Leaders Think They Know Their People. The Numbers Say Otherwise.

Seniority comes with confidence about organisational knowledge. The longer you have led, the more certain you tend to be that you understand what is actually happening. That confidence is built from real experience. The problem is that it is also built from distance, and distance is very hard to see from the inside.

New research from the Oliver Wyman Forum, drawing on 300,000 respondents across 20 countries over five years, puts a number on that distance. Nearly three-quarters of executives believe they understand the concerns of their frontline people.

The gap is not marginal. It is not a rounding error in how leaders self-assess. It is a 50-plus point chasm between what leaders believe about their own comprehension and what the people they lead actually experience, that gap has been widening. The proportion of employees who name poor leadership as a primary dissatisfaction at work has risen by around 60% since 2023. Nearly half say their organisation's leadership model is outdated.

Coverage of findings like these tends to land in the same place: leaders need to listen more, be more present, invest in visibility. Get on the floor. Hold town halls. Run skip-levels. The advice is not wrong, exactly. The problem is that it treats the gap as a behaviour to fix rather than a structure to examine.

Here is what the structure actually does. The higher you rise in an organisation, the more your understanding of the organisations is secondhand. You stop receiving experience and start receiving reports. The raw texture of what is happening on the ground, the small indignities, the workarounds people have built, the decisions that look sensible from the fourteenth floor and absurd from the front line, that all gets processed, filtered and summarised before it reaches you. By the time information arrives, it has already passed through several layers of people who know, consciously or otherwise, what you want to hear.

This is not a conspiracy. It is how hierarchies work. Information travels upward in ways that protect the people carrying it. Leaders sitting at the top of that process rarely have cause to question whether what they are receiving is accurate. They feel informed. They feel connected. The system has been designed, however unintentionally, to make them feel exactly that.

What compounds the problem is that certainty is the currency of seniority. Leaders are selected, promoted and retained partly on their ability to project confidence. Doubt, and the admission that you do not fully understand your organisation, are rarely rewarded in the same rooms where strategy is set. Leaders become practitioners of professional certainty, and that certainty closes off the very curiosity that might close the gap.

The norm worth examining is not that leaders are overconfident. It is that the systems around leadership actively produce overconfidence, and then mistake it for capability.

What would it look like to lead inside a different norm? One where not knowing was treated as information rather than liability. Where the question "I'm not sure I'm seeing this clearly — what am I missing?" was as credible as the answer. Where leaders held their felt sense of the organisation loosely enough to update it when the data said otherwise.

The research offers one clue worth sitting with. Workers in developing markets trust their leaders measurably more than workers in developed economies do. The gap correlates with leaders who communicate more directly, who maintain more visible connection to the work, and who have not yet inherited the organisational insulation that comes with mature corporate hierarchies.

The advantage is not that those leaders know more. The advantage is that fewer systems are in place to make them feel like they do.

That is the norm worth rewriting. Not listening harder. Trusting your comprehension less.

That's the rewrite.

— Cindy Schwartz

Founder, Executive Excellence Group | Rewriting Leadership Norms