meeting along. She knows she stopped contributing after you interrupted her for the fourth time.

You know your questions were intended to clarify. He experienced them as an interrogation.

You know you were trying to improve the work. Your team experienced twelve minutes of hearing everything that was wrong with what they had spent three weeks building.

Intent matters. It can explain behavior and sometimes correct a genuine misunderstanding. But explanation is not exoneration.

Your intention is part of the evidence. So is your impact.

This is why self-awareness cannot be entirely self-generated. There are things about ourselves we can discover only by allowing other people to tell us what it is like to experience us.

Which gives every leader a profoundly important question:

What is it like to be on the other side of me?

You Don’t Need Them to Be Completely Right

Suppose someone tells you, “You never listen to me.”

Well, that’s probably not literally true.

Never? Not once?

You could win that argument fairly easily. “That’s simply not true. We talked for forty-five minutes Tuesday.”

Congratulations. You won.

And you may have learned nothing.

The word never may be inaccurate while the experience underneath it is profoundly important. Perhaps what the person is actually saying is, “I don’t feel heard by you.”

Now we have something worth examining.

Mature leaders learn to separate imperfect packaging from useful information. Sometimes 20 percent of a criticism is true.

Take the 20 percent. You don’t have to swallow the other 80.

The same applies to the messenger. He’s too sensitive. She does the same thing. He doesn’t understand everything I’m responsible for. She’s not exactly a great communicator herself.

Maybe.

But an imperfect messenger can carry accurate information. The person giving you feedback does not have to be wiser than you, more experienced than you, more spiritually mature than you, or particularly good at giving feedback.

They only need to have seen something you cannot see from where you are standing.

So instead of asking first, Is this fair?, try asking:

Is there anything here I need to see?

When the King Heard, “You Are the Man”

Nathan’s confrontation of David is obviously far more serious than the ordinary corrective feedback most leaders receive. David had committed adultery with Bathsheba, arranged the death of her husband, and concealed what he had done.

But David’s response when truth finally reached him gives us a remarkable picture of what happens when a person stops defending himself against reality.

Nathan told David a story about a rich man who took a poor man’s only lamb. David burned with anger at the injustice.

Then Nathan turned the mirror around.

“You are the man!” (2 Samuel 12:7, BSB).

David was king. He had options.

He could have challenged Nathan’s information or questioned his tone. He could have explained the pressures of leadership. He could have reminded Nathan of everything he had accomplished for Israel. He could have investigated who had been talking to the prophet.

He could have punished the messenger.

Instead, David said, “I have sinned against the LORD” (2 Samuel 12:13, BSB).

No counterargument. No context. No but.

David’s response did not remove the terrible consequences of his sin. But it revealed something important about his posture toward truth: once he saw it, he stopped defending himself against it.

And this was not merely an isolated crisis response. David elsewhere prayed, “Let the righteous man strike me; let his rebuke be an act of loving devotion. It is oil for my head; let me not refuse it” (Psalm 141:5, BSB).

Let me not refuse it.

That’s a useful prayer before somebody tells us something we would rather not hear.

Personality Enters the Room With You

Feedback does not arrive in a personality vacuum.

The DISC Model of Human Behavior is a framework for understanding common behavioral tendencies in how people approach problems, people, pace, and procedures. It does not tell us who is humble, defensive, mature, or godly. Personality is not character.

But personality can influence not only how we respond to uncomfortable information, but how we initially receive and process it—especially under pressure.

A high-D may instinctively challenge the information: Give me an example. When did that happen? Who else thinks that? Those may be excellent questions. Asked too quickly or intensely, however, they can turn a feedback conversation into cross-examination before the other person has finished speaking.

A high-I may talk, explain, contextualize, reassure, or quickly repair the relationship. The conversation can feel wonderfully resolved while the actual feedback has barely had time to land.

A high-S may appear highly receptive while experiencing the criticism much more deeply internally than anyone realizes. The desire to preserve harmony may produce agreement before genuine processing has occurred.

A high-C may analyze wording, evidence, definitions, exceptions, chronology, and factual precision—and successfully disprove one sentence while missing the larger pattern the person was trying to describe.

These are tendencies, not verdicts, and each can arise from a legitimate personality strength. But under stress, our strengths can volunteer themselves too quickly.

The goal is not to become less D, I, S, or C. It is to become sufficiently self-aware that personality does not decide what happens before character gets a vote.

Your Response Is Teaching Them

Imagine an employee finally works up the courage to tell her leader, “When you interrupt me in meetings, I eventually stop contributing because it feels like you’ve already decided what you want.”

The leader responds, “I don’t think that’s fair. I interrupt everybody. I’m just trying to keep the meeting moving. You know how much we have to get through.”

Perhaps that’s completely true.

It also doesn’t answer the feedback.

She was describing her experience of his behavior. He answered by explaining his intention.

But something more important just happened.

He trained her.

She learned that bringing difficult information to him requires defending the legitimacy of her own experience. So the next time she notices something, she has another decision to make: Is telling him worth it?

Research suggests that decision is very real. In a study involving 3,149 employees and 223 managers, James Detert and Ethan Burris found that managerial openness was associated with employees’ willingness to speak up with improvement-oriented ideas and concerns. Psychological safety helped explain that relationship: employees were assessing the interpersonal risk of speaking.²

People are learning what happens when they tell you things.

Every time.

Can You Be Known?

This is where receiving feedback stops being merely a communication skill and becomes a leadership issue.

We have called it leadership knowability: the degree to which a leader’s actual impact, weaknesses, blind spots, and effects on others remain accessible to the leader through honest information from the people around him.

A leader can be surrounded by people and still become remarkably difficult to inform—not because information is unavailable, but because information has become expensive.

If disagreement produces irritation, if questioning requires a courtroom defense, if criticism gets remembered, if every concern receives an explanation, or if the messenger somehow becomes the subject of the conversation, people learn.

They begin managing what you are allowed to know.

And then something dangerous can happen:

The leader’s confidence can increase while the quality of his information decreases.

Nobody is telling me there’s a problem.

Meanwhile, everyone else is thinking:

Nobody is telling him because we’ve learned what happens when we do.

Those are profoundly different realities.

Your response to today’s feedback helps determine the quality of the feedback you will receive tomorrow.

Retaliation Can Be Very Quiet

When leaders hear retaliation, we tend to imagine something dramatic. I would never fire someone for disagreeing with me.

Good.

That’s a fairly low bar.

Retaliation can be much quieter. The relationship cools. Access changes. Someone is left out of a conversation. Her motives receive greater scrutiny. The leader becomes more guarded around her. Months later, the criticism somehow appears during an unrelated disagreement.

The leader may not even consciously intend retaliation. The other person still experiences the cost.

This creates an interesting problem when leaders ask, “Do you feel safe telling me the truth?”

The person who does not feel safe telling you the truth may not feel safe telling you that he doesn’t feel safe telling you the truth.

That is one reason anonymous feedback can sometimes reveal patterns that face-to-face feedback cannot.

But anonymity creates another temptation:

Who wrote this?

Don’t.

Don’t hunt for the author. Hunt for the pattern.

If three unrelated people describe essentially the same experience, the most important question is probably not which three people wrote it.

The question is why three people experienced it.

Feedback Doesn’t Automatically Make You Better

We sometimes talk about feedback as though receiving more of it automatically produces growth.

It doesn’t.

In one of the landmark analyses of feedback research, Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi examined 607 effect sizes representing 23,663 observations. Feedback interventions improved performance on average, but in more than one-third of the effects they actually reduced performance. Their analysis suggested that feedback becomes less effective as attention moves away from the task and toward the self.³

Feedback can be rejected, distorted, personalized, rationalized, resented, forgotten—or applied.

More recent meta-analytic work examining 46 independent samples and 12,478 workers found that feedback orientation—a person’s general receptivity toward feedback—was positively associated with work performance, job satisfaction, and feedback-seeking behavior.⁴

So perhaps the important question isn’t, Do I receive feedback?

Everybody does.

The question is:

What do I do with it once it arrives?

HOLD. HEAR. TEST. OWN. ACT.

It helps to decide how you will receive difficult feedback before somebody gives it, because when feedback threatens us, improvisation tends to favor self-protection.

Here’s a simple process.

HOLD — Suspend your defense.

For now.

You may eventually need to clarify something. There may be context the other person doesn’t know. The feedback may even prove substantially wrong. But you don’t have to settle that in the first thirty seconds.

James gives us an extraordinarily practical order: “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger” (James 1:19, BSB).

Quick to listen. Slow to speak. Slow to anger.

The order matters.

You don’t have to agree with feedback in order to keep listening to it.

HEAR — Understand the experience.

Ask another question before making another statement.

Can you help me understand what you mean? Can you give me an example? Have you experienced that more than once? What is it like when I do that?

And perhaps the bravest:

Is there something I do that makes it difficult for you to tell me things like this?

Don’t merely listen for the accusation. Listen for the experience underneath it.

TEST — Corroborate reality.

Look backward. Watch yourself. Compare the observation with previous feedback. Ask someone you trust. Look for repeated experiences from unrelated people.

One person’s observation is information. A recurring pattern deserves considerably more weight.

If one person says it, become curious.

If several unrelated people describe the same experience, become very curious.

Defeating every observation individually can become a sophisticated way of refusing to see the pattern collectively.

OWN — Take responsibility for whatever is yours.

Not more than yours. Not less than yours.

If 20 percent is true, own the 20 percent. If your intention was good but your impact was harmful, own the impact without pretending your intention was evil.

If the feedback reveals sin, call it sin. If it reveals an unhelpful habit, call it that. If it reveals a personality strength being overused, own the behavior without condemning the personality.

And if careful examination shows the accusation genuinely isn’t accurate, you are allowed to conclude that too.

Humility does not require false confession. It requires an honest willingness to discover the truth.

ACT — Turn insight into behavior.

Feedback that never reaches behavior becomes accumulated information.

So ask yourself: What will I actually do differently because I now know this?

Maybe you stop interrupting. Maybe you ask two questions before giving your opinion. Maybe you apologize. Maybe you invite someone to tell you the next time the behavior occurs. Maybe you build accountability around the change.

“Whoever listens to life-giving reproof will dwell among the wise. He who ignores discipline despises himself, but whoever heeds correction gains understanding” (Proverbs 15:31–32, BSB).

Wisdom doesn’t merely hear correction.

It does something with it.

Four Words That Can Save a Conversation

There is enormous freedom in being able to say:

“I need to consider that.”

You can also say, “Thank you for telling me.”

Neither statement means you agree. Neither is an admission of guilt. They mean your identity is stable enough to leave a question unanswered for a while.

Defensiveness often creates urgency. We feel as though an accusation left unanswered somehow becomes true, so we rush to correct the record.

But if something is untrue today, it will still be untrue tomorrow.

Truth can survive twenty-four hours without your assistance.

And if something is true, twenty-four hours of reflection may help you see what an immediate defense would have hidden.

What If You Actually Asked?

There is one more step beyond learning to receive feedback well.

Go looking for it.

But don’t merely ask, “Do you think I’m a good leader?” or “Is there anything I could improve?” Those questions make it very easy to be polite.

Ask people about their experience of you.

When do you experience me at my best—and at my worst?

What is one thing I repeatedly do that limits my effectiveness?

What do I do that makes it harder for you to work with me or contribute your best?

Have you ever chosen not to tell me something because you were concerned about how I would respond? What made you hesitate?

And perhaps the question that takes the most courage:

What do you think I don’t know about myself that people around me probably do?

Don’t ask people merely to tell you who they think you are. Ask what they have consistently experienced.

Patterns are considerably more useful than isolated impressions.

And if you’re not sure whether the people around you can actually tell you the truth, don’t guess.

Find out.

The Leadership Masterworks Where Can I Grow? Our Feedback Questionnaire is designed to help you do exactly that: ask better questions, invite honest experiences rather than polite opinions, identify recurring patterns, and discover things about your leadership that you cannot see from where you stand.

So the questionnaire isn’t the test.

What you do with the answers is.

Can anyone… wait… can everyone tell you the truth?

The goal is not to become criticism-proof. I don’t want leaders who cannot be hurt by criticism. That can become another kind of dysfunction.

I want leaders who can be affected without being controlled, humble without becoming insecure, discerning without becoming defensive, teachable without becoming gullible, and confident without becoming inaccessible.

“The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to counsel” (Proverbs 12:15, BSB).

Listening is not agreeing. It is remaining open long enough for truth to have an opportunity to reach you.

Almost anyone can receive affirmation. The test of teachability comes when the information threatens something we value—our competence, motives, reputation, authority, or view of ourselves.

That is when the mirror becomes uncomfortable.

And that is precisely when we most need to keep looking.

When someone tells you something you don’t want to hear, are you more interested in protecting the person you already believe yourself to be—or becoming the person God is calling you to become?

Hold. Hear. Test. Own. Act.

And when someone finally takes the risk of telling you what it is like to be on the other side of you, remember: they may not be entirely right. They may not say it particularly well. They may see only part of the picture.

But before you explain, correct, defend, or dismiss—

listen.

Because one of the most important questions a leader can ask is not:

Do people agree with me?

It is:

Can anyone tell me the truth?

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Want to Know What It Is Like to Experience Your Leadership?

Leadership Masterworks has developed the Feedback Questionnaire (FQ) to help leaders gather candid, experience-based feedback about their strengths, blind spots, impact, response to disagreement, openness to difficult information, and Leadership Knowability.

The FQ includes directions for a facilitator, reviewers, and the leader receiving feedback—because how feedback is gathered and received matters almost as much as the questions themselves.

Download the Leadership Masterworks Feedback Questionnaire

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Endnotes

1. Rachel L. Ruttan and Loran F. Nordgren, “The Strength to Face the Facts: Self-Regulation Defends Against Defensive Information Processing,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 137 (2016): 86–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2016.06.006.
2. James R. Detert and Ethan R. Burris, “Leadership Behavior and Employee Voice: Is the Door Really Open?” Academy of Management Journal 50, no. 4 (2007): 869–884. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMJ.2007.26279183.
3. Avraham N. Kluger and Angelo DeNisi, “The Effects of Feedback Interventions on Performance: A Historical Review, a Meta-Analysis, and a Preliminary Feedback Intervention Theory,” Psychological Bulletin 119, no. 2 (1996): 254–284. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.119.2.254.
4. Ian M. Katz, Caroline M. Moughan, and Cort W. Rudolph, “Feedback Orientation: A Meta-Analysis,” Human Resource Management Review 33, no. 4 (2023): 100986. DOI: 10.1016/j.hrmr.2023.100986 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2023.100986.

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