Have you become cocooned from hearing the truth? There is some interesting new research that explains the neuroscience behind increasing leadership blindness and why leaders don’t get feedback.
In June 2023, a small submersible called Titan imploded near the wreck of the Titanic, killing all five people on board, including the CEO of the company that built it.
In the months that followed, a picture emerged that was very uncomfortable to look at. Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate, had repeatedly been warned about the vessel by a series of his own chief engineers. They had pointed at the carbon fibre hull, the lack of independent certification, the corners being cut. Some of them left rather than continue working under conditions they believed were unsafe. They knew something catastrophic was going to happen and it was not a matter of if but when. When it did happen five people died and the business failed.
Rush wasn’t stupid. He was a confident leader with a strong vision. What killed him and four others wasn’t lack of intelligence. It was the absence of feedback he was willing to hear, and the absence of a culture in which giving it was safe. In fact, he created a culture where giving honest feedback was career-ending.
It is the most extreme recent example of a pattern that plays out in less dramatic forms inside leadership teams every day. Leaders stop hearing the truth. Not because their teams have nothing to say, but because saying it has become more stressful than staying quiet.
Most leadership writing on feedback focuses on how leaders should get better at receiving feedback. How to stay open and how not to get defensive. It’s good advice, but it misses the real bottleneck.
In 2018, a research team led by NYU psychologists Dr Tessa West and Dr Katherine Thorson, working with David Rock and Heidi Grant at the NeuroLeadership Institute, ran a study with 62 participants at a major consultancy. The participants engaged in mock negotiations, then gave each other feedback. Heart rates were monitored throughout. Self-reported anxiety was also measured.
The findings, published in the NeuroLeadership Journal, were counter-intuitive. Giving feedback was just as anxiety-producing as being on the receiving end. By some measures, more so. When feedback was unsolicited, the receiver’s heart rate jumped to levels comparable with those seen during public speaking. But the giver was no less stressed; both sides were affected by it.
There was, however, a clean way through this stress. When the feedback had been asked for, the heart rate spike was approximately 50% lower for both parties. Asking not only changes the physiology, it changes the meaning of the conversation because it changes who is in control. When the leader asks, the giver no longer has to decide whether to take the social risk of raising the issue; the invitation has already lowered the interpersonal threat.
This single finding reframes the whole problem of giving feedback. The reason leaders stop hearing the truth is not that their teams are cowardly or politically calculating. It’s that giving feedback up the chain is genuinely, physiologically threatening. The brain, given a choice between two paths of unequal stress, will reliably take the lower one. Silence is the path of lower stress, so silence is what leaders get.
This pattern compounds in ways most leaders don’t notice until it’s far too late.
A senior leader, by virtue of position, is the person most costly to disagree with. The consequences of being wrong about challenging them, of being seen as difficult, or of damaging a working relationship sit on the giver’s side of the conversation. It costs very little to agree with a leader. It can cost a great deal to disagree.
Over time, the leader receives less and less of the information they most need. Their meetings become smoother. The pushback gets softer and the disagreements happen in smaller and smaller rooms with fewer and fewer people, eventually it only happens outside the building and out of the leader’s earshot. The leader experiences this as the team finally being aligned, when what is actually happening is the team has stopped trying.
Stockton Rush is the catastrophic example. The everyday version is a board that no longer challenges the CEO, an executive team that no longer raises real concerns, a partner group that has stopped calling out what isn’t working. We’re watching versions of this play out at the highest levels of global politics right now. We’ve probably all seen versions of it inside the businesses we work in.
The pattern is rarely identified as a feedback problem. It is identified as strong leadership, or commercial focus, or getting on with things. Until something breaks.
The conventional response to this problem has been to coach leaders to be more open to feedback. Tell them to listen better, to thank people when they push back, to model vulnerability. None of this is wrong, but it’s treating the wrong half of the conversation. It’s asking the receiver of the feedback to do the work, when the cost is sitting with the person giving it.
The powerful shift in thinking that actually changes things is for the leader to take responsibility for asking. Explicitly, broadly and often.
Explicitly means asking for feedback on something specific rather than issuing a general invitation. “How am I doing?” gets you nothing. “What did I miss in that conversation with the Head of Operations?” gets you something useful. Specificity reduces threat for the giver, because they know what is being asked of them, and it reduces threat for the leader, because they are not bracing for an open-ended attack on their character.
Broadly means going beyond the usual two or three people. Every leader has the colleagues who will tell them anything. Those aren’t the people whose feedback will save them. The people they really need to hear from are the ones who would not normally volunteer it. For example; junior team members, peers in other functions, clients, the quiet engineer who felt so ignored that they eventually left. Asking widely reduces bias and breaks the pattern in which the same small group does all the emotional labour of telling the leader the truth.
Often means making it a habit, not an event. Annual feedback is too late to act on. Quarterly is better but still mostly retrospective. Asking after a meeting, after a presentation, after a difficult conversation, that is where the information is current enough to change anything. It also normalises the practice so that, over time, the threat response shrinks for everyone involved.
There’s a useful pair of questions that does almost all the work, asked consistently: What worked well? What do we need to rethink? They’re surprisingly simple, because that’s all they need to be.
When a leader builds the habit of asking for feedback consistently, several things begin to shift.
The team begins to trust that the questions are real. This often takes longer than leaders expect, it tends to be months rather than weeks. This is because the first few times they ask, the team is calibrating whether honesty is genuinely safe. Once trust is established, the quality of information the leader receives improves dramatically.
This means the leader stops being the bottleneck on progress. When this becomes a habit, they’re no longer relying on the courage of others to speak up, they hear about potential problems earlier, more often, and from more directions. Small course-corrections become possible before they become emergencies.
The culture around the leader changes. Asking for feedback is contagious in a way that being open to it is not. When leaders model the asking, others start asking. The feedback flows in more directions than just down. The whole system gets better at noticing what’s going on.
Crucially, the leader stops being cocooned. The information they need to make good decisions stops being filtered out by office politics or status games. The Titan tragedy could have been prevented, because the chief engineers would have stayed in the room and the vessel would have been independently certified.
When did you last ask for feedback on something specific, from someone who may have found it difficult to give it to you, if you hadn’t asked?
If you stopped relying on your team to volunteer the truth, and started asking for it instead, what might you finally hear?
When leaders stop waiting for the truth to arrive, and start asking for it with consistency and courage, they make it safer for others to speak, and harder for themselves to drift into delusion.
Here is a small experiment worth running. Ask three people whose feedback you would normally not seek what they think you should rethink. If the question itself feels uncomfortable to ask, that is the data. If you would like to talk through what gets in the way, or how to build the habit consistently across a leadership team, Alli and I would be glad to hear from you.
Remember, when it comes to feedback . . . stay curious!
David Klaasen
© Talent4Performance 2026
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