You believe you get honest pushback. You say “my door is 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’re wrong. And you rarely do.

This isn’t a team of people who lack opinions. It’s a team facing a much bigger ask than you realise, and one that has nothing to do with confidence or competence.

Why “just speak up” doesn’t work

In their book on Netflix’s culture, Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer describe what they call the emperor problem: the higher you climb in an organisation, the less feedback you receive, and the more likely you are to make an error that’s obvious to everyone except you. Netflix’s fix wasn’t to wait for candour to appear. It was to build the structure that makes candour survivable — starting, deliberately, with feedback flowing up before it flows down.

That detail matters more outside Silicon Valley than inside it. Meyer found that even within one company, the ask lands differently depending on power distance leadership orientation — how much a team expects authority to be earned through hierarchy versus questioned openly. In more hierarchically-oriented teams, correcting a superior in front of others isn’t a personality trait to overcome. It’s a real social cost, and asking someone to absorb it with an open-door policy is like asking them to walk into traffic because you promised the crossing was safe.

A warning that never landed

A project lead — call her Priya — knows three weeks before the deadline that a client commitment isn’t going to hold. She raises it once, on a status call, in front of the team: “The timeline for this phase is quite ambitious. We may want to keep an eye on it.” That sentence is her alarm bell. Where she’s from, you don’t tell your manager he’s wrong in front of colleagues — so saying even that much, out loud, in a meeting, is a significant move, and she expects him to follow up with her afterwards, privately.

Her manager hears a careful lead being careful. “Good shout, let’s monitor it,” he says, and moves on. He never follows up. So Priya concludes the message was heard and the decision made — it’s his call now, not a decision she has standing to keep pushing on. She stops raising it, out of respect, not fear. Three weeks later the deadline fails exactly as she knew it would, and he asks the question every leader asks in that moment: “why did nobody tell me?”

She did tell him. He just didn’t recognise the warning as a warning, because feedback across cultures often travels in softer packaging than the listener is trained to expect.

The power distance leadership gap, not a confidence problem

This is where most leaders misdiagnose the problem. They read the silence as low engagement, or read individual team members as passive, and start looking for people who will “push back more.” What’s actually happening is a cultural friction point: two reasonable, functioning systems for how authority and correction work, colliding without either side realising there’s a difference to reconcile.

This is one of the most common and most fixable forms of feedback breakdown I see in leadership teams — and it compounds with the leadership styles across cultures gap already sitting underneath most decision-making friction in the same teams.

Treated as a skill gap on the leader’s side, this becomes solvable. Treated as something wrong with the team, it never does — because you’ll keep hoping for a trait to appear instead of building the structure that makes the trait unnecessary.

What actually works

The fix Meyer documents at Netflix is structural, not attitudinal — and it transfers well beyond Silicon Valley:

Make it a standing agenda item, not an open floor. “Any feedback?” asks someone to volunteer into risk, in public, with no script. “What’s one thing I could have done better in that meeting?” asks a specific, bounded question in a one-to-one — a fundamentally smaller ask, and one that doesn’t require the other person to decide unprompted that now is the moment to speak.

Ask before you need it, not after something’s gone wrong. Feedback requested only in a crisis reads as a test with a right answer. Feedback requested as a routine, low-stakes habit — every 1:1, every project close — reads as genuinely safe, because it isn’t tied to a specific failure someone would have to name.

Build a written or anonymous channel as a bridge. It isn’t the end state, and it shouldn’t replace direct conversation permanently. But for a team still learning that upward correction is actually welcome, it lowers the first-time cost enough that people will use it. A written channel would have let Priya flag the deadline risk without needing to manage the social read of raising it in the room.

Close the loop visibly. When someone does correct you, change something and say so — publicly, if appropriate. This is the single fastest way to prove the door was real, and it’s the step most leaders skip because it feels like admitting a mistake rather than modelling the exact behaviour they’re asking for.

None of this asks your team to solve a power distance leadership gap by becoming less hierarchical in how they see authority generally. It asks you to stop relying on comfort with hierarchy as the delivery mechanism for information you need.

The real cost of not fixing it

The danger isn’t just that you miss feedback. It’s that you form false confidence — the read on a project, a decision, a client relationship that everyone else in the room already knows is wrong, and nobody has a route to tell you. Left unaddressed, a power distance leadership gap doesn’t just cost you a few uncomfortable conversations. It costs you accurate information, at exactly the moments you need it most.

In a multicultural team, upward silence is rarely a signal that everything’s fine. It’s usually a signal that your team has quietly worked out that the door was never the barrier.