Why Successful CEOs Stop Hearing the Truth

A curious thing can happen as a CEO becomes more successful.

The company gets larger. The data gets better. The executive team gets stronger. The board packs become more sophisticated. There are dashboards for almost everything.

And yet the person at the top can gradually become further away from reality.

Not because people suddenly start lying.

Because people start editing.

A customer disaster becomes “some service issues.” A troubled executive becomes “someone who needs more time.” A product nobody wants becomes “early adoption challenges.”

Each description may be technically defensible. Together, they can create a version of the company that is considerably more reassuring than the one customers and employees are actually experiencing.

This problem has been studied for decades. Organisational researchers Elizabeth Morrison and Frances Milliken described “organisational silence” as the collective withholding of information about problems and concerns. Later research by James Detert and Amy Edmondson showed that employees often carry deeply held assumptions about when speaking up is risky or inappropriate—even when what they want to say could help the organisation. Academy of Management Journals

I think CEOs should worry about this much more than they do.

Power changes what enters the room

The CEO does not need to be an unpleasant person for this to happen.

Hierarchy itself changes conversation.

Imagine you are sitting in a strategy meeting. The CEO is visibly excited about a new initiative. You think one of the assumptions is badly wrong.

Before speaking, you are likely to make a calculation.

How certain am I?

Will this change anything?

Will my boss think I am being negative?

What happened the last time somebody strongly challenged the CEO?

That calculation may take seconds. But multiplied across hundreds of decisions and thousands of employees, it changes what leadership hears.

Research on power offers another caution. A well-known series of experiments found that people placed in more powerful positions were, on average, less likely to spontaneously take another person's perspective. That does not mean power inevitably makes leaders insensitive—the study was experimental and not a study of CEOs—but it points to a genuine leadership risk. PubMed

The more authority you acquire, the less you can assume that other people will automatically show you the world as they see it.

Leaders teach people how honest to be

I think one of the most underestimated leadership behaviours is the response to bad news.

A CEO asks for candour.

An executive delivers it.

The CEO becomes defensive, interrupts, questions the executive's judgment and spends ten minutes explaining why the criticism is wrong.

The meeting ends.

No formal policy has changed.

But everybody has learned something.

The next difficult message will arrive more carefully packaged.

Recent research shows that this reaction is not imaginary. A 2025 experiment involving frontline managers found that, under some conditions, employee voice could create ego threat and defensive evaluations of both the message and the person delivering it. But newer work adds an important qualification: challenging ideas are more likely to be supported when managers themselves recognise that the status quo needs to change. ScienceDirect

That nuance matters.

Managers are not simply fragile gatekeepers who dislike dissent.

Context matters.

So does leadership behaviour.

And employees are constantly learning from both.

The real danger is not lying. It is filtering.

This is why I would not describe the problem as dishonesty.

In most good companies, the people involved are trying to do their jobs.

But information passes through layers.

A frontline employee tells a manager.

The manager tells a business head.

The business head briefs the executive committee.

The executive committee briefs the CEO.

At each stage, someone adds interpretation.

Someone removes noise.

Someone tries to appear in control.

That is necessary up to a point. A CEO cannot receive every raw complaint in a company employing 50,000 people.

But compression can become distortion.

I call the distance between what is really happening inside the company and what senior leadership believes is happening the Leadership Information Gap.

That is my term, not an established academic measure.

Every large organisation has such a gap.

The question is whether leadership is actively reducing it—or unknowingly widening it.

More dashboards won't solve it

The obvious response is better data.

And yes, CEOs need excellent data.

But data does not eliminate interpretation.

A customer satisfaction average can improve while an important customer segment deteriorates.

Revenue can reach target because discounting is hiding weakening demand.

A project can remain green because nobody wants to be responsible for making it red.

A culture survey can look acceptable while the people the company most needs are quietly updating their CVs.

The problem is not the dashboard.

The problem is believing that the dashboard contains the entire company.

Sometimes the sentence a CEO most needs to hear cannot be reduced to a metric:

“We all know this isn't working.”

The best CEOs design dissent

This is where I think the standard advice—“be a better listener”—doesn't go far enough.

A large company cannot depend on the CEO having a particularly humble mood that morning.

The organisation needs mechanisms that bring opposing information into important decisions.

Sometimes that means collecting views before the most powerful person gives theirs.

Sometimes it means asking a team to argue deliberately against a strategy everyone appears to support.

Sometimes it means speaking directly with customers or employees several layers below the executive committee.

And sometimes it means asking an extraordinarily simple question:

What am I not hearing?

Then resisting the urge to fill the silence.

Psychological safety matters here. Research continues to find a connection between employees feeling safe and their willingness to speak. But recent work also suggests safety alone is not always enough; employees also need to believe speaking will actually accomplish something. Frontiers

That distinction is crucial.

A company where employees are allowed to speak but nobody listens is not genuinely open.

It is merely polite.

Success makes curiosity more important, not less

Perhaps the hardest part is that successful leaders have good reasons to trust their instincts.

They have often been right when other people were wrong.

They took risks others rejected.

They saw opportunities others missed.

Conviction helped create their success.

But the same history can eventually make contradictory information easier to dismiss.

That is why I think success should make a CEO more curious, not more certain.

The great leadership risk is not that somebody inside your company believes you are wrong.

That is healthy.

The danger is that many people believe you are wrong—and have independently concluded there is no point telling you.

The strongest leaders do not simply tolerate dissent.

They build organisations in which uncomfortable information has a reliable route to the top.

Because by the time everyone agrees with the CEO, the most important question may no longer be whether the strategy is right.

It may be whether anybody would still say so if it wasn't.

Abhimanyu Ghosh

Business. Leadership. Economy. Society.