How much productivity is your organisation losing because employees have stopped telling management the truth? During a culture transformation session with a financial services client, I ask participants to name the one issue quietly undermining performance. I have now come to expect it, the room becomes still. Executives look at their notebooks and Managers look at one another.
Then an operations officer raises his hand. “Sir, we report the same customer delays every month, but management tells us to remain positive. So we have stopped reporting them.”
The Chief Executive Officer shifts in his chair. The officer explains that customers wait for approvals, staff repeat work, and branch teams manipulate reports to avoid appearing difficult. Everyone knows the process is broken, but nobody wants to become known as the employee who always complains.
Most managers defend themselves. One executive behaves differently. She asks the officer to draw the process on a flip chart. Within twenty minutes, the team identifies three unnecessary approvals, two duplicated controls and one manager who has been sitting on decisions for days.
That moment changes the room. The problem was never employee attitude. The problem was leadership deafness.
Feedback is an operating system
Let me be direct. Leaders who brush aside feedback do not create harmony. They create silence, and silence is expensive. Waste continues. Weak performers hide, resources are abused, meetings become theatre, and employees learn that telling the truth carries more risk than protecting failure.
A four-times growth agenda cannot be delivered by a culture that punishes bad news. Growth multiplies pressure, transactions, customers and operational risk. It therefore demands faster feedback, faster correction and stronger accountability. Culture transformation must make truth safe and action compulsory.
The practical leadership discipline is simple. Every strategic priority should have a weekly feedback loop (Figure 1): what is working, what is failing, what is being wasted, who must act, and by when. Leaders must then close the loop publicly.
Figure 1: Weekly Feedback loop
Employees do not stop giving feedback because they have nothing to say.
They stop because management has repeatedly taught them that nothing will change.
Copyright Summit Consulting Ltd, 2026. All rights reserved.
