When did someone last tell you something about your leadership that was genuinely hard to hear?
Take a second with it. Not a performance review. A real, uncomfortable piece of truth from someone who wasn't trying to protect your feelings.
If you can't remember, I want to be straight with you about what that probably means.
It isn't that there's nothing to say. It's that you've climbed to a place where people have stopped saying it.
This is one of the strangest traps of senior leadership.
The higher you go, the less honest feedback reaches you. People filter. They soften. They round the edges off anything difficult, partly out of respect and partly out of self-protection. By the time you're in the top seat, you may be the least-told-the-truth person in the entire building.
And it doesn't feel like a problem. That's what makes it dangerous.
It feels like things are going well. The meetings are smooth. People agree with you. Nobody pushes back hard. You read that as a sign you're doing well, when often it's a sign the honesty has drained out of the room.
I see this in almost every senior leader I coach.
Not a shortage of talent or effort. A shortage of anyone willing to tell them the truth. The systems they trust to surface it, the surveys and the review cycles, hand them a diluted version that's comfortable to read and impossible to act on.
I heard the sharpest version of this from Carlos Abrams-Rivera on the podcast this week. He spent 30 years climbing to the top of Kraft Heinz, a company of 36,000 people. He had a full 360 process. Anonymous surveys. Every mechanism you'd assume gives a leader the truth.
Then he went through a deep feedback exercise. 28 people interviewed about him. His board, his peers, his wife.
Day one, he was handed a blue folder: everything great about him. He read it and thought, maybe I'm doing fine.
Day two, a red folder, thicker than the first, holding everything he needed to work on.
He called it one of the most humbling moments of his career, because you reach the top believing you've largely figured it out, and then you see how much is still there.
Here's what matters.
None of it, he told me, came close to what his own company's feedback systems had ever surfaced. A man running 36,000 people, with every formal channel available to him, had to go outside all of it to finally hear the truth about himself.
That's the lesson. The truth stops finding you on its own, so you have to go looking for it on purpose.
This is much of what I do with the leaders I coach. I become the person in the room who isn't on the payroll, doesn't want anything from them, and will say the thing nobody else will. If that's missing for you right now, reply COACHING and we'll talk.
So carry the question into this week:
When did someone last tell you something hard to hear? And if the honest answer is that you can't remember, the first move of a leader who wants to keep growing is to go find the truth that no longer reaches you on its own.
🎧 Full conversation with Carlos Abrams-Rivera, former CEO of Kraft Heinz, on The World Class Leaders Show:
🎧 Watch on YouTube
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts
🎧 Listen on Spotify
Andrea
One idea a week on how top CEOs lead when the stakes are high, from inside rooms most people never enter. Free, and you can leave any time.