What if I told you that the most impressive progress reports in tech are often the biggest lies? Would you believe me, or would you rather believe the illusion?

In Hans Christian Andersen’s classic tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a vain ruler is duped into believing he’s wearing a magnificent outfit when in fact he’s strutting around naked. Everyone goes along with the charade until a child finally blurts out the truth: “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!”

The same thing is happening in far too many tech leadership meetings. Progress reports are the emperor’s new clothes – presented with pomp and circumstance, but often masking the naked truth of challenges, setbacks, and failures.

I’ve seen it time and again in my years as a leader in the tech industry. Managers, eager to impress their higher-ups, paint a rosy picture of their team’s accomplishments. They highlight wins, gloss over roadblocks, and spin narratives worthy of a fairy tale. Meanwhile, the executives nod along approvingly, either not probing deeper or not really wanting to know the unvarnished truth.

And nowhere is this illusion more prevalent than in the leadership reviews where bleary-eyed execs review slides full of metrics and dashboards, trying to make sense of the progress (or lack thereof) of their teams.

It’s in these pressure-cooker meetings that the temptation to spin the truth is at its highest. Managers, desperate to prove their worth and justify their budgets, pull out all the stops to make their numbers look good. They highlight the green metrics, downplay the red ones, and hope no one looks too closely at the details.

But here’s the thing: If your progress reports are consistently showing 80% green, that’s not a cause for celebration. It’s a giant, flashing red flag.

In the real world, nothing is green all the time. Projects hit snags. Timelines slip. Assumptions prove faulty. That’s just the nature of the beast in the fast-moving, uncertain world of technology. If your dashboards are a sea of green, it’s not because your teams are flawless. It’s because someone is hiding the truth.

And that’s a problem. Because here’s the counterintuitive secret of effective leadership: You should be actively seeking out the red. You should be probing for pain points, digging for dissent, demanding to know what’s not working.

The red metrics, the missed targets, the harsh realities – those are the things that show you where you need to focus, what you need to fix. They’re the canaries in the coal mine, warning you of dangers ahead before they become disasters.  They’re opportunities for learning, for growth, for course-correction.

But you can’t capitalize on those opportunities if you don’t know they exist. You can’t steer the ship to safety if your charts show nothing but smooth sailing ahead.

That’s why, as a leader, your job isn’t to bask in the glow of green dashboards. It’s to seek out the red, to create a culture where people feel safe pointing out the problems, to reward honesty and transparency even when the truth is ugly.

This requires a fundamental shift in mindset. It means valuing truth over optics. It means prioritizing genuine progress over false positivity. It means creating an environment where people are more afraid of hiding failures than admitting them.

It’s not easy. It requires courage, vulnerability, and a willingness to confront harsh realities. But it’s essential. Because in the end, the companies that succeed aren’t the ones with the shiniest dashboards. They’re the ones that are relentless in their pursuit of truth, even when it hurts.

So why does this happen? Why do smart, capable leaders fall into the trap of sugarcoating reality?

Part of it is human nature. No one likes to be the bearer of bad news. In the competitive pressure cooker of the tech world, admitting to struggles or missed targets can feel like weakness. There’s a pervasive fear that owning up to problems could be career suicide.

But there’s also a failure of leadership. Too many execs send the message – explicitly or implicitly – that they only want to hear good news. They don’t create an environment where people feel psychologically safe to tell it like it is. They don’t reward honesty and vulnerability. So is it any wonder their teams resort to pretense?

The irony is that this lack of transparency is ultimately self-defeating. You can’t fix problems you don’t know about. You can’t make informed decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate information. All those pretty progress reports are just a mirage obscuring the true landscape.

So what’s the solution? It starts at the top. Leaders need to make it crystal clear that they value truth over spin. They need to model openness, sharing their own challenges and failures. They need to actively probe for the uglier parts of the story, the risks and roadblocks, the lessons learned. They need to celebrate people who have the courage to say “the emperor has no clothes!”

This isn’t about creating a culture of negativity or defeatism. It’s about fostering genuine accountability, continuous improvement, and evidence-based decision making. Sugar may make things more palatable in the short-term, but too much of it rots an organization from the inside out.

The most successful leaders and companies are the ones who are relentless in their pursuit of truth, who believe sunlight is the best disinfectant, who understand that openly confronting challenges is the only way to overcome them. They don’t need fancy narratives because they let the genuine results speak for themselves.

So to all you tech leaders out there, I challenge you: Next time you’re in one of those leadership reviews, don’t just nod along to the sea of green. Dive into the red. Ask the tough questions. Demand the unvarnished truth. It may not make for the prettiest slides, but it will make for a stronger, more resilient organization in the long run.

Take a cold, hard look in the mirror. Are you parading around in your own version of the emperor’s invisibility cloak? Or are you ready to get real, get naked and show your teams and stakeholders what authentic, transparent leadership looks like?

After all, when you’re navigating the choppy waters of innovation, you need a map that shows the rocks along with the clear channels. Anything less is just an illusion waiting to be shattered.