Consider the following scenario: It’s 8:47 a.m. on a Tuesday, and Alex is already active in her team’s group chat. A question comes up about how to approach a client’s request. Before anyone else can respond, Alex jumps in with a full answer and the exact phrasing to use.
10 minutes later, she follows up on another task: “Just flagging this in case it got buried.” An hour after that: “Did you see my email?” Ask Alex what she’s working on as a leader and she won’t hesitate. She’s building accountability; staying close to the work and making sure her team has what they need to succeed. From her perspective, this is what “good leadership” looks like. From her team’s perspective, it’s something else entirely.
The quick responses remove space for others to think and the constant follow-ups create pressure. What feels like support to Alex feels like control to her team. Alex isn’t a bad leader. She’s a well-intentioned one, working hard to help the team succeed. She’s just working on the wrong things.
The Leadership Perception Gap
What’s happening with Alex in the above scenario isn’t unusual. People evaluate themselves from the inside out — their intentions, their effort and what they’re trying to accomplish. But teams evaluate leaders from the outside — what it felt like, what changed in the room and whether things improved or deteriorated.
Research reinforces the consequences of this misalignment. One study found that when leaders and their direct reports perceive workplace dynamics differently, the relationship between resilience and workability breaks down. When a leader believes they’re building strength, but the team experiences pressure, the team gets worn down. This is the “perception gap,” where well-intentioned leadership becomes ineffective.
The Data Behind the Gap
The 2026 “State of EQ” report from TalentSmartEQ puts a number on the problem. Across roughly 23,000 multi-rater data points, leaders rated themselves on behavioral items, and their teams rated them on the same items.
The report provides gap scores on the behaviors leaders flagged as their top areas to develop, and the behaviors their teams most wished they would develop. Fewer than 5% of leaders matched the top three behaviors, and 45% had zero overlap. Without the data and feedback from their team, nearly one-half of leaders were going to invest their development time on behaviors that wouldn’t make the biggest impact for those around them.
Why This Matters Now
The disconnect between how leaders believe they show up and how they are experienced is widening at precisely the moment organizations need trust the most. According to 2026 research by Korn Ferry, 86% of senior leaders believe their employees highly trust them, while only 67% of employees agree. In addition,
Organizational disruptions due to economic uncertainty and technology advancements have made trust harder to earn and easier to lose. Employees aren’t looking to the CEO; they’re looking to the leader they report to every day. Leaders are shaping trust through everyday interactions. Leadership development must be grounded in the leader’s real impact, and how it feels to work with them.
What L&D Can Do About It
Upward feedback is rare, and when it does surface, the perception gap makes it easy to dismiss. If a leader believes they’re helping and hears otherwise, the instinct is to reinterpret. They think they know exactly who gave the feedback, and they have a long list of reasons why it should be discounted.
Here are two ways L&D can help leaders better understand and improve how they are experienced by their teams.
- Make feedback visible, specific and actionable.
Multi-rater feedback only drives change when it is shared and revisited. One study found that managers who discussed their feedback with direct reports improved significantly more than those who did not. Research by Marshall Goldsmith and Howard Morgan, analyzing 86,000 respondents, found that the strongest predictor of behavior change was not the plan itself, but whether leaders shared goals and followed up.
Feedback also needs to be specific and situational. Generic check-ins like “Any feedback for me?” don’t create the insight leaders need. Targeted, moment-based questions do, such as:
- “In that meeting, did my input move things forward or slow them down?”
- “When I followed up on that deadline, how did that land?”
- Strengthen social awareness.
Self-awareness is foundational, but it keeps attention inward. Leaders also need social awareness to read cues, detect disengagement and check assumptions in real time. This might look like:
- “You seemed to pull back in the last part of that conversation. Was there friction for you?”
- “You look like you love that idea. Do you have something you want to add?”
Learning to master social awareness requires leaders to learn how to watch for non-verbal cues. People will subtly give away their position on things, but it takes a leader who is well trained to be able to spot when the mood in the room changes or when friction starts to happen in the middle of a call.
The Real Work
Alex eventually received her feedback, not through a performance review, but through a multi-rater assessment that made the gap visible. Her version of support was landing as control and bordering on micromanaging. She didn’t overhaul her leadership overnight. She announced to her team what she wanted to work on and then she started small: fewer immediate responses, more questions instead of answers and less follow up. Her team noticed, not because she announced a change, but because the pressure eased.
Alex’s intent was never the problem — her visibility into impact was. Once she could see it, she finally started working on the right things.
