Most leaders were promoted for the wrong skills. Now what?

‍Most leaders were promoted for the wrong reasons, and nobody's said it yet.

Many senior leaders were promoted for their financial, technical, or scientific skills, not their ability to motivate people. That gap rarely gets named. In my work, I meet leaders regularly who confess to lacking confidence in front of their teams, who feel unsure how to manage change, or who don't know what to say when they have to deliver difficult news.

The underrated fix? Listening. Not every moment needs an answer. Sometimes what people actually need is for the leader to stay in the room long enough to hear what's being said, rather than move straight to what comes next.

What concerns me is that this is getting harder to shift. As AI takes on more of the decision-making, personal accountability gets diluted further. When something goes wrong, it becomes easier to point at a system. Leaders set the standard for everyone watching. If that standard keeps dropping, the cost isn't just operational. It's cultural.

"Surveys don't work" is almost always a process failure, not a format one.

I hear this constantly, and I push back on it every time. The survey isn't the problem. The problem is what happens next, which is usually nothing visible. Employees stop believing their feedback matters. When the same questions arrive a year later with nothing changed, they disengage entirely.

Shorter pulse surveys help. But the real goal is always-on feedback: an environment where people can raise things at any time, with genuine faith they'll be heard. What makes it work is simple and hard in equal measure: managers who can answer real questions, and communication that closes the loop rather than opening another one.

And the same logic applies to employer branding. Window-dressing is not enough. If your external EVP doesn't match the actual experience, new joiners notice within months and leave.

The invisible force shaping how people show up:

Shared passion for the work. A culture grounded in values people actually feel. Being empowered, recognised, and supported by your line manager. These are the forces that shape behaviour every day, and they rarely get measured with enough precision.

There's one more that almost never appears on the measurement dashboard: authenticity.

Leadership that matches stated values. The ability to be yourself at work. It sounds intangible. The data, when you look for it properly, is anything but.

The career moment that changed how I see people and power:

It wasn't one moment. It was a gradual realisation, earlier in my career, that some leaders put a great deal of effort into crafting a professional persona, when a degree of authenticity and empathy would make them far more effective. Some leaders have natural people skills. For others, those skills can be trained. But some, if I'm honest, should never be managing people at all.

The one conversation every leader should start this week:

Ask your employees: what's working? What's not? And what's the most important thing we should be focusing on right now, and why? Direct, respectful, and for most organisations, the answers will be more useful than another round of formal engagement data.

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