Everyone loves clarity… right up until it gets them into trouble.
You know, I get a lot of heavy nods when I say that clarity forces you to take a stand. And people mean it. They want to take a stand.
But eventually, someone speaks up with a but: “I’ve tried that. I spoke plainly. I was very clear. And it blew up in my face.”
And I get it. That’s a real scar.
Maybe people pushed back.
Maybe the room went quiet.
Maybe the project stalled because someone felt threatened.
Whatever it was, it taught you a lesson:
that clarity is dangerous.
Here’s the thing though. That lesson is incomplete.
Because what really happened isn’t that clarity failed. It’s that clarity revealed something: about the culture, about the priorities, about the willingness to have hard conversations.
And that’s precisely why clarity matters.
If your words never create friction, they probably never cut deep enough to matter. And if the truth never meets resistance, maybe it’s not the real truth.
Clarity is not the absence of pushback. It’s often the cause of it. But that pushback is information. It shows you where the real work begins.
The leaders who light the path don’t avoid those moments. They walk straight into them … not to win an argument, but to move the conversation forward.
So, to me the question isn’t so much “What if it backfires again?”
The question is “What might change if you kept going after it did?”
Keep lighting the path,
Michael
