The thing about being the CEO, or any level of top management, is that it’s very difficult to know what your people really think. Lately, I’ve noticed high-level executives in large public companies speaking with confidence about how a certain program or change was going over.

In one case, an exec involved in communicating a major organizational transformation talked about how excited people in the company were about this new vision. When we interviewed employees outside the exec’s inner circle at that Fortune 100 company, they seemed surprisingly in the dark about the transformation plan and concerned that there may not be a focused vision guiding decisions at the top.

In another example, the senior VP of HR was commenting on a recent decision to freeze the company’s retirement benefits. “We really didn’t hear anything negative about it,” he said. Considering the strong culture of that company, it’s certainly possible that they did such a good job at communicating the reasons for that difficult decision, and the big-picture, long-range employee benefits of maintaining the company’s financial soundness, that the change was easily accepted. But I think it’s more likely that employees are reluctant to complain to management when they’re surrounded by layoffs, if not at their company then at those of their family, friends and neighbors. It’s also likely that the people around that SVP act as a buffer to protect him from negative feedback, in a well-meaning version of the emperor’s clothes.

I remember a CEO commenting once about what her former boss, the CEO who preceded her, told her to expect. When she asked him how things would be different after she assumed the mantle of CEO, he said the thing that would surprise her the most would be how funny her jokes would be, suddenly. I know my employees at Tribe are enormously generous in listening to me talk about my son’s inventions, my puppy’s housetraining, even my mother’s health. That’s just human nature, to be a good audience for the ones in charge. We tend to tell the ones at the top whatever they want to hear — and not give them the feedback they don’t.

That’s why it’s so important to look for other ways to learn what employees really think. If we labor under the assumption that employees are being brutally honest, we’re deluding ourselves.

One of the points we stress to our clients is that internal communication needs to be a two-way street. You can’t just talk at your employees; you need to provide them with a way to be heard as well. Many companies are afraid to open that can of worms, fearing what they’ll hear. But just because you don’t hear it, doesn’t mean your people aren’t talking about it. And you can’t address those difficult issues unless you know they exist.