Most Leaders Think They Make Their People Feel Valued. They Can't All Be Right.

Recently, I wrote about something I've seen happen in organizations more than once: some of our best people continue performing long after their relationship with the organization has begun to change. They still do excellent work, help their colleagues, take on difficult assignments, and say yes when something important needs to get done. Because their performance hasn't changed, it's easy to assume everything is fine.

That left me thinking about a different question. Why are leaders sometimes among the last people to realize that everything isn't fine? More specifically, how can a leader sincerely believe that people feel valued, supported, and appreciated while the people being led experience something quite different?

I suspect most leaders believe they value their people. They can probably provide plenty of evidence. They recognize good work, tell people they're important, provide opportunities, ask talented employees to participate in consequential decisions, and perhaps maintain the proverbial open door. Those behaviors may be completely sincere. But they don't necessarily answer the more important question: Do the people being led actually feel valued?

I'm a marketing professor, so my natural inclination is to think about this as a relationship and value problem. We spend a lot of time in marketing thinking about how organizations create value for customers and how those perceptions shape relationships. One of the most basic ideas is also one of the most important: the organization doesn't get to determine that it has created value simply because it intended to. The customer does. We can believe we've created an exceptional experience, strengthened the relationship, and given customers every reason to choose us again. If they experience something different, our assessment isn't the one that's going to determine what they do next.

The more I've thought about it, the more I'm convinced that leadership presents essentially the same problem. Leaders know how much they value someone. Employees know what it feels like to be valued by them. Those aren't necessarily the same thing.

We may not experience the same leader

There is a substantial stream of leadership research examining what scholars call "self-other agreement," essentially the degree to which leaders' assessments of their own behavior correspond with assessments made by the people around them. The findings provide good reason for some humility.

Research synthesizing leader self-ratings and ratings from others finds that agreement is far from perfect. Particularly interesting to me is evidence that leaders can evaluate themselves more favorably on relationship-oriented aspects of leadership. The part of leadership involving how well we relate to other people may therefore be one of the areas in which our view of ourselves is especially generous.

That makes intuitive sense because I have access to a lot of information about myself that the people I lead don't. I know what I intended to do. I know that I care. I know that I meant to respond, that I tried to help, or that circumstances got in the way. I remember the encouraging conversation we had three months ago, and I understand all of the competing demands that prevented me from doing something I hoped to do.

The person on the other side of that relationship has access to a much simpler set of information: what I actually did.

That difference is not only meaningful, it represents a significant blind spot for many leaders. Leaders evaluate themselves with access to both intentions and behavior, while everyone else primarily experiences the behavior. I can therefore construct a perfectly coherent story in which I am caring, accessible, responsive, and supportive even when the accumulated experience of the people around me tells a somewhat different story. Neither side has to be dishonest for that divergence to occur.

Leadership itself may make the problem worse

The problem isn't simply that human beings aren't particularly objective when evaluating themselves. Leadership can alter the environment in ways that make understanding other people's perspectives more difficult.

Research on power and perspective-taking has found that greater power can, under some conditions, make people more likely to anchor on their own perspective and less accurately recognize what other people know or feel. The broader literature is more complex than saying that power inevitably makes people less empathetic, but the underlying challenge is important.

As people acquire organizational power, they generally become less dependent on the people around them. The people around them, meanwhile, often become more dependent on them. That creates very different incentives for paying attention. Employees have good reason to study a leader carefully. They learn what matters to the boss, how the boss reacts to disagreement, when it's safe to raise an issue, and whether requests for candid feedback really mean candid feedback or something closer to agreement delivered in the language of candid feedback.

Leaders don't necessarily have the same incentive to study every employee quite so carefully. The more senior the position, the easier it may also become to confuse the information that reaches us with an accurate representation of what people actually think. Disagreement gets softened. Feedback becomes more polite. People become more selective about which concerns are worth raising.

At precisely the point when understanding other people's perspectives becomes increasingly consequential, our organizational position may make doing so more difficult.

The story we tell ourselves can become part of the problem

There is another body of research that makes this even more interesting. Meta-analytic research on narcissism and leadership, for example, has found that narcissism can help people emerge as leaders without necessarily making them more effective leaders. Particularly relevant here, narcissism has been positively associated with leaders' assessments of their own effectiveness even when observers don't share that assessment.

I'm certainly not suggesting that leaders who overestimate themselves are narcissists. That would be scientifically irresponsible and far too convenient an explanation for every bad boss we've ever encountered. What interests me is the broader implication: confidence in our own leadership and other people's experience of our leadership can develop somewhat independently.

There may also be an important difference between caring about people and caring about being the kind of leader who cares about people. The two can certainly coexist, but they aren't the same thing. Once being "a great people leader" becomes part of how I see myself, information suggesting otherwise becomes more than feedback about something I did. It challenges my view of who I am.

That may make the leadership perception gap particularly difficult to recognize. If I already believe I'm accessible, supportive, and deeply committed to my people, I have plenty of evidence available to confirm it. I remember the encouragement I gave, the opportunities I provided, and the times I recognized someone's contribution. When people continue performing, accepting responsibilities, and showing up when I need them, their behavior provides even more apparent confirmation.

After all, if something were really wrong, wouldn't they stop saying yes?

Maybe. Or maybe they're just really good at their jobs.

Leaders and employees may be keeping different receipts

I suspect we also remember different parts of the relationship. Leaders naturally remember the visible things they do for people. We remember giving someone recognition, approving a development opportunity, writing a thank-you note, recommending someone for something important, or telling an employee what a terrific job she did. Those things matter, and I'm certainly not arguing that we should stop doing them.

Employees, however, are evaluating the relationship using a much larger collection of experiences. They remember the concern they raised several times without receiving an answer. They remember whether we followed through. They remember whether we noticed the extra work only when we needed more of it. They remember whether we asked what mattered to them or simply decided what should matter to them. They remember whether our concern was still evident when responding required something from us.

Recognition deserves particular attention here because organizations often treat recognition as evidence that someone is valued. An award, public praise, a new title, or an invitation to take on something important can demonstrate that an organization noticed someone's contribution. And for some people, those things may themselves create considerable value.

For others, they may not.

Recognition tells someone that their contribution was noticed. It doesn't necessarily tell them what that contribution means for the relationship. An employee can genuinely appreciate being recognized and still wonder whether the organization's decisions about compensation, workload, autonomy, opportunity, resources, or responsiveness reflect the same assessment of their value.

The problem isn't recognition. It's assuming that because we've recognized someone's value, we've necessarily created value for them. This is where I think we need to distinguish between two things that sound similar but aren't:

Valuing what someone does for an organization isn't the same as making that person feel valued by it.

In fact, valuing someone's contributions can lead us to give that person more responsibility, involve them in more important decisions, and ask them to solve more difficult problems. From the organization's perspective, those requests may be compelling evidence of how highly the person is regarded.

From the employee's perspective, the interpretation may eventually be very different. If "You're incredibly valuable to us" is routinely followed by "Here's something else we'd like you to do for us," what was intended as recognition can eventually start to look a lot like efficient resource allocation.

My marketing brain keeps coming back to value

This is the part of the issue I find hardest to separate from marketing. If I want customers to continue choosing a brand, I don't get to decide that I've already created enough value because they chose us yesterday. I need to understand what they value now, how their needs are changing, and how we can continue finding ways to strengthen the relationship.

Most marketers would recognize the absurdity of saying, "This customer has purchased from us repeatedly for 15 years, so apparently we don't need to worry about creating any additional value for them." Continued purchasing isn't permission to stop creating value. If anything, the strength and duration of the relationship give us more reason to protect it.

Yet organizations can behave surprisingly close to that way with their best people. Continued contribution becomes evidence that the relationship must be working. We provide recognition we believe should be meaningful, opportunities we believe someone should appreciate, and responsibilities we assume demonstrate trust. Then we're surprised when the other party doesn't calculate the value equation exactly as we do.

Marketing has taught us something fundamental here: value isn't determined solely by what the provider believes it has delivered. It's experienced by the person receiving it. But marketing teaches us something else that may be equally important: understanding value isn't always as simple as asking people what they want.

Customers are often much better at describing their experiences, frustrations, tradeoffs, and aspirations than they are at designing the solution. Good customer insight therefore requires more than asking a question and recording the answer. We listen, probe, interpret, and try to understand what sits beneath the stated preference.

I suspect employee value works much the same way.

Ask someone what would make them feel more valued and compensation may be the immediate answer. Sometimes compensation really is the answer. A genuine market discrepancy isn't transformed into something else simply because an organization has financial constraints. But compensation can also carry meaning beyond the dollars themselves: fairness, status, reciprocity, acknowledgment, or tangible evidence that contribution has consequences.

And when compensation can't fully address the problem, asking, "What else would make you feel valued?" may not get us very far. The employee may not know. People can often recognize that something about a relationship isn't working long before they can identify precisely what would make it better.

That means understanding employee value may require something closer to discovery. When has this person felt most valued? What experiences have changed the relationship? What do they wish they had more or less of? What repeatedly frustrates them? What does another responsibility, opportunity, award, or unanswered concern actually mean to them?

In other words, leaders shouldn't assume they know what people value. But neither should they assume employees can always hand them the answer.

Understanding value requires discovery.

That doesn't mean organizations can or should satisfy every employee request any more than companies should satisfy every customer demand. Nor does it mean leadership is a simple exchange in which employees should receive something every time they're asked to contribute. Relationships are more complicated than that. It does mean that leaders should be cautious about declaring a relationship healthy based primarily on their own assessment of what they've contributed to it.

Feeling valued may therefore be less about any individual leadership practice and more about the accumulated evidence someone has about the relationship. Does this person listen when I raise something important? Does she respond when doing so is inconvenient? Does he follow through? Has my leader invested enough in understanding what I actually value, even when I may have difficulty articulating it myself? Can I disagree without changing the relationship? And do the organization's decisions about things like compensation, opportunity, workload, autonomy, and advancement actually reflect the value it says I provide? Does the organization seem interested in creating value for me as well as extracting value from what I contribute? Perhaps most importantly, does the relationship feel reciprocal?

We can tell someone they're valued every day. Eventually, the relationship provides its own answer.

Humility matters because we might be wrong

This is one reason I've become particularly interested in research on leader humility. Humility in this literature doesn't mean being timid, passive, or pretending not to know what you know. It involves behaviors such as recognizing one's limitations, appreciating other people's strengths and contributions, and remaining teachable. A substantial body of research now connects leader humility with positive employee and team outcomes.

For this particular issue, teachability may be the most important characteristic. A leader who already knows they are a great leader has relatively little reason to look for evidence suggesting otherwise. A leader who remains genuinely curious about their impact does.

I don't think the lesson is that leaders need to become less confident. Organizations need people who can exercise judgment, make difficult decisions, and act with conviction. The challenge is maintaining confidence in our ability to lead while remaining appropriately uncertain about how our leadership is being experienced.

That uncertainty isn't weakness. It leaves room for information we don't already have.

And perhaps that's one of the important differences between caring about people and caring about being seen as a leader who cares about people. If my primary concern is the former, learning that someone doesn't feel valued gives me information about a relationship I care about and might need to change. If I'm heavily invested in the latter, the same information can feel like a challenge to my identity that needs to be explained away.

High performance may be a terrible diagnostic

All of this brings me back to the observation that started this line of thinking. We usually imagine disengagement as something we'll be able to see. Performance falls. Someone stops volunteering. Their attitude changes. They withdraw. Eventually, they leave.

But our highest performers may be particularly difficult to read because professionalism can conceal a deteriorating relationship. Conscientious people continue being conscientious. People who care about their colleagues continue helping them. People committed to customers, students, patients, or a mission continue serving those constituencies even when their relationship with the organization has changed. They may continue doing exceptional work simply because exceptional work is part of who they are.

Leaders see the performance and conclude that everything is fine. Worse, they may see someone's continued willingness to accept important responsibilities as evidence that the person feels valued. But those behaviors can tell us much more about the employee than they tell us about the employee's relationship with the organization.

By the time that person finally makes a different choice, the organization may experience the decision as sudden. The employee may experience it as the entirely predictable conclusion of a process that took years.

That's why I think continued performance can be such a dangerous source of reassurance. The warning sign isn't always when our best people stop performing. Sometimes they continue performing exceptionally well while quietly changing something much more consequential: whether they would still choose us if given the choice again.

A better question

I don't think there's a leadership assessment that completely solves this problem. A 360-degree evaluation can help, but collecting feedback isn't the same as believing it. Engagement surveys provide useful information, but averages can create their own comfortable abstractions. An open-door policy matters only if people believe walking through the door will accomplish something.

Perhaps the discipline is simpler, although certainly not easier. Good leaders should remain at least a little uncertain about their own goodness. They should look for information that might contradict the story they tell themselves, distinguish recognition from reciprocity, and pay attention when someone's behavior and words don't quite match. When someone tells them something difficult, they should resist the very human temptation to translate "this person is telling me something difficult" into "this person is difficult."

Most importantly, I think we have to recognize that part of our leadership exists outside of us. We can control our intentions and our behavior. We don't get to control how the relationship is ultimately experienced.

That's why "Am I a good leader?" may not be the most useful question. Neither is "Do I value my people?" Both allow us to evaluate ourselves using information and intentions that the people around us never experience.

A more uncomfortable question may tell us considerably more: What is it like to be led by me?

The harder part is creating the kind of relationship in which people are willing to tell us the truth.