Brutal Honesty

A client at last week's Manchester workshops used the term "to be brutally honest".

I've never understood how honesty can be brutal?

It's the opposite that causes the problems in both personal and professional life.

The neatest opposite is probably “comfortable dishonesty”.

Other useful alternatives, depending on what you mean, would be diplomatic avoidance, polite fiction, sugar-coating, evasive reassurance, or convenient silence.

Any of the above could be used to describe what happens when you don't face up to an uncomfortable truth about the systems or the people in your business.

The long term result of avoiding honest truths is most often much more painful that the short term approach of dealing with them..