Truth is cheap when it costs nothing. The only truth that builds anything is the sentence you say in the room where saying it costs you something, and most leaders quietly learn to stop paying.
Anyone will tell the truth when the truth is free. The test of a leader is the true sentence that costs something to say.
There is a specific moment that happens in every organization. Someone needs to say the accurate thing, and the accurate thing is going to be unwelcome. It will disappoint a client, or contradict the boss, or admit a mistake, or name a problem everyone has agreed not to see. In that moment, the true sentence has a price, and the leader has to decide whether to pay it.
Most people, most of the time, do not pay it. They soften the sentence until it is no longer true. They wait for a better moment that never comes. They let someone else say it, or they let it go unsaid and hope the problem resolves itself. Each of these feels reasonable in the moment. None of them is free either, because the cost of the unsaid true sentence is simply deferred, and deferred truth compounds interest.
I have watched companies fail slowly because the true sentences kept getting postponed. The client who should have been told the hard thing two years earlier, told instead at the point of crisis, when it was too late to be useful. The employee who should have heard the honest feedback while there was still time to act on it, told instead in the exit interview. The market shift everyone in the building could see, that no one would say out loud in the room where it could have changed the plan.
The leader who is willing to pay for the true sentence builds something the avoider cannot. They build an organization where reality is allowed in the room. Where problems get named while they are still small and cheap to fix. Where people trust that what they are being told is actually true, because they have seen the leader pay the price for truth rather than dodge it. That trust is infrastructure. You cannot build anything serious without it.
This does not mean saying every harsh thing that crosses your mind. Cruelty disguised as honesty is its own avoidance, a way of paying with someone else's currency instead of your own. The true sentence that builds something is the necessary one, said with enough care that it can be received, at the moment it can still do good. That is harder than both silence and cruelty, which is exactly why it is the standard.
Find the true sentence you have been not saying. You already know what it is. The cost of saying it is real, and it is almost always less than the cost of the silence you have been paying instead.