There was a concept we used in leadership meetings at one organisation I worked at. You may have heard of it. De Bono's Six Thinking Hats.

On paper, it's a genuinely useful framework. Six hats, six modes of thinking — white for facts, red for instincts, black for caution, yellow for optimism, green for creativity, blue for process. The idea is that you move through them deliberately as a group, drawing out different perspectives. It was designed to create the conditions for honest, rigorous thinking.

In practice, in this particular leadership team, it worked quite differently.

How a Good Framework Becomes a Bad Tool

An idea would be presented. Sometimes by the CEO. Sometimes by someone in the room whose ideas always seemed to arrive fully formed and suspiciously well-timed — as if they'd had a preview. We all knew what that meant.

And then the unspoken rules would apply.

Green hat? Welcomed. The expected response was a 'yes, and.' Build on it. Find the angle that makes it work.

Black hat? Dangerous territory. Not explicitly banned. Just... noticed. The slight shift in energy. The way the room would go quiet. The institutional memory that seemed to develop, quietly, for who had been negative in a particular meeting.

So what happened? People stopped wearing the black hat. They became extraordinarily creative at finding ways to support ideas they privately thought were flawed. They got very good at the 'yes, and' while filing the 'but what about' somewhere they'd never retrieve it.

It wasn't a thinking methodology. It was a consent machine.

The most sophisticated manipulation doesn't look like control. It looks like a framework.

 

 

What Toxic Positivity Actually Is

Toxic positivity is not enthusiasm. It's not a leader who genuinely believes in their team and says so. Those are good things.

Toxic positivity is the enforcement of positive affect as a substitute for honest thinking. It's 'good vibes only' as a cultural mandate. And when it takes hold, it does something very specific to the environment: it destroys what Simon Sinek calls the Circle of Safety.

In Leaders Eat Last, Sinek argues that when people feel genuinely safe — protected from internal politics, free to share ideas without fear of repercussion — they direct their energy outward toward the work. When that safety is absent, they spend their energy protecting themselves. The consent machine creates exactly this: a room full of capable people quietly managing their own survival instead of thinking clearly about the problem in front of them.

It shows up in ways that are sometimes so normalised we stop recognising them:

• Concerns raised in meetings are reframed as attitude problems. 'We don't want to be negative about this' translates to: we don't want to hear it.
• Enthusiasm is performed rather than felt. People learn to look energised regardless of how they actually feel, because the alternative is being seen as 'not a culture fit.'
• Problems go underground. They don't disappear — they stop being discussed in the rooms where decisions get made. They end up in carparks, whispered hallways, and exit interviews.
• Women are told to smile more. Not the men. Never the men. In twenty years I cannot recall a single performance conversation, a single piece of corridor feedback, a single offhand comment where a man's facial expression was the issue. It was always the women. Smile more. Look more approachable. You seem a bit intense. Appearance-policing repackaged as professional development.
• The people with the strongest critical instincts disengage first. They can see the gap between what's being said and what's actually true, and they can't keep pretending otherwise 

Brené Brown names the leadership version of this in Dare to Lead — the armoured leader who uses control and forced positivity as protection against vulnerability. The armoured leader doesn't build a culture of courage. They build a culture of compliance, and eventually, of quiet exodus.

 

 

What Good Actually Looks Like — The Contrast

I've been lucky enough to also work with leaders who did this completely differently. And the contrast is, frankly, astounding.

One CEO I worked with had a philosophy I've returned to many times since. He would say: if you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.

If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.

Think about what that belief creates. A leader who genuinely holds that view isn't threatened by people who challenge him — he's actively seeking them. His confidence comes not from being unchallenged, but from surrounding himself with people capable of challenging him well. He wanted the black hat. He needed it.

A manager I worked with had an equally simple approach: bat the ball, not the person. Any idea — including his own — could be taken apart in the room. The debate was about the idea, never about who raised it. What came out the other side were decisions that had been genuinely stress-tested. Even when you hadn't fully agreed with the outcome, you were completely on board — because you'd been heard in the process.

Adam Grant's research on psychological safety points to exactly why this worked. In studies on leader vulnerability and team trust, Grant found that when leaders openly share feedback about themselves — including their own weaknesses — it signals trust, normalises vulnerability, and creates a cycle of reciprocal honesty in the team. Both my leaders were doing this instinctively. The bat the ball rule was a public commitment that no idea, including theirs, was above scrutiny. That's not weakness. That's the architecture of a high-functioning team.

 

 

What Enforced Positivity Actually Costs

The price of toxic positivity cultures is rarely visible until it's too late.

Decisions proceed unchallenged and fail in ways that could have been anticipated if anyone had been allowed to say so. Problems compound quietly behind a performance of optimism. The people who leave first are reliably those who could see the gap most clearly — and could no longer keep pretending they couldn't.

Sinek is direct about this: when the Circle of Safety collapses, people stop exchanging information freely and start hoarding it. They stop innovating and start self-protecting. The organisation that looks, from the outside, like a high-performance culture is running on cortisol and compliance — and it's far more brittle than it appears.

Real positivity makes room for hard conversations. It's not threatened by the black hat. It needs it.

What You Can Do With This

If you lead a team, ask yourself one honest question: does your team feel safe enough to tell you when something isn't working? Not in theory — in practice. Would they say it, in the room, in front of you?

If the answer is no, or even maybe, that's where the work starts. It doesn't require dismantling an entire culture overnight. It starts with small, consistent signals — thanking someone for raising a concern, asking the black hat question yourself before anyone else has to, making the bat the ball rule explicit and sticking to it publicly.

And if you're on the receiving end of a consent machine — if you've been in that room, filing away the 'but what about' somewhere you'll never retrieve it — your instincts were right. What you noticed was real. Organisations that don't make room for your thinking don't deserve the benefit of it.