I once worked with a senior leader who told me, early in our engagement, that he had an open-door policy and always welcomed feedback.

Six months later, after building enough trust with his team to have real conversations, I heard a very different story. People described walking on eggshells. They described preparing carefully before sharing anything negative, anticipating his reaction. Several said they'd simply stopped trying.

He was not, by any measure, a bad leader. He genuinely believed what he'd told me. The gap between his self-perception and his team's experience wasn't dishonesty. It was the most common blind spot I encounter in leadership work: The belief that openness is created by announcing it.

It isn't. Openness is created by demonstrating, repeatedly, what happens when people tell you the truth.

Why Feedback Cultures Are Rare

Most organizations have feedback mechanisms. Annual reviews. 360 surveys. Town halls where leaders invite questions. The mechanics exist; The culture rarely does.

The reason is straightforward: People share feedback based on what they believe will happen when they do. If past experience suggests that honesty produces defensiveness, awkwardness, or subtle consequences, they learn to manage up instead of being straight. Over time, leaders become surrounded by a version of reality that has been carefully curated for their comfort.

This is a significant organizational risk — not just for culture, but for strategy. The information you most need to make good decisions is often precisely the information people are least likely to give you.

What Honest, Compassionate Feedback Actually Requires

The word 'honest' gets most of the attention in conversations about feedback. In my experience, 'compassionate' does most of the work.

Compassionate feedback isn't softer feedback. It's feedback given by someone who genuinely cares about the person receiving it — who wants them to succeed, who sees their potential, who is offering something hard because they believe it will help. That intention changes how feedback lands.

When I work with leadership teams on building feedback cultures, I focus on three things:

  • The quality of the relationship underneath the feedback. Feedback given by someone you trust lands differently than feedback given by someone who feels like a threat. Investment in relationships is investment in feedback receptivity.
  • The leader's visible response to receiving feedback. Nothing shapes a feedback culture more than what the leader does when they hear something difficult. Defensiveness closes the loop immediately. Genuine curiosity — even just 'tell me more about that' — opens it.
  • Specificity and timeliness. The most useful feedback is behaviorally specific ('When you cut people off in meetings...') and delivered close to the moment it's relevant. Vague feedback about general patterns, delivered months later, rarely changes anything.

Starting With Yourself

If you want to build a genuine feedback culture in your team or organization, the most powerful place to start is with your own willingness to receive it.

One question I give to leaders in development programs: 'When is the last time someone told you something about your leadership that surprised you?' If you can't remember, that's the data.

In the research I've engaged with through my work at Michigan Ross and in writing for HBR, the leaders who grow most are consistently those who maintain a genuine curiosity about their blind spots — not as a performance of humility, but as a real orientation toward learning.

The culture you want — one where people are honest with each other, where problems surface early, where trust compounds over time — begins with you deciding that feedback is a gift, not a threat.

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Creating a genuine feedback culture in your organization takes work, but you don’t have to do it alone. We’ve helped our clients create specific, sustainable solutions for giving and receiving feedback. Connect with us to see how Riverbank can help you find your feedback flow.

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