The higher you go, the more polite the information becomes — and nothing in the promotion letter warns you about it.
Where This Shows Up
The day before the promotion, peers told you when an idea was weak. The day after, the same people report to you, and the same idea is “interesting.” Nobody decided to stop being honest. The incentives changed. You now influence their rating, their raise and their next role, so every comment to you carries a cost it did not carry before. The result is a leader whose view of themselves is built on a shrinking sample: fewer people, saying less, more carefully. Blind spots do not shrink with seniority. They get better protected.
The Practice
The practice is to stop waiting for feedback and start building the conditions for it. Three habits do most of the work:
- Ask a question that cannot be answered with “all good”: what is one thing I did this month that made your work harder?
- When someone takes the risk of answering, say thank you and nothing else. No explanation, no defense, not in that moment.
- Close the loop in public. When a piece of feedback changes what you do, say so, and say whose it was.
The second habit is the one that decides whether there is a next time. People are not testing whether you ask. They are watching what happens to the first person who answers honestly.
The Proof
In my experience, the leaders who are most surprised by an engagement result or a resignation are rarely careless. They are usually well liked, which is exactly why nobody wanted to be the one to tell them.
The Reframe
Self-awareness at the leadership level is not introspection. It is infrastructure: a set of channels you build on purpose, because the natural ones closed the day your title changed.
Next in the series: Day 4 looks at the conversation most leaders postpone — and why being vague is the unkind option.