[agf]

I've unfortunately not found this to be true. I regularly say the difficult things, sometimes ultimately productively, sometimes not; sometimes I'm successful at structuring the feedback so people don't feel "attacked", sometimes I'm not.

However, through all of that, I honestly feel I've only received the same kind of communication in return from people I've build trust with in other ways, generally through friendship of some sort.

Very interested in suggestions as to how to better translate a willingness to say the difficult things into getting other people to do it too, even to those without a preexisting personal basis of trust.

[vicda]

With no preexisting trust? Ask them to give their honest feedback as a favor. Make it into a cooperative discussion so they don't feel like they're the only one criticizing the subject. You need to prove to them that it is safe to discuss those thing with you first, you being by default direct can give some people the opposite impression.

[agf]

> you being by default direct can give some people the opposite impression

Definitely rings true.

> Make it into a cooperative discussion so they don't feel like they're the only one criticizing the subject

If these are people I have time to have regular 1:1s with, then what you're saying does make sense. But there are a lot of people I work with where the benefits from saying the difficult thing would be large that I don't work closely enough with to be able to spend that kind of time. I guess what I'm really asking is how to translate that into a culture; either raise the average trust level or lower the required trust level for difficult conversations.