Here’s something that might make a few leaders uncomfortable.
You can care deeply about your people, genuinely want them to succeed, and still be the person making their working lives unnecessarily difficult. You can believe you’re empowering your team while quietly taking away their confidence. You can pride yourself on being open and approachable while people carefully rehearse what they’re going to say before coming into your office.
And you can be completely unaware that any of this is happening.
In more than 20 years of executive coaching, I’ve found that some of the most unhelpful leadership behaviours don’t come from bad intentions. They come from capable, committed leaders who don’t recognise the gap between who they believe they are and how others actually experience them.
And the inconvenient truth?
Your team experiences your impact, not your intention.
Here are four areas I’d encourage you to consider when thinking about your own leadership blind spots.
1. The stories we tell ourselves about our leadership
Most leaders have a fairly clear picture of the kind of leader they believe themselves to be. I’m decisive. I have high standards. I care about people. I give others room to get on with things. I’m prepared to have difficult conversations. I want the best for my team. All admirable qualities. But let’s look at those statements from the other side of the desk.
You describe yourself as decisive. Your team experiences you as impatient. You believe you have high standards. Your people feel that nothing they do is ever good enough. You think you’re helping by getting involved. They experience you as taking over. You believe you’re challenging their thinking. They experience your questions as interrogation.
Same leader. Same behaviour. Two very different experiences.
Of course, perception isn’t always reality. People can misunderstand our behaviour, and leaders sometimes need to make unpopular decisions. We can’t be responsible for every interpretation of what we say or do.
But when the same feedback or reaction keeps showing up, dismissing it because it wasn’t what you intended is a mistake.
2. The gap between what we intend and how we’re experienced
Your intention explains your behaviour. It doesn’t excuse its consequences.
I was coaching a senior leader recently, whom I’ll call Michael. He’s an experienced leader who genuinely cares about his people and wants to create an environment where they can do their best work.
He had been making some positive changes. He’d introduced regular one-to-one conversations with his team and changed the way management meetings were run. He wanted more openness, better relationships and greater ownership within the team.
What was interesting was what he began to discover through those conversations. Not everyone experienced his leadership in the same way. And what people needed from him to feel trusted, supported and able to speak openly wasn’t necessarily what he had assumed.
This led us into a discussion about authenticity, something we hear a great deal about in leadership. Michael wanted to be authentic and lead in a way that was consistent with his values and who he believed himself to be.
But we explored an interesting question. Is being authentic simply about being true to yourself, or does it also require understanding how others experience you?
You may intend to be supportive, but does the other person feel supported? You may believe you’re encouraging openness, but do people feel safe enough to disagree with you? You may think you’re holding people accountable, but are you creating the conditions for honest conversations about performance?
We also discussed the shadow he casts as a leader. What do people learn from how he behaves, particularly when things are difficult? What messages might he be sending without intending to?
Michael was already doing many of the right things. The next step was to become more curious about whether those actions were having the impact he wanted.
One of the things I encouraged him to explore with his team was what trust actually meant to each of them, rather than assuming they all shared the same understanding.
It sounds simple, but how often do we ask?
For me, this is where leadership development becomes more meaningful. Not just understanding our strengths, values and intentions, but being willing to look at how those qualities are actually experienced by others.
3. The leadership behaviour you tolerate becomes the behaviour you teach and the environment you create
There’s a wider organisational issue here.
We often talk about leadership culture as though it’s something created through values statements, leadership frameworks and engagement initiatives. But people learn an enormous amount about acceptable behaviour by watching what senior leaders do, particularly under pressure.
If the CEO regularly loses their temper, other leaders may learn that intensity is part of authority. If the executive team avoids difficult conversations, that avoidance can travel down the organisation. If senior leaders continually take over decisions, managers learn that it’s safer to escalate than take responsibility.
And if challenging the boss has negative consequences, people learn to keep quiet. None of this needs to be said out loud. It’s the shadow the leader casts, often without even realising it.
So then the behaviour becomes the permission.
This is why I sometimes question how organisations approach leadership development. We send managers on programmes to become better listeners, more empowering leaders and stronger collaborators, while their own leaders may be demonstrating or rewarding quite different behaviours. Then we wonder why the training doesn’t stick.
Perhaps the problem isn’t always the managers. Perhaps they’re responding quite rationally to the leadership environment we’ve created.
And perhaps we need to pay as much attention to the behaviours being demonstrated at the top as we do to the capabilities we’re trying to develop further down.
4. The more senior you become, the easier it is to believe your own story
Here’s another uncomfortable aspect of leadership.
The higher you rise, the more influence you have over other people’s experience of work. Yet the higher you rise, the less honest feedback you may receive about that influence.
People become careful. They choose their words, decide which issues are worth raising and anticipate your response before approaching you. Sometimes they simply stop telling you what they really think.
And because nobody is challenging you, it’s easy to conclude that things are going well. Silence becomes agreement and compliance becomes commitment. A lack of challenge becomes evidence that your leadership is effective.
This is one of the reasons I think senior leadership can be such a difficult place to maintain self-awareness. The very authority that allows you to get things done can also prevent you from seeing the effect you’re having.
And if you’re a reasonably thoughtful, well-intentioned person, you can nearly always find an explanation for your behaviour. I was under pressure. They needed a push. I was only trying to help. Someone had to make the decision.
All of those explanations may be true. But here’s something to consider:
You may be creating the problem you’re trying to solve.
One of the most useful questions I ask in coaching is also one of the hardest:
How might you be contributing to the very thing you’re frustrated by?
The leader who complains that nobody takes ownership may be the one who keeps overriding decisions. The leader who wants people to speak up may be the one who immediately explains why their ideas won’t work. The leader who’s frustrated by constant escalation may have taught everyone that checking with the boss is safer than making a mistake. The leader who wants a calmer, more resilient team may be bringing urgency and anxiety into every conversation.
These aren’t necessarily poor leaders. Many are highly capable people whose strengths have become overused or are no longer serving them particularly well.
Their expertise becomes interference. Their commitment becomes pressure. Their desire to help becomes control. And because they’re focused on solving the problems they see in others, they overlook their own contribution.
This is what I mean when I talk about leaders creating noise for other people.
It’s not just the volume of work, the number of meetings or the constant flow of information. It’s also the uncertainty, tension, hesitation and additional mental effort people experience because of how we lead.
Sometimes we’re the source of the noise we’re complaining about.
So how do you close the gap?
I don’t believe the answer is to become endlessly self-conscious, second-guess every interaction or attempt to keep everyone happy. Leadership requires judgement, courage and sometimes difficult decisions. Nor should we assume that every negative reaction means the leader has done something wrong.
But we do need to become more curious about our impact. There are four things I’d encourage leaders to try.
1. Ask about your impact, not just your intention.
Instead of asking, “Am I approachable?” ask, “What makes it easier or harder for people to bring me difficult news?”
Instead of asking, “Do I empower my team?” ask, “When do I get involved in ways that reduce your ownership?”
And rather than assuming you know what trust looks like, ask people what they need from you to experience it.
2. Notice what happens when you enter the room.
Does the conversation become more open or more guarded? Do people continue exploring ideas or begin looking to you for the answer? Do they challenge your thinking or quickly align with your view?
These aren’t definitive measures, but they can tell you something about the shadow you’re casting.
3. Pay particular attention to yourself under pressure.
Most of us can behave reasonably well when things are going smoothly. It’s when deadlines tighten, performance slips or we’re feeling threatened that our less helpful patterns tend to emerge.
Notice what happens to your tone, your pace, your listening and your need for control. And consider what happens to everyone else as a result.
4. When you receive uncomfortable feedback, resist the urge to explain.
This may be the hardest one.
When someone tells you that your behaviour has affected them negatively, notice how quickly your mind wants to justify what happened.
Rather than immediately explaining your intentions, try asking:
- What did I do that created that impression?
- How did that affect you?
- What could I have done differently?
You don’t have to agree with every interpretation, but you do need to be willing to understand it. And, importantly, do something with what you learn.
The real test of leadership maturity
I think we’ve become rather comfortable talking about authentic leadership, emotional intelligence and psychological safety.
They’re important ideas, but sometimes I wonder whether the language has become a little too easy. It’s possible to understand the concepts, use all the right words and still be remarkably unaware of how you affect others.
Being authentic doesn’t give you permission to be thoughtless. Having high standards doesn’t justify intimidation. Caring about your people doesn’t automatically mean you’re having a positive impact on them. And having the best intentions doesn’t absolve you of responsibility for your behaviour.
The leaders I most respect aren’t those who always get it right. They’re the ones who are prepared to recognise when they haven’t, remain curious rather than defensive, and make adjustments.
Perhaps that’s a better measure of leadership maturity than how confidently we can describe our strengths. Not simply knowing who we intend to be, but being willing to discover who we actually are in the experience of others.
So here’s my challenge.
Think about one recurring frustration you have with your team. Perhaps they don’t take enough initiative. They don’t challenge you. They escalate too much. They seem hesitant or reluctant to make decisions.
Before deciding what they need to change, ask yourself:
What might they have learned from me that is contributing to this?
It’s a question worth asking. And you may not particularly like the answer, but wouldn’t it be better to know?
Aroha,
Judith
These are some of the leadership themes I explore in my forthcoming book, The Noise-Cancelling Leader: Finding Your Signal in a Noisy World, launching in late 2026.
The book explores how leaders can recognise and reduce the interference that clouds their judgement, affects their relationships and gets in the way of good leadership.
Find out more and register for launch updates at www.noisecancellingleader.com.
Judith Jamieson | Executive Coach
