The Leader They Experience Isn’t Who You Think You Are
Good morning. We’re kicking off May with something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while, and it starts with a moment that genuinely surprised me.
A client described herself to me as ‘collaborative and approachable.’ She said it with real conviction, the way you describe something you’ve built into your identity as a leader. So I asked three of her direct reports to describe her leadership style. The words they used: ‘Intense.’ ‘Hard to read.’ ‘You never know what mood you’re walking into.’
When I shared those words back to her, the first thing she did was defend. That’s normal. What wasn’t normal was what happened next. She sat with it. Not immediately, not gracefully, but she actually sat with it. And she realized something that most leaders never let themselves realize: she wasn’t doing anything she thought was wrong. In her mind, she was being direct and efficient. In their experience, she was unpredictable and closed off. And she’d had no idea. Not because nobody saw it. Because nobody told her. And once you know that gap exists, you can’t unknow it.
Here’s the question that should bother you: how confident are you that the leader you think you are is the leader your team actually experiences? That gap, the one between your self-perception and their reality, is one of the most expensive blind spots in any organization. It’s not expensive because you’re failing. You’re probably succeeding by every metric that matters to you. It’s expensive because you’re adjusting the wrong controls. You’re leading based on a version of yourself that doesn’t match what people are responding to. Sometimes for years.
The pattern underneath is usually invisible from the inside. It takes someone outside your day-to-day, someone with no stake in telling you what you want to hear, to name it clearly enough that you can actually see it.
If something in today’s newsletter described a pattern you’ve suspected but couldn’t name, that’s exactly what Executive Triage is built for. One conversation. One pattern named with enough precision that you can’t unsee it once it’s on the page. $3,500. cynthiacorsetti.com/executive-triage
This week’s read: Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. It’s not about how to give feedback. It’s about how to actually hear it, especially when your first instinct is to defend or dismiss. This client’s ability to sit with ‘intense’ instead of explaining it away? That’s what this book is about. It’s the hardest leadership skill that nobody talks about.
The leader you think you are isn’t the leader that matters. The leader your team experiences is. And until you close that gap, you’re solving for the wrong problem.