You Said Your Door Was Open: Why Your Team Isn’t Giving You Honest Feedback

You say your door is always open. You ask “any concerns?” at the end of every meeting. You’ve told your team more than once that you want to hear when you’ve got something wrong. The problem is that nobody actually tells you. You get the nods, you get the “all good,” and then three weeks later a problem lands on your desk that half the team saw coming — the same half that said everything was fine. So you ask the obvious question: why did nobody say anything? Today I want to show you why that’s the wrong question, and give you a better one — one you ask before the disaster rather than standing in the middle of it.

Hi, this is Cultural Friction, and this is our second episode. Our first was on swift trust, and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. This week is all about having an open-door policy and still getting no real feedback.

Let me introduce you to Priya. Priya is a project lead in Singapore. Her manager, James, is in London. And for three weeks now, Priya has known something James doesn’t: the client deadline he’s committed to isn’t going to happen. The integration work is simply too big, and she’s sure of it. And she’s told him. In a status call, in front of the group, she said: “The timeline for the integration phase is quite ambitious. We may need to keep an eye on it.” That was her warning.

What did James hear? He heard a careful project lead being careful. He said, “Great shout, let’s monitor it,” and moved on to the next item. Meeting over. Everything fine — except Priya’s warning has just been overlooked.

Because where Priya comes from, you don’t tell your boss he’s wrong, and you certainly don’t do it in front of a group. So a sentence like “quite ambitious, we may want to keep an eye on it,” said out loud in a group meeting, is Priya putting up a big red flag and setting off the alarm bells. She expects James to hear it and come to her afterwards and say, “Priya, you flagged a problem — tell me what you’re seeing.” He never came.

Think about what Priya knows now. She raised it, he heard it, he acknowledged it, and he decided to carry on. In her mind, the message has been delivered and the decision has been made. He’s the boss; he’s made that call with his eyes open. So she can stop raising it. Three weeks later the deadline arrives and, as she knew it would, it fails. The client is unhappy, James is unhappy, and in the wash-up come those immortal words: “Why did nobody tell me?” And Priya is stunned — because she did tell him.

This happens a lot, and it’s not that James is a bad manager. He’s probably a very good one — he reads the right things, looks after his team, works hard to build a good environment. But he didn’t hear what Priya was saying. And it’s not only bad managers who get this wrong; good managers get it wrong too. Two people, the same sentence, two completely different meanings. James needed the warning to sound like a warning. Priya gave the loudest warning she could give in that room, according to how she works — and the project still hit the wall.

Here’s where most leaders take a wrong turn. After something like this, they decide the team needs to be braver, to push back more. Maybe you’ve said it yourself: “I want people to tell me — push back, don’t be scared.” But look at what James had already done. Open door. Every week he asks, “Any concerns?” He’s made himself as available as a manager can be. And available is the word that matters, because availability was never Priya’s problem. She can reach James any time. The problem is the price — what it costs someone like her to stand up in a meeting and tell a senior person his plan won’t work. James removed every obstacle except that one.

On the same team there’s Erik, based in Stockholm. Erik pushes back on everything — loudly, cheerfully, in front of everyone, sometimes before you’ve finished your sentence. Where Erik comes from, that isn’t rude; it’s how you contribute. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t feel he’s being honest. So does James think people push back? Of course — he’s got Erik. And Erik is exactly why the silence is invisible. The team isn’t quiet; it’s unevenly quiet. Some voices carry easily, and some are paying full price for every word. If you lead a mixed international team, I’d put money on it: you’ve got your own Erik, and somewhere you’ve got your own Priya.

So why does this happen? Two main reasons. Reason one: the higher you go in an organisation, the less you hear. This has nothing to do with culture — it’s true of almost every leader everywhere, and probably of you. Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, and Erin Meyer, who researches culture and organisations, wrote about this in their book on Netflix’s culture and gave it a name: the emperor problem. You know the story of the emperor’s new clothes — he’s convinced he’s wearing the finest clothes money can buy while he’s actually walking around naked. The more senior you become, the fewer people are willing to tell you what they really think, and the more likely you are to be strolling around in some very bad decisions that everyone can see but you.

Think about your own career as a junior. Did you feel comfortable challenging your boss, giving negative feedback, saying a decision was wrong? Now add cultural defaults, where in some cultures you simply don’t challenge your boss — especially not in a full group. So the more your decisions matter, the more careful people are about giving you negative feedback on them — which means exactly when you need straight information, you get the least of it. Watch it happen: the moment a senior person gives their view first, the room quietly reorganises itself around that view. People who firmly disagreed ninety seconds ago are now building on the idea. That’s the emperor problem in miniature, and it happens everywhere — Stockholm, London, Dallas, New Delhi, Brisbane.

Reason two: the price of correcting the boss isn’t the same for everyone. For Erik, telling James the deadline won’t hold costs nothing — where he trained, it’s normal and safe. Staying quiet would feel strange to him. For Priya, the same sentence is expensive. It risks embarrassing James in front of the team, it risks marking her out among her colleagues as someone who doesn’t know how things are done, and there’s always a chance she’s wrong — and being wrong and disrespectful is far worse than just being wrong. This isn’t shyness or a lack of confidence; it’s an accurate reading of the world she grew up in. The cost could be a reprimand, a stalled career, the promotion that never comes.

So Priya says something — in the loudest terms she knows how. And when the price is high, messages get wrapped in softer packaging. The words carry a hint, and the listener is expected to unwrap it. “That may be difficult” often means no. “We’ll do our best” can mean this is never going to happen. “Let me check with the team” can mean the conversation’s over. And “quite ambitious” — we know what that means. If you’ve ever come off a call with an overseas team thinking “great, they’re on board,” and then watched the thing you agreed quietly fall apart, this is probably what happened. Nobody misled you; someone told you no, politely, in packaging you took at face value. And it goes the other way too: your direct, well-meaning feedback can land like a slap, because to them that bluntness signals something far more serious than you intended.

Put the two reasons together and you can see what’s happening. Being the boss means you hear less. And leading across cultures means some of your people are paying a much higher price to give you negative feedback — and when they do, it may arrive in packaging you don’t recognise. An open door gives people access. But access was never what was missing. It’s the price. And an open door doesn’t lower the price.

One more thing, because it affects so many teams: if your team is remote, all of this gets harder. In an office, the real warning comes in the corridor two minutes after the meeting — the quiet conversation by the coffee machine. That’s where Priya would have made her second attempt. In a distributed team, there is no corridor. Everything is said in a meeting in front of everyone, or typed where it sits forever for all to see. Both raise the price. If your team went global faster than your habits did, that’s part of why the silence is growing.

So what do we do? We stop waiting for people to be brave and start building structure. Bravery asks Priya to pay the price. Structure lowers it. Four moves, and you can start all of them this week.

Move one: replace the open floor with a standing question. “Any concerns?” asked in an open meeting is an invitation to volunteer into risk, in public, with no script — and almost nobody takes it. So take the moment out of the room. Put one fixed question into your one-to-ones, the same words, the same slot, every week. One of my favourites: “What’s the biggest risk on this project right now?” You might think Priya has already raised the deadline, so she’d stay quiet — but here’s the whole point. In the meeting she was volunteering a correction to a senior person in public, and that’s the expensive part. When James asks her directly, in private, “What’s the biggest risk right now?”, she isn’t volunteering any more — she’s answering. And answering a direct question from your boss is not disrespectful; it’s what you’re supposed to do. The question flips the exchange: James carries the act of raising the subject, and all Priya has to do is answer. Ask for her read right now, every week, and nothing gets to be old news — a warning missed in week one gets another chance in weeks two, three and four. One warning on the wording, though: never ask “Was I wrong about anything?”, because to answer that, someone has to look you in the eye and say “yes, you were wrong,” and Priya never will. “What’s one thing I could do better?” can be answered with “it might have helped to hear more about the delivery team before we agreed the date.” Same information, completely different sentence to have to say.

Move two: ask when there’s nothing wrong. If the only time you ask for honest input is mid-crisis, the question always feels like a test, and everyone knows the passing answer. Ask on an ordinary Tuesday, about nothing in particular, and it feels safe because it isn’t attached to anyone’s failure. Expect the first few answers to be “oh, everything’s fine.” That’s normal — people are checking whether the question is real, sending a scout ahead to see if it’s safe. They watch what happens to the small, harmless answers before they trust you with the big ones. So keep asking — same slot, same words. The week you skip it because you’re busy is the week the team quietly files it under “he just says these things.”

Move three: give people a way to put it in writing. A shared risks page, a short asynchronous form — ideally one-to-one, so people aren’t reading each other’s comments — a regular “flag anything here” thread. Somewhere a concern can be raised without an audience and without having to find the perfect words live. Remember, some people are working in their second or third language; getting it right, live, in front of an audience is real pressure. Take that pressure away. Priya can type two careful sentences on a Tuesday evening; you read them calmly on Wednesday morning; nobody had to survive a moment. Writing is a bridge — if it becomes the only channel, you’ve just built a tidier version of silence — but as a first step for a team still learning that correcting upwards is genuinely welcome, it makes that first attempt cheaper.

Move four: when someone corrects you, say so out loud. This is the one leaders skip, and it has huge impact. When a concern reaches you and it’s right, act on it — and then tell the team. “Priya flagged a risk on the Meridian account last week that I’d missed, and we’ve adjusted the timeline.” No drama, no speech about the importance of speaking up. Just a fact: someone gave me negative feedback, it changed the course of things, and that’s good. For some leaders this feels like admitting a mistake that costs you authority — and in some cultures it might. But done regularly, in my experience it does the opposite. The whole team watches someone correct the boss and get thanked for it. Most of your team will never be in the room for your one-to-ones with Priya; this is the only one of the four moves they get to see with their own eyes. One visible moment like that is worth fifty repetitions of “you can always come and see me.”

Notice what none of these moves asks. They don’t ask Priya to toughen up. They don’t ask your team to see authority differently — you can’t change that, and it’s not your job. Every one of these moves changes something you control: when you ask, how you ask, where the answer can land, and what happens to the person who gives it. And if four feels like a lot for one week, start with move one — a single line dropped into the one-to-ones you already have. No announcement, no rollout, no slide deck. You can start tomorrow morning, and the only person who has to change anything is you.

And it works quickly. Picture the same team six months on. James asks his question every week. There’s a shared page where concerns go, and it gets read. Twice now the team has watched him credit a correction in the open. Priya still wouldn’t contradict him in a meeting — that hasn’t changed, and it never needed to. But when she sees the next deadline wobbling, she doesn’t have to weigh the price of saying so. There’s a place for it; it’s private; it’s expected; and she’s watched with her own eyes that people who use it come out ahead. That’s the moment the door becomes real.

So if you take one thing from this episode, take this: an open door removes a barrier, but it doesn’t remove the risk for some people. Being available is not the same as being safe to talk to. You don’t need people to be braver — you need a cheaper way for the people you already have to tell you the truth. If you build it, they will use it.

If this is a live issue for your team right now, that’s exactly the kind of thing I work through one-to-one with leaders — through advisory, coaching and workshops. You can find out more at brendanthomasquinn.com, and you can also find me on LinkedIn.