As you grow, the truth gets filtered. Softened. Edited. And you are the last to know.
“The higher you sit in an organisation, the less of it you actually see. Not because people are dishonest. Because they are careful.”
There is an information problem that comes with success. In the early days, people tell you everything. The product is broken. The client is unhappy. The team is frustrated. You hear it because you are close enough to the ground to feel it.
Then the company grows. Layers appear. The truth starts to travel differently. It gets softened at each level. Reframed. Packaged. By the time it reaches you, the bad news has become a manageable update and the warning sign has become a footnote.
“The loneliest information problem in business belongs to the person at the top. Everyone is telling them something. Almost nobody is telling them everything.”
Three signs the truth is no longer reaching you:
• Every update you receive is broadly positive. Problems exist in every organisation. If yours only has solutions, the problems are being filtered before they reach you.
• People agree with you faster than the problem deserves. When your team stops pushing back, it is rarely because you are always right. It is because pushing back has stopped feeling safe.
• You are surprised by things that should not surprise you. When a client leaves or a key person resigns and it feels like it came from nowhere — it did not. It just never reached you in time.
The solution is not to demand more honesty. It is to build the conditions where honesty is safe. Where the person who brings bad news is valued more than the one who buries it.
The best-led organisations are not the ones where everything goes right. They are the ones where the truth travels fast enough to fix it before it becomes a crisis.
When did someone last tell you something you genuinely did not want to hear? And what did you do when they did?
Best,
Arjun
