How Candid Can You Really Be With Your Boss?

Marchiano Loen stared at his screen for two hours. He drafted one response, then another. He begged someone in human resources for help. Still, the question vexed him.

What can your manager improve on?

“Oh God, I actually have to answer this,” the tech worker thought as he pondered the employee survey. “What am I going to write?”

Bosses claim they want honest feedback. Telling the truth can spark change, make your work life better and show off your own assertiveness. Or you could get fired. (At least it feels that way.)

Like it or not, silence isn’t an option. But you have to be really careful about just how candid to get with the boss.

Loen says he was once frozen out by a manager after suggesting he could improve his communication style during presentations. Warm small talk and jokes evaporated, and Loen’s big projects were redistributed.

Now he uses what he calls “the Jacuzzi approach.” He dips a toe in with bosses to test the water, seeing how they react to a fairly neutral piece of commentary before saying anything of substance. He might ask, would that meeting be better on Tuesday than Monday?

“It’s a survival mechanism,” he says.

The lies we tell

The average person lies three times in the first 10 minutes of meeting someone new, according to research from Robert Feldman, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Such superficial fibs lubricate many of our social interactions, he says, helping us fit in and getting people to like us.

This salad is delicious, we insist. Or I loved the “Barbie” movie, too! With the boss, the photo of their kid is suddenly extraordinarily cute, their jacket perfect for today’s presentation.

“At the end of the day, we want to hear good things,” Feldman says. “Your boss is just like everybody else.”

What about when bosses want to be tapped into what’s really going on, too? After all, you’re the one who’s connected to collegial chatter and gossip, which can give managers insight into how they can do a better job and get ahead. Giving the right information to your boss can help you, too. You just have to share it the right way.

“I want people to feel like they can be them,” says Karin Storm Wood, who manages a team of communication professionals at a private school. But, “I don’t want everything.”

Don’t assume you have all the facts, she says. Acknowledge you’re just sharing one person’s perspective. And keep your language grounded. For instance, describe a behaviour instead of lobbing a negative adjective at your boss.

Wood says she’s OK with hearing that she sometimes jumps around from idea to idea in brainstorming sessions. She doesn’t want you to call her “scattered.”

“That’s like, ‘Ouch,’ ” she says. “It has that element of judgment.”

Feedback, please!

Everyone seems to want our take these days. We’re subjected to quarterly 360 reviews, weekly pulse surveys and drive-by requests for input by the coffee machine. It’s part of a longstanding shift from command-and-control leadership styles to more collaborative ways of running companies, says Doug Stone, who teaches conflict management at Harvard Law School and co-wrote the book, “Thanks for the Feedback.” A lot of it stems from employees who have demanded more of a voice…even if another app wasn’t what they had in mind.

Be careful what you wish for.

“You have to say something,” says Matt Abrahams, who teaches at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and has a book coming out this week about spontaneous communication.

A smart start is to ask some questions of your own to the boss, says Abrahams. What kind of guidance do they typically find useful? If they readily divulge a time they messed up or made a change, be more candid, he suggests.

Emphasising the positive might subconsciously correct the negative. For example, praising the boss for being so focused at the start of her speech could imply that she completely lost her train of thought by the end, without you having to spell it out. But don’t get too soft, Abrahams warns, devolving into coded language and euphemisms.

“You’re being coy. You’ve got something to say but you’re not saying it. That can look really bad for you,” he says. After all, we were all hired to be experts in our jobs.

The risk of always saying yes

Earlier in his career, Irvan Krantzler used to nod his head yes to everything, eager to fit in. That project idea? It sounded great. A deadline next week? Sure, he could handle it.

The result, he says, was often “bad news, late.” The issue he didn’t speak up about—an unrealistic timeline, not enough people on the team—would fester and eventually send a project sideways.

“I can’t be put in a situation where I can’t be open with people,” he says he realised. He started voicing his concerns more, and left one employer where everyone was expected to agree all the time.

When Leslie Venetz’s boss asked her what she thought about a new team of salespeople, she assumed the pair were just spitballing thoughts in confidence. A few months later, her comments were shared with HR, she says, and a person she had identified as weak was fired.

She felt guilty and betrayed, and soon left the company.

Now when clients of her sales training and consulting firm request her feedback, she asks how they’re going to use it. Are they deciding the fate of a division this week? Or just considering a possibility, and gathering dozens of opinions in the meantime?

The answer, she says, determines her candour.

“Everyone says that they want feedback,” she says. “There’s something to be said for taking a moment.”

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is set to make its stock-market debut Friday in the largest IPO ever—and perhaps the most closely watched. The company sold an outsized portion of the offering to individuals. Its performance on Friday will be a crucial gauge of investor appetite for mega-offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic expected later this year.

The rocket maker, which derives most of its revenue from its satellite internet unit and has a nascent artificial-intelligence business, will trade under the ticker “SPCX.” It sold 555.6 million shares at $135 each, raising about $75 billion in a deal that valued the company at roughly $1.77 trillion.

When will shares open for trading?

SpaceX executives are set to ring the Nasdaq’s opening bell in New York, but shares in buzzy initial public offerings don’t tend to start trading until later in the day.

Bankers leading an IPO typically want to match buyers and sellers for about 10% of the shares sold before opening trading to lessen volatility. For SpaceX, that would be about 55 million shares, or roughly $7.5 billion worth.

Because pre-IPO investors are restricted from selling shares for a while, it can take time to find willing sellers among those who bought shares in a high-demand IPO.

Shares of Alibaba , the largest U.S. IPO until SpaceX, opened for trading a little before noon in its 2014 offering. Last year, one of the highest-profile offerings was that of software maker Figma , whose shares started trading just before 2 p.m.

It is possible that SpaceX’s bankers will decide to start trading without matching the typical portion of orders to ensure the shares have several hours of trading on their first day, people familiar with the matter say.

How volatile will the stock be?

Bankers and traders expect SpaceX’s share price could be volatile in initial trading, thanks in part to the large portion of its shares expected to be held by individual investors. Some who anticipate individuals will rush into the shares worry they could just as easily get spooked and rush out.

Any sharp movement in stock price could trigger so-called circuit breakers that could pause trading. For most newly listed companies, a 10% swing in either direction prompts a five-minute pause. Companies that had their shares halted include Figma and Cerebras Systems , the chip company whose shares soared in its May debut.

These forced timeouts applied to single stocks came after the so-called flash crash in 2010, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 700 points in eight minutes before recouping much of the loss.

What is all the talk about the ‘green-shoe’ option?

If the stock starts trading erratically, bankers have a secret weapon to attempt to calm things down.

Underwriters typically sell more shares to investors than an IPO’s total offer size, colloquially called the green shoe. In SpaceX’s case, they sold about 15% more shares than the stated offering size.

Because this means they technically allocated more than the offering amount, the so-called stabilisation agent, in this case, Morgan Stanley , needs to buy back the excess number of shares to deliver them. If the stock starts to fall, the bank will buy the shares in the open market, which helps buoy the stock price. If the stock isn’t faltering, the stabilisation agent can buy the additional shares they need to deliver to investors directly from the company.

The term “green shoe” comes from the first company to employ a version of this method years ago, a shoemaker that was a predecessor to Stride Rite. When Meta Platforms , then known as Facebook, went public in 2012, its shares started dropping and its bankers stepped in to buy more shares.

How will Elon Musk’s take-it-or-leave-it pricing fare?

Like all things Musk, SpaceX’s IPO bucked the norms. Instead of approaching prospective investors with a possible price range for shares ahead of the IPO and incorporating their feedback, the company set an exact share price from the beginning: $135.

The idea was to limit drama for what is already the biggest IPO of all time. It did, however, remove what many see as an important step along the way: price discovery. The success of this approach will partly be judged by how SpaceX’s shares trade Friday. If the stock surges, critics will say SpaceX left money on the table by not pricing shares higher. If the stock falls or trades flat, there will likely be critiques that SpaceX and its advisers overestimated demand.

Will the machinery hold up—and what will be the wider market impact?

The sheer size of SpaceX’s IPO will test the trading infrastructure at Nasdaq and could have ripple effects in the broader market.

Nasdaq has practiced with mock openings to make sure its trading platform is prepared. When Facebook went public, some investors who tried to change or cancel orders ahead of trading didn’t get confirmations because of a technology malfunction. The confusion contributed to Facebook shares dropping on the first day of trading. They didn’t return back above their IPO price for more than a year.

Meanwhile, some market watchers expect added activity Friday in stocks that individual investors might sell to buy SpaceX shares, such as those of technology companies and Musk’s electric-car maker Tesla . Such sales already appeared to be under way earlier in the week, when individual investors dumped single-stock holdings on a net basis for two days in a row, according to Vanda Research. (To be sure, those sales came on days that were poor showings for tech stocks broadly.)

It will take several days for SpaceX shares to show up in any major index funds , so the offering’s wider impact on the market could play out over the next several weeks or longer.