Working for leaders who can't say "I was wrong"
Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety identifies three core leader behaviors that make teams genuinely safe to speak up in. One of them, arguably the hardest, is acknowledging your own fallibility. Saying "I don't know." Saying "I got that wrong." Saying "I'd do it differently now."
Plenty of leaders never get there.
That behavior isn't a moral failing worth sermonizing about. For every internal communicator reading this, it's a working condition, and it costs your function more than it costs the leader.
The leader who is never wrong is an IC problem
When a leader can't acknowledge a miss, the messaging downstream has to carry that weight. A project that failed has to be reframed as a "learning opportunity." A walked-back decision becomes "evolving our approach." A rollout that landed badly gets narrated as a successful change management effort. The writing turns into an exercise in saying everything happened on purpose.
Employees aren't fooled by this. They were there. They watched it happen.
Earlier this year we covered the ContactMonkey data showing only 9% of employees completely trust what leadership communicates to them. That number doesn't come from nowhere. It's the cumulative effect of every message that asked employees to pretend a visible mistake didn't happen, or that a failed project was quietly renamed and relaunched as something new.
Better subject lines won't fix it. Neither will a new intranet, a polished town hall, or a tighter editorial calendar. When the source of the messaging won't level, the messaging itself has nowhere to go.
Why the most capable people disengage first
In teams where mistakes can't be named, the most experienced people in the room are the first to stop contributing.
This isn't a mystery. High performers are calibrated. They know what good work looks like, and they know what failure looks like. When they watch a project fail and then listen to the executive team narrate it as a win, they do one of three things. They push back and lose. They go silent. Or they leave.
Edmondson's original research on hospital teams surfaced a paradox: the best-performing teams reported more mistakes, not fewer. They weren't making more errors. They were working in an environment where errors could be surfaced and learned from. The teams that looked cleanest on paper were often the ones where nobody felt safe saying what actually went wrong.
Internal communication is that same mechanism, scaled up. Where leaders can openly name what went wrong, people closer to the work tell the truth. Where they can't, the fiction becomes the official record, and the best people stop contributing to either.
The pattern to watch for
This behavior isn't usually loud. The leader who refuses to admit mistakes is rarely the one declaring "I'm never wrong." It's the one quietly restructuring the team that delivered the bad news. The one who asks for the deck to be "cleaned up" after the numbers come in worse than projected. The one who requests that a survey comment theme get described as "a handful of concerns" when the data says something much clearer.
As an IC practitioner, you often see this pattern before anyone else does. You're close enough to the raw inputs and the polished outputs to know how big the delta has become.
That puts you in an uncomfortable position nobody trained you for. Pushing back risks your standing with the leader. Not pushing back erodes your standing with everyone else.
What you can actually do
You can't fix a leader's relationship to their own mistakes. That's their work.
But you can refuse to write the fiction.
Ask what outcome the communication is optimizing for before you start writing. If the answer is "making leadership look decisive," that's a different piece of work than "helping employees understand what happened and what we're doing about it." We wrote about this a few weeks back, and "what outcome are we optimizing for" is one of the most useful questions IC can ask in these rooms.
Bring the employee view into the conversation early, not after the draft is done and leadership has signed off. Surveys, listening sessions, skip-levels, whatever data you have. If the proposed narrative won't survive contact with what employees already know, surface that on day one rather than reading about it in the LinkedIn commentary the week after. Building the infrastructure for listening to flow back up is IC's job whether leaders want to hear the result or not.
Protect the messenger when bad news gets delivered. If your job involves collecting and surfacing feedback, the feedback channel has to stay credible, which means the people who contribute to it need to come out no worse off. A leader who retaliates against a feedback source will degrade the channel faster than any budget cut.
Name the pattern to your leader privately if you have the relationship for it. "This is the third time we've communicated a change in direction as if it was always the plan. Employees are tracking this. It's credibility we'll want back later." A good leader will hear that. A leader who can't has told you something useful.
Where the line is
Most of this is about surviving the behavior, not changing it, which isn't a clean ending. The reality is that internal communicators do a lot of quiet work translating leadership moves that don't always hold up. Some of that is the job.
The line worth defending is the point where the messaging stops describing a recognizable version of reality and starts describing a version that only works inside the executive suite. When you can feel that line, you're doing the job. When you're writing on the wrong side of it, you'll know it before anyone else.
Jenni Field and I got into adjacent territory on a recent episode of Frequency, covering the trust recession and why the research on psychological safety keeps pointing back to what leaders are willing to own in front of their people. The data isn't flattering. Neither is the work ahead. Worth the listen if this one landed.
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.