Everyone on your team already knows what it's like to work for you.
In this episode
Everyone on your team already knows what it’s like to work for you. So do your peers. You’re the only one still guessing.
In this episode, we take on the gap between what a leader intends and what the team experiences. Most leaders have never had a mechanism for hearing the truth from their leaders, their peers, or their direct reports at the same time.
We dive into the stories of an operations leader whose 360 put an active listening score near the top of the scale next to a direct-report score at the very bottom, and the two next steps that turned that report into better meetings and a turnover metric that dropped.
Show outline
- 03:34 Why every leader has this gap
- 04:43 Intent versus experience
- 05:41 Where feedback systems fail
- 07:19 The operations leader and the listening score
- 09:30 One behavior that shows up clearly
- 12:05 The three question audit
- 13:59 The full mirror, and your next bold move
Takeaways
- 1Your title edits your feedback. Once you start signing off on raises and shaping careers, people edit what they tell you. The quiet in your meetings is a filter, and it grows with every promotion you get.
- 2You grade yourself on what you meant; your team grades you on what they heard. Self-perception is a broken instrument because it only measures intent, and the distance between intent and behavior is where trust erodes.
- 3A blind spot is the place where your score and your team’s score disagree, and you’re the only one who hasn’t seen it yet. In the story, listening was the leader’s highest self-rating and the team’s lowest score for the leader.
- 4Data doesn’t change your leadership; what you do with it does. Surveys that end in a committee, and 360s that end in a drawer, teach everyone that feedback isn’t real.
- 5Pick one behavior and make it observable: did other people talk first, and did their ideas survive contact with the boss’s opinion?
- 6Go first, say it out loud. When a leader names their own gap to the team before explaining it away, trust rises. Then build a small, boring, repeatable rhythm around it: the team scores the meeting, and the leader keeps the pledge.
- 7Run the 3 question audit this week. Ask a supervisor, a peer, and a direct report, in-person: what should I keep doing, what should I stop doing, and what’s one thing you’ve always wanted to tell me but haven’t? Say thank you, write it down, and don’t defend. The moment you explain yourself, the feedback ends.
- 8The leader’s line after the feedback: “I thought I knew myself pretty well, but I was the only one who didn’t.”
