Grace (not her real name. not pictured) had been in the role for two years, and by every internal measure she could point to, it was going well. The team was performing, the board presentations had landed, and the numbers were moving in the right direction. She had built what she believed was a strong relationship with the chair and felt in a way that is hard to articulate but easy to recognise, like she was getting it right.
Then came the governance review. A scheduled, routine review of the kind that most organisations conduct every few years with external consultants, a series of structured conversations, and a report.
The report said several things that were accurate and several things that were not, but the thing she could not stop returning to was one sentence in the executive summary. A description of her leadership style that bore almost no relationship to how she had understood herself to be operating.
Grace was described as decisive to the point of being difficult to challenge. This puzzled her as she had believed she was creating an environment where challenge was welcome. She had said so, explicitly and often, and she had meant it.
The gap between what she had intended and what had landed had been accumulating quietly for two years. The review had not created this, it just made it visible.
There is a structural problem that sits beneath most executive reputation challenges, and it is rarely the one that gets named when the challenge arrives.
It is often framed as a communications failure. The wrong message, medium, timing, or the wrong tone. These are real, and they matter, but they are downstream of something more substantial, which is the gap between how a leader understands themselves to be operating and how it is actually being experienced by the people around them.
This is something misunderstood by those in senior leadership itself.
Real talk. When you reach a certain level of authority, the feedback you receive becomes systematically unreliable. The people around you have too much at stake to be consistently honest. For too many, the board sees a curated version of your operation. Direct reports manage upward, and peers are navigating their own agendas. The informal intelligence that tells most people how they are landing dries up the more senior you become. That casual correction, the unguarded reaction, or the thing said in the corridor that never makes it to the meeting. You know the drill.
You're receiving less candid feedback because the structure of your role makes it progressively more expensive for the people who would otherwise provide it.
This is the condition I think of as the reputation blindspot and it has three typical expressions.
The first is the narrative gap. The distance between the story a leader tells about their own leadership and the story that circulates without them. Both are partial, and neither is wrong, but they are not the same story, and in high-stakes moments, it is the circulating story, not the curated one, that determines the outcome.
The second is the consistency gap. The distance between how a leader operates in the rooms they care about and how they operate in the rooms they don’t. Most senior leaders are excellent in the performance moments: the board presentation, the all-hands, the investor meeting. The reputation is built in other moments. The hallway conversation that was overheard, the email sent at eleven at night that came across differently than intended, or heaven forfend the decision made during a difficult week that contradicted everything the town hall had said the previous month.
Reputation is not what happens at the peak moments but the average of all the other ones.
The third is the distance gap . The space between a leader’s understanding of their own culture and what that culture is actually like to inhabit. This is the most dangerous of the three because it is the hardest to see from inside. A CEO can sincerely believe they have built a culture of psychological safety, and yet the people who work in that culture may be experiencing something quite different. When scrutiny arrives whether regulatory, reputational, or public, it is the experienced culture that tells the story.
None of these gaps is permanent. They are closeable. They cannot be closed through a communications strategy alone, because they are decision problems.
The leader who closes the narrative gap does so not by refining their messaging but by building a more consistent pattern of decisions that the messaging is actually describing. The leader who closes the consistency gap does so not by performing better in the rooms that matter but by raising the standard in the rooms they had stopped paying attention to. The leader who closes the distance gap does so not by commissioning a culture survey but by finding a way to access information about their own organisation that is currently filtering out.
This is reputation intelligence. Not the blase management of reality of how you appear, but the active, disciplined understanding of the distance between how you intend to lead and how that leadership is actually landing.
The leaders I work with who come through this kind of scrutiny with their standing intact are not better at managing their reputation in the moment. They built something with enough coherence and alignment between what they said and what they did, between the culture they described and the one people experienced so that when scrutiny arrived, it found substance rather than construction. Bloody hard work and you are not going to win over everyone, but a big chance of winning over the majority, which is what matters.
The gap between how you think you are read and how you are actually read is not inevitable and closing it requires a different kind of work than most executives have been told to do.
That is what this week’s content is about.
On Thursday I will share a pattern I have seen more times than I would like focusing ona specific moment when the gap becomes expensive.
On Friday, for paid subscribers, a working framework for auditing your own reputation across four dimensions, with questions you can take into your next leadership team conversation.
Thanks for reading, and hope this continues to be helpful
Until next time
Stay Fabulous
Dave
In my book, The BRAVE Leader, I address this directly, specifically the Ethics dimension, which is about making the gap between your stated values and your actual decisions visible before someone else does. Get your copy here. If you want to work through the reputation question with me directly, start a conversation here.
One question, very simple, that is useful here, is: what if they are right? If we can accept that as a valid question to ask when we look for and receive less than positive feedback then it can help. Cheers Dave.