Stop telling the Truth

Happy Thursday,

“I say it like it is.” That line gets worn like a badge of honour. It is meant to suggest integrity, candour, and truth-telling. Something leaders often encourage in the workplace. But here is what most leaders won’t say out loud: that kind of candour is often more self-fulfilling than actually effective in real team dynamics. Let us talk about how you can deliver the truth not just honestly, but for influence and impact.

🧠 LEARN something.

In the military, we used to have a very powerful leadership concept for the middle ranks: “Provide unvarnished truth upwards.” When I was first introduced to it, I loved it immediately. I saw myself as a truth-teller. I was young (ish), bold, and eager to embrace the “I say it like it is” persona. It felt powerful, authentic, even righteous. But it seldom worked in reality. More often than not, it isolated and alienated senior leaders and my peers. In time, it left me frustrated, underestimated, and disempowered, muttering to myself, you want the truth but “You can’t handle the truth!” Yes, I just quoted the iconic line by Colonel Jessup, played by Jack Nicholson, in the 1992 movie A Few Good Men.

Movie quotes aside, I quickly learned a very important lesson as a leader: my ability to translate the truth mattered far more than my courage to tell the truth. Today, I still see the same mistake playing out with frontline and operational leaders, and even some senior executives, who confuse honesty with impact and influence, and assume that more candour automatically earns more respect. Of course, there is the matter of tone and approach, or as the old saying goes, “it’s not what you say but how you say it.” That is true. But there is another element many truth-tellers miscalculate. They confuse translating the truth with diluting, pandering, or filtering. In reality, translation is not about watering down the message or saying what people want to hear. Instead, it is about delivering it so the truth can be understood by those who do not see it, feel it, or know about it. Without that translation, their message often triggers defensiveness, status threat, or simple disengagement.

🤔 REFLECT on an idea.

Raw truth, delivered in the heat of the moment, might feel powerful, but it rarely lands with influence and rational. When your goal is to be heard, emotion takes over. When your goal is to shape a decision, you slow down, translate, and deliver the truth in a way that actually lands.

😊 SMILE a little.

Every team has that one person who thinks they are the resident truth-teller… funny thing is that everyone else quietly stopped listening to them sometime since July 2023 😂

✅ DO IT to get results.

If you want to influence truth upwards, shift away from being a messenger who simply delivers the truth and start thinking like a translator who informs decisions. That means letting go of the instinct to report, educate, tell, sell, vent, rant, crusade or complain. Because at the end of the day, your role as a leader is not to offload your view and feel good about it, but instead to influence decisions and move an outcome.

So before you speak the truth, get clear on the decision your senior leaders are trying to make. Decide how relevant and meaningful the truth is, then position it as input for better decision making, not a critique of it. Specifically, anchor your message in outcomes they care about such as risk, cost, timing, or reputation. This reduces status threat and increases relevance. Be the translator who informs better decisions. When the truth helps them decide, it gets heard.

🌱 How we can support you and your team.

We provide strategic leadership solutions tailored to align with your business strategy, size, and budget. We can support your with:

• Leadership Coaching (Individual)

• Team Coaching (Group and Leadership Teams)

• Workshops, Offsites and Team Building

• In-house End-to-End Leadership Program Design and Delivery

Kia pai tō wiki

Kenny Bhosale

CEO & Founder, The Bridge Leaders