Innovation Isn’t Soft — It Needs Tough Love

We talk a lot about psychological safety and fun cultures, but here’s the hard truth: innovation doesn’t just need comfort — it needs candour.

It needs environments where the hard truths are shared, not to hurt, but to help. Where challenge is welcomed. Where feedback doesn’t just come from the head, but from the gut, and from a place of care.

As part of my graduate diploma in change management, I found myself reading two very different takes on what creates the conditions for innovation.

The first leaned heavily on psychological safety — the idea that innovation can’t thrive in environments where people feel unsafe. No surprises there. Risk and creativity don’t exactly love walking hand-in-hand with fear.

But the second perspective hit me harder. It argued that innovation doesn’t just need safety — it needs candour. The kind of culture where challenge is welcomed, mistakes are celebrated, and honesty isn’t just allowed, it’s expected. A true high-performance environment.

That got me thinking about tough love — the kind of environment where people are told the hard truth, not out of ego or dominance, but out of genuine care. That’s not easy to build. Tough love usually comes from your closest friends. But in most workplaces, we’re surrounded not by lifelong allies, but by acquaintances, colleagues… and, sometimes, subtle competitors.

So how do you create an environment of tough love when trust isn’t deep, but work still demands high performance and honest feedback?

Here’s my take: you create context. When I talk about strengths, I mean the unique abilities and perspectives each person brings to the table. When people know their own strengths and the strengths of those around them something shifts. Strength reduces threat, because it creates context. Suddenly, the feedback you give isn’t seen as a personal attack, but as insight coming from your unique angle, your lens, someone’s superpower. It turns candour from confrontation into contribution.

If we want truly innovative environments, we need candour. And if we want candour to work, we need to equip people with strengths-based context, so feedback can be understood not from a place of ego, but as care.

That’s tough love. Not soft. Not cruel. But powerful.

📚 References:

• Pisano, G. (2019). The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures. Harvard Business Review. Explores the paradoxical nature of innovative cultures — balancing psychological safety with brutal candour, and experimentation with discipline.

• Clark, T. R. (2020). To Foster Innovation, Cultivate a Culture of Intellectual Bravery. Harvard Business Review. Introduces intellectual bravery as the willingness to dissent in the face of social risk — and explains how leaders can build cultures that reward vulnerability.

• CliftonStrengths® by Gallup. A framework for understanding and using individuals’ unique talents. Using strengths as context helps teams reduce threat perception, receive feedback constructively, and engage in productive, candid conversations.