What is truth in business? It is not the slogans printed in the annual report, nor the polished story told to investors. Truth is what people actually see, what they actually believe, and what they often feel unable to say. 

The uncomfortable reality is that most organisations are not very good at truth. Leaders may say they want honesty, but when it arrives, raw, unfiltered, sometimes critical, they flinch. Truth unsettles. It challenges decisions already made. It exposes flaws in strategies that were meant to be watertight. So, consciously or not, many leaders push it away. 

And then something dangerous happens. People stop speaking. Ideas are kept under wraps. Energy drains out of the business.
Silence sets in, and silence is a slow killer. 

Yet truth is not simply about avoiding disaster. It is also the key to growth. I have been saying this for years: when organisations create space for truth, two things happen. First, ideas surface that were hidden because nobody thought they were “allowed” to be voiced. Second, people come alive again, because they see that they are trusted to help shape the future. 

Why were those ideas hidden in the first place? Because people didn’t feel safe. They believed their voice didn’t matter. They had seen decisions made only by the people with big titles and big offices. Thinking was treated as a privilege, not a responsibility. 

Let me be blunt. If only your senior team is allowed to shape the future, you are throttling your own organisation. You are sitting on untapped ideas, untapped energy, untapped solutions — and you are the one stopping them from surfacing. 

Some of the most transformative ideas I have seen came not from the C-suite but from the graduate, the warehouse supervisor, the customer service agent. The people who see problems close-up, and often see fixes that the boardroom cannot imagine. When you give them permission to think, you gain not just ideas but energy, resilience, and belief. 

The challenge for leaders is not just to say they want truth, but to build the conditions where truth is possible. That means creating trust, proving that people can speak honestly without punishment. It means showing that their contribution matters, not only in principle but in decisions. It means rewarding candour, not just compliance. 

And what about doing business in Trump’s America, or anywhere truth itself is being contested? That raises the stakes even higher. Millions of people now take what they see on their mobile feeds as truth, no matter how distorted. For leaders, the temptation is clear: join the game, bend the story, tell people what they want to hear. 

But illusions cannot power a business. You can buy time with spin, but reality always arrives. Costs still need paying. Customers still make their own choices. Competitors still exploit your weaknesses. A company built on distortion is building on sand. 

A company built on truth, by contrast, is building on bedrock. It is not easy, and it may not be popular, but it is sustainable. In the long run, truth is not a moral luxury. It is a commercial necessity. 

The choice for leaders is simple, though never easy:
Do you want comfort, or do you want growth?