Nothing Is Wrong. And Yet Something Is Not Right.

The quiet leadership challenge that builds each day, and has no name.

You are not in trouble.

Nobody has complained about you. There is no warning on your file, no investigation, no meeting in your calendar that you are quietly dreading. Your last review was strong. When something difficult lands, you are still the one they hand it to.

And yet, if you’re honest with yourself there is a small, persistent sense that something is not quite right, and you're not sure why.

From the outside things look good, you’ve landed your dream role in your dream organisation. Life is pretty good. "I should be grateful." You tell yourself, and yet you’re just not feeling it.

What you notice, and cannot quite name

It is usually small.

A meeting where nobody pushed back, and you found yourself wishing someone had.

A capable person has stopped asking questions, and their performance is slowly slipping.

An engagement score that came back lower than it should have, and yet you don’t think you're to blame.

Psychological safety results show your people are not comfortable to speak up, and yet you are committed to the opposite.

The sense that you are working harder for the same result than you were three years ago.

None of it is a crisis. None of it requires urgency. And yet something important is missing. 

Sure you’re doing well, but not as well as you know you could be.

There’s an elephant in the room but you’re not exactly sure of its name.

That is exactly what makes this so difficult to look at.

The most expensive assumption in leadership

The assumption is this: that your experience of yourself is a reliable guide to how you are actually landing with your team.

It is the most natural assumption in the world. You know your intent. You know how much you care. You know the restraint you exercised in that meeting. The version of the sentence you did not say.

Your team, however, does not have access to any of that. They have access to the sentence you did say. They are doing what comes naturally.

They judge themselves by their intentions, and they judge you by your behaviour.

And research comes to a similar conclusion. Leaders often report higher levels of relation-oriented behaviours compared to how observers rate them (Lee & Carpenter, 2018). 

Is this because most leaders know their intentions are good, despite how their actions were perceived?

The truth is, you are simply not experiencing yourself as others are experiencing you. No one is, no matter how self-aware they are.

This is not a character flaw. It is a structural feature of holding a senior role.

The more senior you become, the more carefully people edit what they tell you, and the less accurate your own reading of the situation can become, at exactly the point where accuracy matters most.

Why this is better news than it sounds

Gallup has spent decades researching why one team thrives while another, in the same organisation, with the same pay, the same tools and the same strategy, does not. 

One of their most important studies ever found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement across business units; meaning the quality, behaviour, and leadership of a person’s direct manager determines how happy, motivated, and connected people feel each day at work (Gallup, 2015). Much more than company perks, or corporate culture.

Of course workload, restructures, pay, strategy, resources, colleagues, and teams also matter, but not as much.

When two teams in the same organisation diverge, the person leading them is the largest single explanation.

This means that you have more power over your team, and their engagement, and performance, than you may realise. 

And when you grow, they grow. 

And when you're a well and engaged leader, it's 59% more likely that your team will also be engaged (Gallup (2015).

Later research by Gallup (2022) also found that burnt out and disengaged managers affect company wide performance. And vice versa, when managers are engaged, business performance soars.

The good news is that you don’t need to wait for a culture program, a restructure, or a budget cycle. Your own self awareness, well-being, confidence, and self-efficacy has the most impact on your team's experience, engagement and performance.

If it ain’t broke, still fix it.

If there is a little niggle inside you, and you don’t know why, are you going to wait until the message gets louder, and ultimately a crisis happens?

Or are you going to get curious, and stay open to the messages that are trying to reach you right now? The butterflies in your stomach, the feeling of dis-ease, the feeling you’ve plateaued. 

It’s up to you.

Look while it's optional

Executives in crisis are, almost without exception, running the same pattern as the executives who were curious years earlier.

They are just two to five years further along their leadership journey.

Nothing dramatic happened in between. The pattern simply continued, unexamined, until it produced something that could no longer be ignored. A resignation. A complaint. Unexplained turnover. A team that fell apart.

And at some point the leader had to make the decision to stay, or go. To evolve, or be pushed aside.

The leaders who never had a crisis are not luckier. They were simply willing to look earlier, while looking was still optional.

What it looks like to do the work early

It looks like curiosity rather than confession.

It looks like sitting down with someone whose job is to see the thing you cannot see from the inside, and finding out what your particular brilliance is currently costing you and the people around you.

It looks like getting an accurate read on how you are actually landing, as distinct from how you intend to land, before that gap has a chance to become a formal problem requiring remediation.

You do not have to be in trouble to be curious about what your excellence is costing you.

Most of the leaders I work with were not.

They were simply honest with themselves earlier than they had to be.

Research

Lee, A., & Carpenter, N. C. (2018). Seeing eye to eye: A meta-analysis of self-other agreement of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 29(2), 253 to 275.

Beck, R., & Harter, J. (2015). Managers account for 70% of variance in employee engagement. Gallup Business Journal, drawing on Gallup, State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders (2015).

Mann, A. & Wood, J. (2015). Managers With High Well-Being Twice as Likely to Be Engaged.

Pitonyak, J. Desimone, R. (2022) How to Engage Frontline Managers.

About the Author

Caryn Cridland is an executive psychologist, lawyer, and mediator who transforms Fortune 500 executives' executive challenges into conscious leadership breakthroughs through her proprietary Executive Evolution System.™ With two decades specialising in high-stakes workplace conflicts and leadership development, four degrees in psychology and law, she helps "brilliant exceeders" evolve from intellectual dominance to conscious leadership.

→ Facing this challenge with an executive on your team? Let's talk. Message me directly.

→ Know a brilliant exceeder who needs to read this? Share it. You might save their career.