How well a leader believes they are performing is often at odds with how the team experiences their leadership.
Leaders and team members typically look at the same actions from very different vantage points.
A leader has direct access to their own intentions, constraints, and reasoning. They know exactly what they are trying to accomplish, what trade-offs they have considered, and what information they have to work from.
As a result, leaders judge themselves primarily on their goals and intentions, while team members evaluate them largely on their actions in real time.
Not surprisingly, a gap in perception is common.
Team members only get to see a small slice of what leaders actually do, and this can amplify the gap in perception. When observation is limited, team members presume a leader’s visible behavior reflects the whole pattern.
So, if a leader fails to hold someone accountable in a meeting, the team presumes the same is true away from the meeting. If a leader lacks compassion in group interactions, the team presumes the leader lacks empathy in other contexts as well.
And so on.
In many cases, this gap in perception reveals a deep disconnect. One with real consequences.
How leaders think they are showing up for their teams and how teams experience their leadership can be enormously different. Leaders naturally fail to address issues, problems, or flaws they don’t believe they have.
So, when leaders believe they are performing effectively and teams believe otherwise, dissatisfaction can spread and affect team climate, morale, and performance.
Research suggests leaders are particularly prone to overestimate how effectively they communicate, how approachable they are, and how much they delegate and empower others. These misperceptions can significantly shape the team dynamic.
As a rule, leaders believe they communicate more clearly than they do, often overestimating the clarity, alignment, and transparency they create.
Teams often experience shifting expectations, ambiguous priorities, underexplained decisions, and competing signals while leaders contend that, thanks to their efforts and focused messages, everyone “gets it.”
Leaders also commonly overestimate how approachable they are.
Because their intention is to encourage dissent, stay open to feedback, and listen to team members’ problems and issues, they conclude that others find them more approachable and desirous of candid feedback than they are.
This means they sometimes don’t learn about issues important to the team.
Delegation is another frequent point of contention. Because of their intentions, leaders believe they commonly entrust others with important tasks and outcomes.
What team members experience can be grossly different.
In their view, leaders exert too much control over the work that matters, keeping a tight rein on critical decisions and projects. This gap in perception makes leaders susceptible to micromanaging others and operating with more authority than they realize.
The consequence is a team that feels the leader is a bottleneck to getting things done.
Because leaders confuse good intentions with strong impact, team member feedback on these and other gaps rarely changes their view. Leaders typically give themselves credit for effort others can’t see and deflect criticism they believe lacks context.
This is why external feedback is so critical for leader development. Leaders benefit greatly from the external insight of coaches, mentors, and assessments.
Feedback and criticism from outside sources help leaders to remain curious about how others experience their leadership. External views encourage leaders to accept the gap in perceptions and to act on it rather than deflect it.
The best leaders seek views from outside the team to give themselves a dose of reality. They do so regularly because deep down they know that even when perceptions are inaccurate, those perceptions can derail the team.
Perception is reality more often than not.
