If you don't know Rich Hagberg's work, it's worth knowing. He's been diagnosing how leaders actually operate — rigorously, with hard data — for decades, and I admire him a lot. He reaches a lot of the same dynamics I come at phenomenologically through Axis. Different instruments, same territory.
Rich is right that people only tell leaders the truth when it feels safe. But before safety, people have to be able to find the truth — and they find it by reading whether you, as a leader, actually believe what you're saying.
That coherence is the signal people actually trust, and it holds the whole "Truth Pipeline" together. Lose it, and the truth gets filtered long before it reaches you — not because people are careful, but because there's no steady thing to read.
