The Leadership Feedback Nobody's Giving You

There's a specific kind of silence that leaders mistake for things being fine.

Nobody's complaining. The team shows up. Work gets done. Meetings feel mostly productive. And the leader looks around and thinks: if something were wrong, someone would say something.

That assumption is one of the most expensive mistakes a leader can make.

Because the silence isn't satisfaction. It's often something else entirely - a team that has learned, through experience, that honest feedback doesn't go anywhere useful. Or that raising something uncomfortable comes with a cost that isn't worth paying. Or that the leader, despite what they say about wanting feedback, doesn't actually behave that way when they receive it.

The feedback that would most help a leader grow is almost never the feedback they're getting.

Why the Gap Exists

Research on psychological safety: the belief that one can speak up without fear of punishment or humiliation,  consistently shows that it is the single strongest predictor of team performance and learning behavior. Google's Project Aristotle, which studied hundreds of teams over several years, found that psychological safety was the most important factor in whether teams could identify problems, adapt, and improve.

In food industry environments  where pace is relentless, hierarchy is real, and the pressure to keep production moving is constant psychological safety is not the default. It has to be built deliberately. And it is built or destroyed almost entirely by leader behavior.

What leaders do with the first honest piece of feedback they receive sets the tone for everything that follows. If they become defensive, dismiss it, or change nothing, the team files that information away. The door can be wide open after that and nobody will walk through it.

The Open Door Myth

The most common response leaders give when they discover their teams haven't been giving them honest feedback: "But I always told them my door was open."

An open door is not a feedback culture. It puts the entire burden on the person with less power to initiate a conversation that feels risky and then waits for them to do it anyway. The leader who says "my door is open" and sits back has outsourced their own development to the people least likely to deliver it.

Catalyst Co-Founder Jill Stuber tells a story from her time leading the FSQ department at Gold'n Plump that illustrates this precisely. She gave trust that hadn't been earned and a quality manager shared information externally before it was ready. She withheld trust from another and micromanaged a report they were fully capable of writing. In both cases, the feedback she needed - your expectations aren't clear, your investment in us isn't visible - was never given. Not because the team didn't feel it. Because the conditions for sharing it safely hadn't been created.

Her coach Isaac put it simply: assume nothing, teach everything, and start from the beginning. The blind spot wasn't about trust. It was about never making the expectations visible and never making people feel genuinely invested in.

What Actually Creates Feedback

Feedback doesn't come from open doors. It comes from leaders who ask, specifically, repeatedly, and in ways that make honest answers feel genuinely welcome.

Not "any feedback for me?" at the end of a quarterly review. Specific, direct questions asked in the flow of real work:

What's one thing I could do differently that would make your work easier? Where have you felt like I wasn't as clear as you needed me to be? What's something you've been hesitant to bring to me and what made it feel that way?

These questions are uncomfortable to ask. They're supposed to be. The discomfort is exactly what signals to the team that the leader is serious.

And then, this is the piece most leaders skip, doing something visible with the answer. Naming it. Changing something. Coming back and saying: you told me this, and here's what I did with it. That loop, closed once, opens more feedback than any open-door policy ever will.

The Cost of Not Knowing

In the food industry, the cost of a leader who can't see their own blind spots isn't abstract. It shows up in turnover, people who stop trying to grow because no one is investing in their development. In disengagement, teams that show up but stop bringing their best. In quality gaps and safety issues that might have been raised but weren't, because the culture said don't bother.

Gallup research consistently shows that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement. The single biggest variable in whether a food safety culture holds under pressure isn't the procedure manual. It's whether the leader of that team has built the kind of relationship where problems get surfaced before they become incidents.

The Question Worth Sitting With

What is the feedback your team is not giving you and what would it cost you to ask for it directly?

Not in a survey. Not anonymously. In a real conversation, with a specific person, where you make it clear you actually want to know.

That is uncomfortable. And that discomfort is exactly where leadership growth lives.

If you want a structured environment to do that work — with a cohort of food industry leaders who understand the specific pressures of this industry — Leadership Bootcamp starts May 6. Fourteen weeks. Designed for exactly this.

Download the module details or Enroll directly →

Culture doesn't change until leaders do.

SOURCES

• Edmondson, A.C. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
• Google re:Work — Understanding Team Effectiveness. rework.withgoogle.com
• Gallup. State of the American Manager. gallup.com/workplace/236579