I realized that misguided optimism can be just as destructive as negativity. I worked for an organization that prioritized maintaining an upbeat attitude above all else. Early in my career as an HR team lead, I saw leadership meet every challenge with a smile and soften difficult conversations before addressing them. On the surface, it may seem perfectly fine. But if we look deeper, whenever an employee voiced a concern, the standard response was to encourage them to “look on the bright side” and nothing further.
Then one incident changed my view as a young leader: a strong performer from another department, whom people spoke well of, put in her resignation. I’ll call her Sarah (not her real name).
By the time she resigned, Sarah had been carrying an unmanageable workload for months because of a stretched assignment tied to her upcoming promotion, with no clear guardrails, accountability, or timelines. Every time she tried to name it, they told her to ‘look on the bright side’ or be grateful for the opportunity. This dismisses her feelings, leaving her unheard and invalidated.
I didn’t learn the real reason until her exit interview, one of the first I conducted as a newly appointed HR lead. She wasn’t angry; she was exhausted. She told me plainly that raising a real problem in that office felt like pushing against a wall made of good cheer.
This piqued my curiosity as I value the employee experience of Sarah’s and others too; I wanted to find out whether she was the only one, so I reached out to colleagues on other teams. We conducted employee surveys and focus groups to understand how people really felt. It quickly became clear that Sarah wasn’t alone in putting on a brave face. We humbled ourselves, that we hadn’t created a supportive workplace; we’d created one where negative feelings were quietly treated as off-limits.
We often mistake ‘okay lang’ for peace. In many Filipino offices, saying you’re okay when you’re not is considered good manners, a way to avoid burdening the room. When leaders treat ‘okay lang’ as a choice rather than a requirement, it empowers employees to express their true feelings, fosters a sense of control and hope, and signals that the room has psychological safety.
That difference changed how I worked. My manager and I rebuilt our people practices, not to force optimism, but to make room for unresolved problems. We moved beyond pizza Fridays and month-end employee creative days, going deeper by running cultural sensitivity workshops, providing targeted coaching on behavior, and setting up structured feedback follow-ups so nothing fell through the cracks. It took far longer than either of us expected.
The Philippines isn’t imagining this. Gallup’s 2025 data shows that 50 percent of Filipino workers feel stressed for most of the day, double the Southeast Asian average and up from 45 percent in 2022. JobStreet’s 2025 Workplace Happiness Index found that 77 percent of Filipino employees describe themselves as happy at work. Yet in the same survey, only 41 percent feel in control of their stress, 38 percent report burnout, and 55 percent regularly think about changing careers. The findings show that two things can be true at once: people can smile through a survey and still be drowning. I guess this is Filipino’s culture of resilience showing.
A 2026 Radical Candor study of US workers found that 60 percent are afraid to speak up at work, and 45 percent cited a lack of psychological safety as the reason. Psychological safety, Amy Edmondson’s term, describes a team where people believe they won’t be punished for raising a problem. Google’s own research later named it the most important of the five dynamics that separate effective teams from the rest. Toxic positivity is what a workplace looks like without it, dressed up as culture.
Here’s the test I use now. Positivity that’s optional is culture. Positivity that’s required is control. If someone on your team can say “this isn’t working” without softening it first, you have the first kind. If they can’t, no amount of team-building will fix what’s actually missing.
Start noticing what happens in your own meetings when someone raises a problem. Recognizing whether the room allows honest discussion or rushes to positivity can help you foster a more open environment.
The best thing to come out of all this wasn’t a policy. It was the honest, slightly uncomfortable conversation that preceded it. Brené Brown has a name for that kind of conversation: a rumble. In her book Dare to Lead, she describes it as a conversation where you commit to being vulnerable, stay curious and generous, stay with the messy middle of the problem instead of rushing past it, take a break and come back when you need to, and own your part. Borrowing from psychologist Harriet Lerner, she adds that you listen as passionately as you want to be heard. Her larger point is that daring leaders must care for the people they lead and stay connected to them.
For a courageous leader, vulnerability can be as simple as saying, “I may have missed something. Tell me what it looks like from where you sit.” Then comes the listening. I practice reflective listening. It means paying attention to someone’s words and body language, then reflecting back what you heard so they know they were understood, not just tolerated. From there, you can work together to make a plan to solve the problem and learn from it so it doesn’t happen again. That’s what a positive workplace sounds like. Not constant cheer, but the courage to listen first and fix second. Imagine if every leader in an organization became courageous enough to ask, pay attention, truly listen, take action, and model accountability; what a great place to work we would all have.
Your first step toward becoming a courageous leader is this: ask your team one genuine question this week: “What’s something you’ve been keeping to yourself because the timing didn’t feel right?” Before responding, reflect back what you heard. Say what you heard, not what you want to say next. It may not be easy. It is a little uncomfortable, but that’s where real positivity begins.
Jefrri-Ann Francesca Santiago, MSHRM, CMC, CHRP, is the Founder and Principal Consultant of Strategence Consulting, a boutique HR, organizational development, and leadership advisory practice in the Philippines. She has more than 20 years of experience in corporate HR leadership across IT, BPO, retail, and professional services. Learn more at strategenceconsulting.com.
Sources
- Think with Google, Team dynamics: Five keys to building effective teams
- Manila Bulletin, “77% of Filipino workers are happy, but the reason isn’t their salary”
- Philippine Daily Inquirer, “PH tops Southeast Asia in workplace stress – Gallup”
- GlobeNewswire, “Radical Candor report on speaking up at work
- Brené Brown, “Let’s Rumble”
- Brené Brown, Dare to Lead (Random House, 2018)
- Original Strategence article, “The Hidden Danger of Toxic Positivity in the Workplace”
