As organizations grow, leadership conversations naturally focus on strategy, fundraising, sales, product, and operations.
Those conversations are essential. Yet one conversation often receives far less attention than it deserves, even though it may have the greatest impact on the organization’s future:
What do the people around me know about my leadership that I don’t?
Every leader makes decisions based on an incomplete understanding of how others experience them. The question is whether they are open to becoming aware and intentionally closing that gap.
The most valuable information about your leadership already exists in the experience of the people who work with you every day. They see your strengths. They see your contributions. They also see the habits and behaviors that are beginning to limit your effectiveness, often before you do.
I saw firsthand an example that played out with the COO of a rapidly growing software company.
His CEO said in a one-on-one check-in that he’d heard from next level reports that looking at his phone during one-on-one meetings made them feel dismissed. The COO discounted the feedback:
“They just don’t understand how I work.”
Several months later, a confidential multi-rater executive assessment process gathered input from the leadership team. Independently, nearly everyone described the same behavior and the same impact.
Presented with the collective experience of his colleagues, the conversation changed immediately. This was no longer one person’s perception. It was the shared experience of the people who worked with him every day.
Instead of becoming defensive, the COO became curious. He asked his colleagues to help him change. He even placed a sign on his desk during one-on-one meetings that read:
“Tell me if I’m being disrespectful.”
His colleagues did. The behavior changed. Trust deepened. Not long afterward, he became CEO, leading the company through more than tenfold growth with the confidence and respect of the people he led.
The assessment process itself is remarkably simple. Each executive answers four questions about every other executive:
- What is this person especially good at?
- What has this person contributed?
- How has this person grown?
- What should this person focus on next?
The questions are simple. The discipline lies in how the responses are synthesized, tested, and discussed. That work is best led by a trusted facilitator. Whether that person is an HR leader, an executive coach, or another respected professional, everyone involved must trust that the process is impartial, confidential, and focused on helping leaders grow.
The facilitator helps reviewers distinguish isolated observations from broadly shared experience, challenges vague or unsupported conclusions, identifies the few themes that matter most, and ensures the feedback is specific, fair, and actionable. Their stewardship gives leaders confidence that what they are hearing reflects reality, not just individual opinion.
Organizations struggle when leaders continue leading from assumptions that no longer match the reality experienced by the people around them. By the time those unseen realities become obvious, they have often become costly.
The strongest CEOs build organizations where those realities surface early, while they can still be acted upon. They cultivate leadership teams that are relentlessly curious about what others know that they do not because they understand that leadership growth begins with a simple question:
What do the people around me know that I need to learn?
