Issue No. 10 | April 14, 2026 | Dr. Jacqueline Ashley, PCC
The Higher You Go, the Less Truth Reaches You
Agreement is easy to mistake for alignment when no one’s willing to disagree.
The outer work of emotional self-awareness
FEEL DEEPLY
You just got done presenting a new pricing strategy to the leadership team. Heads nod.
On the other side, a few of them are glancing at each other. One of them opens their mouth to speak…and doesn’t. Before making it to your desk, you’ve already sent the follow-up. It’s all good.
Weeks later, an important deadline is missed that not a single person flagged.
Filtration.
People learned to say what’s safe and stopped saying anything else.
THINK CRITICALLY
So, you’ve earned your seat at the table. That matters, but the problem is that as you moved up, more information got “curated” before it reached you. For some leaders, filtered feedback started well before seniority because of something called protective hesitation. It’s where the feedback giver (usually a white male leader) subconsciously withholds developmental feedback fearing they’ll be perceived as biased. Moreover, when bias is involved, it determines what certain leaders can handle before the authority level ever enters the equation. These are two sources of silence and each one compounds.
Does your team’s “agreement” mean what you think it means?
The system incentivizes safety as silence. Honesty seems to carry an inherent risk that the system rarely, if ever, rewards.
As seniority increases, leaders think they’re more self-aware, but are they actually? Their direct reports rate them as a lot less, according to Dr. Tasha Eurich’s research, because feedback degrades with power and the gap gets wider. You’re not getting worse at how you see yourself. People are now afraid to hold up the mirror for you.
The absence of pushback is the system working exactly as it was meant to.
Perception goes in two directions. How feedback reaches you is the first and the second is the context you provide about your decisions and motivations. Leaders who stop receiving honest feedback start making assumptions about what others need, so they stop providing context around their own decisions. And without context, people fill in the gaps with their own assumptions. If you’ve ever experienced a reorg and there was no transparency about what was happening, you know exactly what I mean.
LEAD POWERFULLY
Find people who care about you enough to be honest with you. Dr. Eurich calls them your “loving critics.” What you lead with can shape how you’ll take the feedback.
Measuring yourself against others is central to Competition. It’s pointless if the scoreboard’s inaccurate. For leaders holding a marginalized identity, the scoreboard was never fairly calibrated from the get-go. Build yourself the right scoreboard for what really matters. Go from there.
With Includer, your strength helps you notice exclusion. In a room where filtration is happening, honesty is excluded even when everyone’s there. Widen what’s safe to express. The act of inclusion is not enough on its own. Privately approach someone to ask why they didn’t speak up. For those leaders whose authority is already being questioned, it’s definitely riskier to invite pushback. This is what makes it harder and more necessary.
The signature theme of Input makes you a voracious collector and curator of information. Is the information reaching you complete or pre-processed to protect the source? Filtering can sometimes reflect assumptions not about what your authority level warrants, but what you can handle based on who you are. Find the source.
The Integration
The silence and lack of pushback accumulated where one unsaid concern after another occurred over months and years. It’s hard to recognize filtration when it’s happening in real time.
Agreement without honesty is a problem the system rewards that gets reinforced at the senior level. Even if people disagree and commit, there’s honesty there. For leaders who were already receiving filtered versions of the truth before they had positional power, bias helped compound the problem. See the structure for what it is.
Start with someone who’s a “loving critic.” Tell them what they need to know to understand your decisions clearly. Nudge them to hold up the mirror for you. The feedback goes in two directions, so you can rebuild your side of things first. That’s where you have complete control.
This Week's Momentum
📌 Who in your life is honest enough to tell you what your team won’t—and when was the last time you asked them?
