When there’s a problem inside a business, leaders naturally feel it’s their job to dig deep and find a solution.
But what if their employees already know what’s wrong and just are not saying it?
Dom Thurbon, a former EY partner, two-time founder and author, has spent two decades working with organisations on leadership and change. His conclusion is that most problems in large and small businesses share a common root: a failure of honesty. Not philosophical divergence about what is true, but a collective unwillingness to act on truths that are already known.
“So many of the problems I see in enterprise are not born of good faith disagreements over the nature of truth,” Thurbon says. “It’s people agreeing what the truth is, but then not caring about it anyway. I think that’s where we get into real problems.”
He says SME owners should explore whether their business has a culture of workplace white lies and, at the same time, ask themselves an uncomfortable yet crucial question as a leader: can they handle the truth?
Why Honesty Feels So Hard in Business
Thurbon was sitting in a bar in Austria when, inspired by shifting global politics, he started to reflect honestly upon dishonesty, culminating in a new book, To Be Honest.
“I think we’re living in a culture right now where having a healthy relationship with the truth has largely become optional,” Thurbon sighs. “We even have a phrase for it now: you’ve got your ‘own truth’ and you just need to ‘find your truth.’” He says it was inevitable that that mindset would find its way into businesses. But, importantly, he notes that problems with corporate truth-telling pre-date the era of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts,’ and have nothing to do with politics.
Instead, Thurbon identifies three forces that keep people from telling the truth at work: fear, cost and status.
“It can be scary,” he says, acknowledging the risks of going out on a limb. “Sometimes telling the truth might be admitting our own mistakes and vulnerabilities, errors that we’ve made, deficiencies that we’ve got.”
The second barrier is tangible cost. In many environments, Thurbon says, employees are given active disincentives for telling leaders anything other than what they want to hear. He offers the example of bonuses that depend on hitting certain numbers – in this case telling the truth could directly affect someone’s pay.
The third barrier, which Thurbon describes as the most subtle, is the threat to social standing. “We humans are social creatures,” he explains. “We want to fit in, we want to get along, we want to build strong relationships and sometimes that puts us in positions where we feel like we need to go along with something we know isn’t true or isn’t right, because if we don’t, it’s going to threaten our social relationships.”
Those three forces converge in the small, daily interactions people have in SMEs. A colleague asks for feedback on a presentation. The honest answer is that it needs significant work. But fear, social cost and the desire to protect the relationship push colleagues to avoid reality.
“The everyday lies that we tell are really little and they grease the social skids,” Thurbon says. “But if you think about that situation in that company, that hurts the organisation. A pitch goes out that isn’t very good. A presentation gets given that could be better. Someone misses a performance conversation that could genuinely improve their performance at work.”
Those small lies, he says, aggregate into cultures of well-intentioned dishonesty, where no single person is acting in bad faith but the organisation pays the price.
Leaders Must Go First To Change Culture
Thurbon breaks down truth-telling into three categories. ‘Them truths’ are statements about others or the outside world. ‘We truths’ are statements about the organisation, and ‘me truths’ are things we say about ourselves. Most people default to ‘them truths,’ he says, but the ‘me truth’ is the harder and more powerful place to start, especially as a leader.
Thurbon points to his co-founder at his first company, who undertook a 360-degree performance review and received brutal results. The appraisal called him out for destructive behaviours, including competitiveness, perfectionism and oppositionality. “His response was to call a meeting of the entire company and share the feedback top to bottom,” Thurbon recalls. The founder apologised and invited more feedback in real-time. “I have never, ever seen a group of people respond more positively to a leader in 20 years of working with senior executives because of that vulnerability,” Thurbon says.
Research supports the link between leadership behaviour and culture. One study of nearly 2,000 senior managers confirmed what many leaders instinctively know: leaders shape culture far more than culture shapes leaders. Culture is not built through policy or structure; It is built through the daily behaviour of the people at the top. If SME owners want honesty to flow freely in their businesses, Thurbon argues, it must start with them.
“Yeah, it’s hugely uncomfortable,” he acknowledges. “But I think sometimes we just need to put our adult pants on and go first with that stuff.”
Three Steps to Embedding Truth-Telling In Small Businesses
For businesses without an established culture of candour, Thurbon offers practical advice: do not try to overhaul everything at once.
“If you’re in an organisation where you feel like there’s not a very robust culture of truth-telling, you probably don’t want to start by calling a 30-person team meeting and then getting everyone to tell the deepest, darkest secret about the organisation,” he says.
His first step is to start small, he says, with a nod to his business partner, behavioural neuroscientist Dr Emily Heath. “She says humans are ‘ease-seeking missiles’ that, in any given situation, tend to gravitate towards the path of least resistance,” he explains. In other words, because truth-telling causes friction, the goal should be to make it as frictionless as possible at first. This could be as simple as, after a client meeting, taking three minutes with the team to ask one question: what is one thing that could have gone better? The first attempt may yield little, Thurbon says, but it begins to condition a different dynamic.
The second step is to lead with a ‘me truth.’ Opening with personal vulnerability, rather than pointing at problems elsewhere in the organisation, signals safety and sets the tone for others to follow. It could be as simple as expressing concerns over budgets or the economic landscape.
Third, he suggests leaders remove disincentives. He says many businesses have systems that actively discourage honesty, from bonus structures that reward specific numbers to cultures where speaking up carries consequences.”You can’t expect someone to tell the truth if keeping their job requires them not to,” Thurbon says. “You need to look at the systems inside your business and go, ‘Do we have things in place that are disincentivizing this?’”
What Happens When Truth Becomes an Active Practice
While actively lying is universally regarded in a negative light, Thurbon says it’s important not to define truth as simply the absence of falsehoods. “If all we focus on doing is removing lying, it’s not like we get left with the truth,” he says. “We might get left with silence. We might get left with people saying some things, but not the whole truth.”
The returns from actively building honest cultures, he argues, show up in three areas: innovation, performance and agility. “The data are incredibly clear on this,” he says. “The more honest cultures become, the more innovative those cultures become.” The same goes for performance, he says. He cites studies into what academics call ‘integrity management’ as proof companies with strong honesty cultures significantly outperform those without, by as much as 40 per cent. “So truth drives profit,” he concludes.
As for agility, he says, there is rarely change without truth, so, the ability to have honest internal conversations also becomes the departure point for quick adoption of emerging trends like economic volatility and AI. “We think we’ve got an AI adoption problem. We think we’ve got an organisational change problem. We think we’ve got a leadership problem,” Thurbon says.
“Actually, we’ve just got an honesty problem.” And a fitness check can lead to a healthier business. “If we could just build a muscle to have honest conversations in a safe and constructive environment, it would be solving the problem that lets us solve all the other problems,” he says “Making truth happen is the thing that really makes the magic happen.”
