Great leaders know how to get to the truth
If you want to win, start by getting honest.
Matt Hunter • July 29, 2025
The best leaders are hardcore truth-tellers and seekers.
Telling the truth is easier said than done. While most people place a high value on truth (or at least claim to), they’re not necessarily willing to face the truth—or go through the tension and discomfort required to excavate it. As Jack Nicholson famously said in A Few Good Men: “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!”
Why does this matter in business?
High performance requires an environment of radical honesty. When something isn’t working or needs to be addressed, we have to acknowledge it before we can fix it. Real leadership means speaking honestly, confronting uncomfortable realities, and facing the (often brutal) facts of a situation. The best leaders know the truth is often scary, inconvenient, and uncomfortable, but they’re willing to brave it for the greater good of their company and mission.
Jeff Bezos—a notoriously direct, no-BS leader who is known for being unapologetically honest with his people—describes this tension well:
“We humans are not truth-seeking animals; we are social animals. Take you back in time 10,000 years, and you’re in a small village, if you go along to get along, you can survive, and you can procreate. If you’re the village truth-teller, you may get clubbed to death in the middle of the night. Truths often don’t want to be heard because important truths can be uncomfortable, awkward, exhausting, challenging, and they can make people defensive, even if that’s not the intent.”
The closer you are to the truth, the better decisions you’ll make. And you get closer to the truth by speaking openly and engaging in constructive conflict when necessary. In the crucible of greatness, it’s the clash of divergent ideas and the delivery and integration of honest, hard feedback that sparks breakthrough performance. Those who are willing to collide are more likely to win.
There are two main ways to cultivate truth-telling on your team:
- Get feedback flowing: To do great work, you must be fully honest about the quality of the work, even when that means delivering bad news. Strong feedback loops are the fastest track to truth. Companies with effective feedback systems learn more, improve faster, and make better decisions, period. Feedback takes time, and yes, it hurts—but it is the clearest route to growth. There’s nothing more efficient than the truth.
- Foster honest, passionate debate: I’ve seen it again and again: Work environments that foster open and spirited debate, rather than shying away from it, are the ones that win. Steve Jobs explained this principle through a childhood memory of a neighbor’s rock tumbler—a simple machine that polishes rough stones by tumbling them together with grit and water. His neighbor threw in a bunch of rough, ugly rocks, turned the machine on, and let them grind against each other overnight. By morning, the jagged stones had become smooth, polished, and beautiful.
The best ideas emerge through this same process: debate, testing, refinement, iteration. Just like the rocks, roughness and imperfections get ground away, and what’s most valuable and true is revealed. Jobs believed that when talented people work together, friction is inevitable—and that’s the point. The goal isn’t to avoid it but to use it.
Both feedback and debates are about getting honest, not about winning arguments or saving face.
Getting comfortable with conflict
Disagreement isn’t a sign that something is wrong; it’s a sign that something real is happening. When two or more people work together, what are the chances that all of their preferences will line up and they’ll all be thinking the same thing? Almost none, unless they’re pretending. Given that disagreement is to be expected, we need a shared process to work through it. That’s how we figure out what’s right, where to compromise, and how to move forward. When we can do that well, like adults, we create a healthy, high-functioning situation.
The problem is, most of us were taught as kids to avoid rocking the boat. We got in trouble for making other people upset or uncomfortable, so we learned to avoid conflict. Your mom probably said to you more than once: “Don’t fight” or “Don’t argue.” No wonder we’re confused about what’s “fighting,” and what’s healthy, productive debate.
The difference? Unhealthy fighting leads to more problems. Healthy debate leads to better judgment and decision-making—and includes a way to repair afterwards. Avoidance and agreeableness aren’t virtues. They’re often barriers to progress. The echo chambers of unanimous agreement are the silent killers of greatness.
The best leaders seek out friction. They ‘spar’ over ideas. They don’t avoid tension, because they know transparency and directness are the oxygen that fuels the fire of innovation. They create environments where tough, uncomfortable conversations are the norm, not the exception. And they also seek out honest and accurate feedback about themselves and the work they’re producing.
A 2010 study by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) analyzed shareholder returns of companies with open communication compared to companies with less open communication over 10 years. They found that companies with open communication achieved a 7.9% return, compared to a 2.1% return for those with less open communication—a whopping 270% difference.
Clearly, there’s massive value (and even necessity) in being brutally honest in a business context. And yet—it’s so hard for us humans to do this. Why?
Back to Jeff Bezos:
“Any high-performing organization, whether it’s a sports team, a business, a political organization, or an activist group, has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports truth-telling. One of the things you must do is talk about the fact that it takes energy and that it’s uncomfortable. You have to tell people it’s not what we are designed to do as humans. It’s kind of a side effect. It’s not how we survive. We mostly survive by being social animals, cordial and cooperative.”
Case in point: A 2022 pilot study conducted by researchers at Harvard and Berkeley found that only 2.6% of individuals provided feedback to a survey administrator who had food or lipstick on their face. Even when the person would likely appreciate it, we tend to stay silent. We’ve been conditioned to avoid discomfort—to prioritize harmony over honesty.
Due to our social-biological need to belong, most of us are afraid to stir the pot, so to speak, because doing so could mean being rejected, exiled, or abandoned and thus end up alone. That triggers ancient survival fears, and so we protect ourselves by staying quiet. But these are the moments where tough leaders and teams emerge.
Too many leaders incorrectly think their job is to “turn off the tumbler,” to minimize friction and protect the team from discomfort. But every time a leader avoids the truth, they invite poor decision-making, resentment, back-channeling, blame, and fragile egos. The biggest impediments to truth are discomfort and avoidance. Great leadership isn’t about minimizing pain; it’s about being tough enough to keep going until you get to what’s real.
As Patty McCord, the first people leader of Netflix and co-creator of the Netflix culture deck, explains: “Not knowing the truth is anxiety-provoking. You can’t protect your people from hard truths anyway. Holding back the truth or telling them half-truths will only breed contempt. Trust is based on honest communication.”
Don’t be afraid to seek the truth. The more hardcore you can go with truth-telling, the better your speed, decision-making, and ultimately results will be.