Typically, when we look at our engagement survey data by management level, there is a slope. The senior leaders have the highest, most favorable views of the company, and those views decline with each level until you get to employees. This is what we expect to see. And, we want the senior leaders to have the most favorable view; they are the ones leading the organization. But sometimes, we see a dip in middle management. The middle level having the least favorable view of the organization. When this happens, we have a problem, because it won’t take long for the employees to follow suit.

The strength of any organization is only as deep as the layer below its best leaders. If that layer isn’t being developed, the C-suite isn’t just carrying more than they should. They are one unexpected departure away from finding out exactly how much they were holding up.

It is usually a result of the middle level either not getting the information they need or not being developed to grow in their position. Either way, it breeds disengagement.

The result is predictable. Everything flows upward. Decisions that should be made three levels down end up on the VP’s desk because that’s how the VP maintains control. Projects stall waiting for approvals that only one person can give. The team beneath them stops growing because they are never given the opportunity to think through problems on their own. And the C-suite, which should be focused on strategy and direction, gets pulled back into operational conversations they have no business being in.

Here are some tips for strengthening the middle layer’s ability to execute.

Assess your second tier honestly. Not by title or tenure, but by capability. Can your VPs and directors lead without constant C-suite involvement? Are they developing the people beneath them, or are they the bottleneck? The answers to those questions tell you more about your organizational health than any engagement survey.

Make development a performance expectation. A VP who delivers results but develops no one is only doing half the job. Build the expectation that leaders at every level are responsible for growing their teams’ capabilities, and hold them accountable for it the same way you hold them accountable for their operational goals.

Give the second tier real authority. Leaders who are never trusted with meaningful decisions never develop the judgment to make them. Delegate authority, not just tasks, and resist the instinct to pull decisions back up when the outcome feels uncertain. That uncertainty is where development lives.

Have the honest conversation about succession. Most second-tier leaders who aren’t developing successors haven’t been asked to do so directly. Make the expectation explicit. The cost goes deeper than inefficiency. When a VP hoards decisions and knowledge, they are also quietly eliminating their organization’s ability to function without them. In most cases, this isn’t malicious. It comes from fear. A leader who hasn’t developed anyone beneath them often believes, consciously or not, that being irreplaceable is the same as being valuable. What they are actually doing is creating a single point of failure that puts the entire organization at risk.

Develop your leaders now, before discovering that the layer beneath you was never prepared to lead, and it’s too late. The most expensive leadership transitions are the ones organizations didn’t see coming.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

The post The Cost of a Weak Second Tier appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

When we sat down with the employees, the answer came quickly. Their leader regularly talked about the company’s values. He referenced standards in team meetings. He was vocal about what the culture stood for. And then he showed up late to work almost every day.

It had become a running joke among the team. When someone was heading out the door in the morning, a coworker would call after them, “Don’t be late,” and they would both laugh. Seems harmless, but it was the way the employees processed their frustration over the situation – a leader who expected standards of them but couldn’t hold himself to them. That leader had lost his team’s respect, and he had no idea.

This is not an uncommon finding in our survey work. Culture problems rarely show up uniformly across an entire organization. They show up in pockets, in specific departments or locations, and when we trace them back to their source, they almost always lead to a single leader whose behavior has created a gap between what the organization says it stands for and what employees actually experience every day.

The gap is rarely dramatic. It doesn’t usually start with a leader who openly defies the values. It starts with smaller contradictions. A leader who talks about accountability but never holds anyone to a standard. One who champions collaboration in all-hands meetings but hoards information and operates in silos. One who emphasizes respect but interrupts, dismisses, and speaks over people in their own team meetings. Each of these contradictions sends a message louder than any value statement on a wall ever could.

Culture is not what leaders say. It is what leaders model, and the moment a leader stops living up to the standards they expect of others, those standards begin to lose their meaning for everyone watching. Employees are perceptive. They notice the gap quickly, and once they do, cynicism sets in. The most engaged employees, the ones with the highest standards for themselves and the lowest tolerance for double standards, are usually the first to leave. What remains is a team that has learned to go through the motions, say the right things in the right settings, and quietly disengage from any real investment in the culture they no longer believe in.

The most important thing leaders at every level need to understand is this: you do not get to choose your team’s culture. You get the culture you model, value, and reward. If you are late, lateness becomes acceptable. If you avoid accountability, your team learns that accountability is optional. If you operate in silos while preaching collaboration, your team will collaborate only when someone is watching.

Walking the talk is not a leadership nicety. It is the foundation on which everything else is built. No culture initiative, no values workshop, and no engagement survey follow-through will close the gap between what a leader says and what a leader does. Only the leader’s own behavior can do that.

The employees at that location didn’t need a new culture program. They needed a leader who showed up on time – who walked the talk.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

The post When Your Culture Says One Thing and Your Leaders Do Another appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

Being liked and being trusted are not the same thing. Leaders who confuse the two almost always find out the hard way.

A leader who needs to be liked will soften feedback that needs to be direct. They will avoid the performance conversation that has been overdue for months. They will make exceptions for people they care about that they would never make for others. Over time, the team learns that standards are negotiable, that effort is optional, and that the leader’s warmth is more reliable than their follow-through. The employees who were already inclined to coast take full advantage of a leader who has a high need to be liked. The employees who came to work to contribute and grow start looking for somewhere they’ll be held to a higher standard.

Trust is built differently than likability. Likability comes from making people feel comfortable. Trust comes from making people feel certain. Certain that the leader means what they say. Certain that the standards apply to everyone. Certain that when something isn’t working, the leader will say so directly rather than let it linger. A team that trusts their leader may not always feel comfortable, but they always know where they stand. That clarity is what high performers are actually looking for, and it’s what a likable-but-not-trusted leader can never quite provide.

The shift happens when a leader begins enforcing standards consistently. It is rarely comfortable at first. The employees who had been taking advantage of the leader’s reluctance to hold the line will push back. Some will complain. Some will test whether the new standard is real or temporary. But the top performers, the ones the organization most needs to keep, will notice. And what they notice is that the leader finally respects the work enough to protect it.

How to lead from trust, not from likability.

Separate care from comfort. Genuinely caring about your people and keeping them comfortable are not the same thing. The most caring thing a leader can do is give honest feedback, hold the line on standards, and invest in people’s growth even when that investment is uncomfortable. Care shows up in clarity, not in leniency.

Hold the standard for everyone. The fastest way to lose the trust of your best people is to make exceptions for your least accountable. When standards apply selectively, the message is clear: effort doesn’t matter here. Consistent accountability is not harshness. It is fairness.

Deliver feedback early and often. Leaders who avoid difficult feedback are not protecting their relationships. They are eroding them. When feedback is delayed or softened beyond recognition, it is usually not even heard, or respected. Direct, timely feedback signals that the leader respects the person enough to tell them the truth.

Let respect be the goal, not approval. Leaders who need approval will always struggle with accountability because accountability risks disapproval. Shifting the internal measure from “do they like me” to “do they respect me” changes what decisions feel possible. Respect is earned through consistency, honesty, and follow-through. Approval is earned through agreement, and it disappears the moment you stop giving people what they want.

Being liked is not a leadership flaw. The problem is when it becomes the goal. Leaders who need their team’s approval to feel effective will always find a reason to avoid the conversation that needs to happen.

Trust outlasts likability every time, and is what actually moves teams forward.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

The post The Difference Between Being Liked and Being Trusted appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

When I hear that pattern, I know exactly where we are.

Deflection is one of the most common behaviors we encounter in executive coaching. It isn’t always conscious. Many leaders who deflect responsibility genuinely believe the story they’re telling. What they haven’t examined is their own role in creating or maintaining the conditions around them, and more importantly, what they’re going to do about it, regardless of who caused them.

In our experience, coaching has roughly a 50 percent success rate, and that rate has almost nothing to do with the coach or the process. It has everything to do with how receptive the leader is to examining their own role honestly. Leaders who resist that examination don’t just limit their own growth. They limit everyone around them. A team led by someone who deflects responsibility learns quickly that accountability flows downward but not upward. Trust erodes.  Whether a leader has the courage to own their outcomes determines their success as well as that of their team.

There are typically three reasons leaders resist coaching. Some deflect out of arrogance, a genuine belief that the problem lies with everyone else. Others deflect out of fear of what they might discover if they look honestly at themselves. And some deflect out of distrust, a suspicion that coaching has been arranged not to develop them but to build a case against them. Each requires a different conversation, but all three lead to the same place if left unaddressed.

How to move a resistant leader forward.

Turn the conversation toward response, not fault. The moment a leader begins attributing everything to external factors, redirect to what they control. The question is never whether the situation is fair. The question is what they are going to do about it.

Connect ownership to reputation. Leaders who resist feedback often respond when the stakes become personal. How a leader handles adversity, including adversity they didn’t create, is visible to everyone above and below them. That visibility shapes how they are seen, developed, and ultimately advanced.

Name the pattern directly. Resistant leaders rarely hear honest feedback from anyone in their organization. Part of the coaching relationship is creating the conditions where direct feedback can land. That requires trust, but it also requires the courage to say what others won’t.

Recognize the limits of the process. Not every leader who enters coaching is ready to change. When a leader continues to deflect after repeated sessions, the most honest thing a coach or a senior leader can do is name that reality. Continuing to invest in someone who has no intention of examining themselves or changing is going to stagnate themselves and their team.

Coaching works when leaders are willing to do the hardest part: looking at themselves honestly and deciding that their response to the situation matters more than who caused it. That willingness cannot be manufactured from the outside. No matter how much you try, you can’t motivate someone to change.

The leaders who come out the other side of a difficult coaching engagement stronger are almost never the ones who arrived ready to agree with everything. They were the ones who were eventually willing to stop deflecting and start owning, stop explaining why it wasn’t their fault, and start asking what they were going to do about it anyway.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

The post The Leader Who Refuses to Be Coached appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

Then came a 360-degree assessment. The results were not what he expected. His team wasn’t silent because they agreed. They were silent because they had learned that disagreement wasn’t welcome. One of his senior leaders put it plainly: “I stopped offering input because every time I did, he explained why I was wrong. Eventually, it was easier to stay quiet.” The CEO was stunned. He thought he was leading. He was, in fact, eroding the very thing that makes leadership possible.

Trust is the most valuable and fragile currency a leader has. When it’s high, communication is efficient, decisions move quickly, people take ownership, and leaders hear the truth early when they can still do something about it. When trust is low, information gets filtered, meetings become a performance, candor disappears, and silence replaces honesty. Leaders often assume trust is present until results start to suffer. By then, the damage is usually well underway.

Here is the part that catches most executives off guard. Research from the Harvard Business Review found that 58 percent of workers say they trust a complete stranger more than their own boss. More than half. That is not just a discouraging statistic. It is a leadership crisis hiding in plain sight.

So how does trust erode, and more importantly, what does it take to earn it back?

Inconsistency. Not through dramatic failures, but through the quiet drift between what they say and what they do. Shifting standards. Uneven enforcement. Promises that slip without acknowledgment. People forgive mistakes. What they struggle to forgive is unpredictability. When employees can’t read what their leader will value today versus tomorrow, they stop relying on them. They start managing around them instead.

Withheld information. Leaders often justify this as timing — they’re waiting until they have the full picture, until the deal is closed, until the moment is right. What they don’t realize is that employees aren’t waiting with them. They’re filling the vacuum with assumptions, rumors, and growing suspicion.

Not trusting employees. When leaders micromanage, require approval for minor decisions, or withhold authority without explanation, they send an unmistakable signal. And people receive it. They stop taking initiative. They stop making decisions. They stop caring. The organization that the leader is trying to protect begins to quietly hollow out.

So what does rebuilding trust actually require? It starts with a willingness to acknowledge the gap. Not with a speech, but with changed behavior. Apologies without behavior change accomplish nothing. Trust is rebuilt when people see different patterns, not different words.

That means doing what you say you are going to do, consistently, even in the small things. It means communicating sooner than is comfortable, sharing what you know when you know it rather than waiting for a perfect moment that rarely arrives. It means explaining the why behind decisions, not just announcing the what. And it means being honest when it costs you something — taking responsibility publicly, giving credit where it belongs, and admitting when you were wrong.

None of that is complicated. But it requires the kind of discipline that leaders under pressure tend to abandon first.

The CEO in our opening story did the work. He didn’t try to convince his team to trust him. He simply changed what they watched him do. Over time, people started speaking up again. Input returned. The meetings that had become exercises in performance became actual conversations. Trust, which had eroded quietly, rebuilt the same way — one consistent action at a time.

Leadership without trust is just authority. And authority without trust doesn’t scale. The leaders who understand this don’t treat trust as a cultural aspiration. They treat it as a daily discipline.

In our book, Leadership is Tough, Chapter 5 goes deeper into the specific behaviors that build and destroy trust, how to repair it when it’s broken, and what communication has to do with all of it. If trust is a challenge in your organization, that chapter will give you a framework for addressing it directly.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

The post Why Leaders Lose Trust — and How to Earn It Back appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

His accounting department was a hub of the organization. Everything flowed through it. And while the rest of the business was pressing forward, his department was doing much of its work manually, including entering data into one system and then updating the supply chain separately. When we asked whether there was software that could integrate those processes and eliminate the duplication, his answer came quickly. “We tried that, and it didn’t work.” We asked when that was. “About eight years ago,” he said.

We asked whether it was possible that a solution existed now that didn’t exist then. He shifted in his seat. You could see the discomfort land on him before he had time to respond.

This leader wasn’t obstructionist. He wasn’t trying to hold anyone back. He was operating from a vision of stability that had quietly become a ceiling, not just for himself but for every person on his team and every department that depended on his.

This is a common and most costly pattern we see in organizations. A leader who has been in place for a long time, who genuinely cares about their work, and who has come to see comfort as competence. The problem is that in today’s workplace, standing still isn’t neutral. It’s falling behind. When a department doesn’t grow, innovate, or adapt, it doesn’t just stagnate in isolation. It creates drag for everyone around them. Technology advances and customer expectations continue to shift. The organization tries to move forward, and somewhere in the middle, there’s a team still doing things the way they were done eight years ago because nobody pushed them to do otherwise.

The phrases are always recognizable. “We tried that and it didn’t work.” “We’ve never done it that way before.” “If it isn’t broken, why fix it?” These aren’t statements of confidence. They’re statements of fear. In our experience, most leaders who resist change aren’t resisting change for its own sake. They’re protecting themselves from the discomfort of not knowing, of being the person in the room who doesn’t have all the answers. Confidence and change are more connected than most leaders realize. When one is missing, the other rarely shows up.

The director we coached never made the shift. He retired, and the organization moved forward without him. The department he had built, capable people with years of experience, began innovating almost immediately once the ceiling was gone. That detail should give every leader pause. The question isn’t whether change is coming. It is. The question is whether you’ll lead it or wait to be replaced by someone who will.

How to lead from the front, not from the past.

Make learning a part of how performance is measured. If growth and skill development aren’t reflected in how you evaluate your team, comfort becomes the default standard. Build innovation and continuous learning into performance reviews and into your department’s culture. What gets measured gets taken seriously.

Start with a small win. Leaders who lack confidence around change often need proof before they’ll commit. Find a low-stakes opportunity to try something new, something with a manageable downside and a visible upside. One successful change builds the momentum, and the internal narrative grows and craves even more.

Work on the confidence beneath the resistance. Fear of the unknown is often the real driver of change resistance, not stubbornness. A mentor, a coach, or even honest self-reflection can help a leader identify where their hesitation is coming from and begin to separate legitimate caution from reflexive avoidance.

Map the worst-case scenario. Most leaders who resist change have never fully examined what they’re actually afraid of. When you walk through the realistic worst case, it’s almost always closer to the current situation than the leader imagined. That exercise alone shifts perspective and lowers the emotional stakes of trying something new.

List the pros and cons. It sounds simple because it is, and it works. When leaders write out what they stand to gain versus what they stand to lose, the pros almost always outweigh the cons. Seeing it on paper changes the conversation from one about risk to one about missed opportunity.

The most dangerous leaders in any organization are not the ones who make bold moves that sometimes fail. They are the ones who stopped moving years ago and built a culture around staying still. Comfortable feels safe. But in a world that isn’t standing still, comfortable is just another word for falling behind.

Change or get passed over. The organizations that are thriving have already made that choice.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

The post Why Comfortable Is not a good thing in Leadership appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

This pattern shows up more often than most organizations want to admit. A leader who genuinely cares about results crosses a line they didn’t know existed, and suddenly accountability becomes control. The two feel similar from the outside, but they look completely different, and they produce completely different outcomes.

Accountability is holding people to a goal. Micromanagement is dictating every step they take along the way. The distinction matters because one builds a capable team and the other builds a dependent one. When leaders insert themselves into every decision point, employees stop thinking through problems on their own and end up deferring. Over time, they stop developing the judgment they need to perform independently, and the leader becomes the reason nothing ever gets done on time.

The irony is that most micromanagers don’t think of themselves that way. They think they’re being thorough. They think they’re maintaining standards. They think their involvement is what’s keeping the quality up. In reality, their involvement is what’s keeping everything else down and bottlenecked. Projects stack up waiting for approvals that only the leader can give. Teams grow frustrated, and the strongest people on it start looking for somewhere they’re trusted to actually do their jobs.

Accountability without micromanagement looks different. It starts with clarity: the employee knows the goal, understands what success looks like, and has the resources to get there. Then the leader steps back, but doesn’t disappear either. Checking in on progress and understanding, not on method. That is a key difference. Be available when questions arise, but don’t hover over every step waiting to redirect. Trusts employees to figure out the path, because that is part of how people grow. As we’ve written about in our work on delegation [link to The Delegation Trap], the goal isn’t to hand off the task. It’s to hand off the thinking.

What the leader we coached eventually came to understand is that their presence in every decision wasn’t protecting the outcome. It was preventing their team from developing the capability to produce better outcomes on their own. Once this leader shifted her focus from controlling the process to clarifying the goal and staying available for support, things started moving, and her team started owning results the way she had intended.

What this looks like in practice.

Set the goal, not the method. Be specific about what success looks like and when it’s due. Then let the employee determine how to get there. Resist the urge to outline every step. If they need guidance on approach, let them ask for it first.

Check in on understanding, not activity. Early in a new assignment, a check-in should confirm that the employee understands the goal and has what they need. It shouldn’t be a progress report on every task completed. There’s a difference between making sure someone is set up to succeed and monitoring their every move.

Be available without being ever-present. Let your team know you’re accessible when they hit a real obstacle. That’s different from expecting them to run every decision by you. Availability is a resource. Constant presence is a constraint.

Watch what you’re actually measuring. If you’re tracking how people spend their time more than whether they’re hitting their goals, that’s a signal. Accountability lives in outcomes. Micromanagement lives in activity.

The leader who came to us was not a bad leader. She was a thorough one who hadn’t yet learned the difference between being involved and being supportive. Learning that difference, being open to feedback, and understanding what accountability should look like, helped the pieces start fall into place.

Accountability is not about being everywhere. It’s about making sure the right things happen, and then trusting your people to make them happen.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

The post Accountability Without Micromanagement appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

What the assessment revealed wasn’t in any of the survey results. A senior leader was not held accountable, and the impact of that failure was quietly and steadily filtering down through the organization. People were watching. They were drawing conclusions about what the culture actually valued versus what it claimed to value. And the ones with the most options, the senior performers, the people the organization could least afford to lose, were leaving. By the time we got there, the turnover among senior leaders had already done significant damage. The metrics had missed it entirely.

This is the gap that lies between measurement and understanding. It is not that the data was wrong. It is that the data was incomplete, and the assumption that a satisfactory score meant a healthy culture had allowed a serious problem to go unexamined for too long.

Engagement scores go up, and the assumption is that engagement improved. Turnover drops, and the assumption is that retention is working. Survey results come back acceptable, and the assumption is that nothing urgent needs attention. It comes back to you get what you measure. Metrics rarely tell you why, and they almost never tell you what is building underneath the surface that hasn’t shown up in the numbers yet.

The organizations we see struggle most with this are not the ones ignoring their data. They are the ones who over-rely on it and put a lot of faith in the instrument. They have confused measuring engagement with building it. As we have written before [link to When Engagement Surveys Fail], the survey is only as valuable as what you do with the results. But there is a step before that one that matters just as much: making sure you are asking the right questions in the first place, and staying curious enough to look beyond the score when something feels off.

The HR vice president in our story did exactly that. She didn’t dismiss the data, but she didn’t stop there either. She used it as a starting point rather than a final verdict, and that distinction made all the difference.

Metrics are most useful when leaders treat them as the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one. A number that confirms something is wrong without telling you what or why is an invitation to dig deeper, not a reason to close the file. The leaders who build genuinely healthy cultures are the ones who stay curious after the data comes in, who are willing to ask harder questions, and who understand that the most important things happening inside an organization often don’t show up on a dashboard.

How to use your metrics as a starting point, not a finish line.

Trust your instincts when they conflict with your data. If your scores look acceptable but something feels off, that feeling is worth taking seriously. In our experience, leaders and HR professionals who sense a disconnect between the data and the reality are usually right. The metric may not be capturing what matters most. A deeper assessment, through one-on-one conversations, focus groups, or a more comprehensive survey, often surfaces the real issue.

Look for what the metric can’t measure. Engagement scores capture sentiment at a point in time. They don’t capture the quality of accountability, the health of senior-level relationships, or the extent to which people believe the culture lives up to its stated values. Build in regular opportunities to gather qualitative insight alongside your quantitative data. The combination is far more useful than either one alone.

Follow the turnover, especially at the senior level. When high performers and senior leaders leave, they rarely do so without a reason. Exit interviews capture some of it, but not all. If you are seeing patterns in who is leaving, treat them as a signal worth investigating before the next departure.

Hold the standard at every level. The accountability issue in our opening story wasn’t invisible. People inside the organization knew it was happening. What they were watching for was whether leadership would address it. When a senior leader is allowed to operate below the standard, the message it sends travels fast and travels far. As we have explored in our work on trust [link to Trust Is Built Through Patterns Not Moments], culture is defined not by what leaders say they value, but by what they are willing to tolerate.

The HR vice president who trusted her instincts over her dashboard did her organization a significant service. She understood something that the most effective leaders we work with have learned over time: the number is not the answer. It is the question.

What your metrics are telling you matters. What they are not telling you matters more.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

The post What Gets Measured Gets Managed, But Not Always Improved appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

We asked him to walk us through exactly what he had communicated. He did. And the problem became clear almost immediately. He had told the employee what the outcome needed to look like, but not how to get there. For him, that was enough. He was a results-oriented leader who didn’t need a roadmap, just a destination. But the employee sitting across from him was wired differently. She needed context, steps, and a clearer sense of the path before she could move forward with confidence. Neither of them was wrong. They just spoke different languages, and nobody had noticed.

This is a common communication failure we see in our work with leaders. It rarely shows up as a dramatic breakdown. It shows up quietly, as missed expectations, repeated instructions, and a growing sense of frustration on both sides. The leader believes they have been clear. The employee doesn’t have what they need to succeed. And over time, the leader starts to draw the wrong conclusion about the employee’s capability.

The root cause is almost always the same. Leaders tend to communicate the way they prefer to receive information. If they process best with a quick summary and a clear outcome, that is how they deliver direction. If they think in systems and sequences, their instructions reflect that. The style that feels natural to them becomes the default for everyone around them, regardless of whether it actually works. When the message doesn’t land, the response is usually to repeat it, louder or more often, in exactly the same way. What they rarely stop to ask is whether the issue is the message or the method.

The reality is that people absorb information very differently, and understanding those differences is one of the most practical things a leader can develop. In our work, we typically see four styles. 1. Drivers  – they want the bottom line. They process quickly, don’t need details, and prefer direct, efficient communication. 2. Analytical – they are the opposite. They need information, context, and time to process before they can move forward confidently. 3. Supporters – they are relationship-oriented and respond better when communication feels personal, patient, and collaborative rather than transactional. 4. Harmonizers – they are team-focused and creative, and they engage best when they can see how their work connects to the bigger picture. Most people lean toward one of these styles but can borrow from the others when needed, and a leader who can read those preferences and adjust accordingly will get dramatically different results than one who doesn’t.

The good news is that this is a learnable skill, and it starts with curiosity rather than diagnosis.

How to close the gap.

Ask before you assume. When an employee isn’t delivering what you expected, resist the instinct to repeat yourself or escalate. Instead, ask what information they need or are missing. Most people will tell you exactly what they need if you give them the opening.

Match the detail to the person. A person who is a fast pasted drivers need outcomes and space to get there, not the direction on how to get there. While a more process-oriented person will need the information ahead of time to review before they can have a conversation about it. A more relationship-focused person will need more connection, patience, and relevance. Adjusting your approach doesn’t mean lowering your standards. It means delivering the same expectations in a way the other person can actually use.

Watch for the repeat cycle. If you find yourself giving the same direction more than once, that is a signal worth paying attention to. The instinct is to assume the employee isn’t listening or doesn’t get it. The more useful question is whether they are hearing it in a way that makes sense to them.

Check for understanding, not just agreement. A nod in a meeting is not confirmation that someone has what they need. Ask employees to reflect on their understanding of the goal and the path to get there. The gaps that surface in that conversation are far cheaper to address in the moment than after the work comes back wrong.

The employee in our opening story wasn’t a low performer. She was a capable person who had been set up to struggle by a communication mismatch neither she nor her leader fully understood. Once he adjusted how he delivered direction, her work changed. So did his assessment of her potential.

Communication mistakes can be expensive as a leader, and it isn’t that they are saying the wrong thing. It’s assuming that the way they say it is the way everyone else receives it.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

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In our survey work, we consistently see the same drivers of disengagement surface across industries and organization sizes. Employees feel uninformed, unrecognized, stagnant, or disconnected from their leader. Each of these is addressable, and addressing them does not require a new program or a significant budget. It requires consistent, intentional leadership habits applied over time. Below are four strategies that make a measurable difference.

Communication is the foundation on which everything else is built. In times of high change, employees crave communication at a much higher rate than leaders typically realize, and what counts as great change has shifted considerably. For many organizations, constant change has simply become the new normal. That means the baseline level of communication leaders need to provide has permanently increased. The goal is not to overwhelm people with information but to ensure employees are consistently informed about goals, challenges, and anything that directly affects their work. When employees know where to find information and can predict when it will come, the rumor mill quiets and trust builds. A regular team meeting, a brief weekly update, or a consistent check-in rhythm costs very little and pays significant dividends in stability and morale.

Recognition is the counterpart to communication and is just as important. One of the most common things we hear from employees in our surveys is that they only know how they are doing when their annual review arrives. That is a problem. By the time a review comes around, it is too late for feedback to change anything, and employees who have been operating in the dark for months are rarely engaged or confident. The goal is to operate on a no surprises basis, meaning employees should have a clear, and ongoing sense of how they are performing long before any formal review. Specific, timely recognition, whether a brief verbal acknowledgment, a note after a strong meeting, or a public callout in front of the team, tells people their effort is seen and valued. That signal is more powerful than most leaders realize.

Investing in professional development is the third lever, and it is one that directly addresses one of the top drivers of voluntary turnover. The most engaged employees consistently cite development opportunities as among the most important things they look for in a role. When leaders invest in their people’s growth, whether through formal training, stretch assignments, or the simple act of delegating meaningful work, they signal that employees’ futures matter to the organization. Delegation, in particular, is worth highlighting here because it serves two purposes simultaneously. It develops the employee’s skills and confidence while freeing the leader to focus on more strategic work. That is a return on investment that few other leadership behaviors can match.

The fourth strategy is connection, and it is the one most likely to be sacrificed when a leader is under pressure. Employees want to work for someone who genuinely cares about them as people, not just as contributors. Building that kind of relationship does not require lengthy conversations or elaborate gestures. It requires the habit of checking in, asking how someone is doing, and following through on what you hear. Leaders who make this a consistent practice find that their teams offer more discretionary effort, raise concerns earlier, and stay longer. The relationship between an employee and their immediate manager remains one of the strongest predictors of engagement and retention we measure, and it is shaped almost entirely by small, repeated moments of genuine attention.

Consistency is what ties all four of these strategies together. Any one of them, applied once, will produce limited results. Applied regularly, over weeks and months, they compound into something much more significant: a team that trusts its leader, believes in its work, and chooses to bring its best every day. The stronger that foundation, the more your team is capable of, and the more you are capable of together.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

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