In this excerpt from a conversation between Bradley Hamner and a co‑host, they explore the difficulty leaders face in determining whether the feedback they receive from their teams reflects genuine truth or merely what the leader wants to hear. Hamner shares personal pain from discovering that team members were saying the "right" things in meetings while privately holding a different view, highlighting how such misalignment hampers culture development. The co‑host points out that leaders often become insulated, which further blocks conflicting ideas and discourages messengers from speaking up. The dialogue sets up the problem of hidden dissent and hints at the need for intentional cultural practices that surface honest feedback.
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a really loaded question, and I'm gonna try my best.
Okay.
How do you know that whenever you are listening and what your team is sharing with you is the truth or what you want to hear or what they think you want to hear?
Okay, I was gonna say those are two different things. What they think, the truth, and what you want to hear.
Okay, truth or they're sharing, they're telling you. Let me just think. And the reason is because I can speak to this from personal, personal pain in my own leadership is that I found out like people are saying the right thing and then come to find out, oh my goodness, this place, this, this place is, is not at all. This is not what they're saying in one-to-ones, in team meetings. Say this, don't say that. Say this, this is what he wants to hear. This is not what he wants to hear. Now that's a big part of developing culture and all of those kinds of things. Yeah. Yes. I understand, which is why I said this is a loaded question. But how do you know?
You're right in that a lot of times, especially leaders can get isolated or insulated, right? They're insulated from conflicting ideas. People want to be kind of— they don't want to be the person that, you know, don't kill the messenger kind of person, right?
Yeah.
So they're going to tell you the things that you want. I think the intentionality comes with As you said, culture, culture is huge in building a culture from the ground up or kind of reestablishing, hey guys, as a leader, I need to hear the tough things. I need to be able to make good decisions. I need you to know. I mean, in communication, sometimes you actually explicitly have to say the thing and not infer. So explicitly saying to people, and maybe it's people closer in a closer circle to the leader. I really need to hear the hard things. I need to know.
