Is your team too polite to tell you the truth? How you respond matters too

Politeness is generally a good thing. Most of us want to work with people who are thoughtful, respectful, kind, and considerate. Nobody wants every meeting to turn into a battle of opinions, and brutal honesty can sometimes be more brutal than useful.

But I've started wondering about the difference between being kind and making feedback comfortable. I recognise this in myself. When I'm reviewing someone's work, I'll often start with what's strong and then carefully work towards the part I am less convinced by. That comes from a good place: someone has put time and thought into it, and I don't want to knock their confidence. But if I'm too careful, they may leave the conversation without knowing what I actually think.

Part of that is simply trying to be considerate. Someone might have spent hours on the work in front of me, and I don’t want to knock their confidence or come across as unnecessarily negative. But I’ve started wondering: at what point does being polite stop being helpful?

If I soften something enough, the other person may never realise how strongly I actually feel about it. And across a team, those small acts of self-editing can add up.

Before giving difficult feedback, we often make a series of tiny calculations:

So we edit.

“This isn't clear” becomes “Maybe we could tighten this slightly.” “I disagree with this approach” becomes “Just one thought…” And “I don't think customers will understand this” becomes “Could be worth thinking about the customer angle.”

None of these phrases is necessarily bad. Tone matters, and thoughtful communication matters. The problem comes when the meaning gets diluted along with the delivery.

Behavioural science suggests there may be more going on here than individual confidence or personality. Decades of research into conformity suggest that people can adjust their expressed opinions to align with a majority, even when they privately disagree. A 2024 systematic review found that conformity remains a robust behaviour across different contexts, building on Solomon Asch's landmark experiments from the 1950s.

In other words, once a room appears to be moving towards agreement, saying “Actually, I don't think this works” can become harder.

If that happens repeatedly across a team, leaders can end up making decisions based on an incomplete picture. Everyone appears aligned, while reservations, alternative ideas, and potential problems remain hidden.

So the cost of excessive politeness isn’t necessarily conflict, but more so the information that never gets shared.

It's tempting to solve this problem by telling people to “speak up”. But that puts all the responsibility on the person giving the feedback.

There are good reasons people hesitate. Hierarchy matters. Challenging your manager can feel very different from challenging a peer. Confidence, previous experiences, team norms, and culture all matter too. Even the way a question is asked may influence what people feel comfortable saying.

Research into employee voice supports this. A study of 3,149 employees and 223 managers found that managerial openness was associated with employees speaking up with ideas and suggestions for improvement, with psychological safety helping to explain that relationship. That makes feedback culture a leadership issue as much as an individual one.

If every idea presented by a senior person is followed by “Does everyone agree?”, it takes confidence to be the one person who says no. And once several people have publicly agreed, disagreeing can become harder still.

So perhaps the better question isn't “Why aren't people giving us honest feedback?” It's “What are we doing that makes honest feedback difficult to give?”

One surprisingly simple place to start is with the question itself.

“Any feedback?” is broad, vague and very easy to answer with “Looks good!”

Instead, try asking questions that actively give people permission to challenge the work:

These questions do something important: they make criticism part of the task. You're no longer asking someone whether they can find something wrong with your work. You're explicitly giving them permission to look for weaknesses, challenge assumptions and identify what could be better. And if you're the most senior person in the room, there's another simple behaviour worth trying: don't give your opinion first.

Ask everyone else what they think before revealing where you stand. Otherwise, what sounds like “I'd love everyone's thoughts” can quickly become “Here's what I think. Who agrees?”

The way leaders respond to feedback matters just as much as the way they ask for it. You can tell people you want honesty, but if someone challenges an idea and the immediate response is to defend it, explain it away or spend ten minutes proving why the original thinking was right, people notice. They learn what happens when they disagree.

Researcher Amy Edmondson describes psychological safety as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Her research found that psychological safety was associated with learning behaviours within teams.

Giving difficult feedback is one of those small interpersonal risks. Before speaking, someone might be wondering: Will they think I'm negative? Will I offend them? Will this affect how I'm perceived? Will I look stupid if I'm wrong?

Leaders can't remove every one of those concerns, but they can influence what happens next.

When someone raises a concern, and the response is curiosity—“Tell me more”, “What makes you think that?” or “What would you do instead?”—it sends a different signal. And when feedback genuinely changes a decision, say so: “Amy raised something I hadn't considered, so we've changed the approach.”

That shows the rest of the team that feedback doesn't just disappear into a meeting. It can have an effect.

There are practical ways to reduce the pressure, too. Ask more junior colleagues for their views before senior voices dominate the conversation. Give people time to respond asynchronously rather than expecting an immediate opinion in a meeting. Invite someone to actively look for weaknesses in an idea. Ask for criticism before sharing your own view.

The goal is not to manufacture disagreement, but to make sure agreement is genuine.

Perhaps this is the distinction that matters most. Kind feedback is honest, but considerate. Comfortable feedback avoids the awkwardness of saying what you really think.

Kind feedback might be:

“I think there’s something strong here, but the customer problem isn’t clear enough yet. I’d revisit that before we move forward.”

Comfortable feedback might be:

“This is looking really good. Maybe just a couple of small tweaks around the customer bit?”

The second version may feel easier to deliver because it softens the criticism. But if you genuinely think the customer problem needs more work, describing it as “a couple of small tweaks” doesn’t give the other person a clear picture of what needs to change.

Being direct doesn't require being rude. Criticism doesn't have to be personal, and kindness doesn't require us to pretend something is better than we think it is. In fact, telling someone what you genuinely think—thoughtfully, specifically, and with the intention of helping them improve—can be one of the more respectful things you do.

We often talk about psychological safety in terms of people's willingness to speak. But there's another side to it: people's willingness to listen. For honest feedback to become normal, teams need both.

People need to believe they can say “I don't agree”, “I think we've missed something” or “I don't think this is ready”. And the person hearing it needs to be able to respond without making them regret saying it.

That doesn't mean accepting every piece of feedback. People will disagree. Some criticism will be wrong. Leaders still have to make decisions. But there is a big difference between hearing feedback and agreeing with feedback. A healthy feedback culture doesn't require consensus. It actually requires people to know that disagreement is allowed.