Randy Polito has been inside organizations where someone saw the real problem and said it out loud.

And the response was anger.

Not productive disagreement. Not "let's test that idea." Anger. Defensiveness. "That's not how we do things."

The problem is obvious. The solution is clear. And the person bringing it gets shot.

This is where leadership fails quietly. Not in the big decisions. But in the moment when an employee—a subordinate, someone lower in the hierarchy—brings uncomfortable truth to a meeting.

What does leadership do? Too often, they defend the system instead of examining it.

Randy Polito watched this happen with a product that wasn't being adopted. The producer was blaming the distributor. But the real issue was that customers didn't want what was being sold. Nobody had asked them. Nobody had listened.

Randy Polito said: "We need to go directly to the end audience and understand what they actually need."

The response: Frustration. Defensiveness. "We don't do that."

But here's what "we don't do that" really means in that context: We don't want to hear that we might be wrong. We don't want to change. We don't want to admit our blind spots.

So we blame the messenger instead.

Coke doesn't work that way. Coke doesn't call a store and get mad at them for not moving enough product. Coke goes to the consumer. Coke creates demand. Coke listens to what the market wants and adjusts.

Then people walk into stores asking for Coke by name.

The stores don't have to push it. The consumer pulls it.

But that requires the producer to engage with facts honestly. To accept that not every initial idea was right. To see failure as a pivot point, not an end point.

Most importantly, it requires NOT getting mad at the people carrying the message.

The distributor isn't the problem. The messenger isn't the enemy. They're the people closest to the customer. They're seeing what's actually happening in the market.

If you shoot the messenger, you lose the information. You lose the person's trust. And you stay stuck in the problem.

Here's what Randy Polito believes: The organizations that win aren't the ones that blame distributors or employees. They're the ones that change the message so it lands better.

That means listening. That means being willing to be wrong. That means treating the people bringing uncomfortable truths as your most valuable advisors, not your problems.

Because they're seeing something you can't. And the only way forward is to change the input, not shoot the messenger.

— Randy Polito