You know the leader you are. Your team knows a different one.

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Hey Spark Family,

I asked a leader recently how his team would describe him.

He answered without hesitating. Approachable. Steady. Someone people can bring anything to.

Then I asked his team.

They used a different word.

Careful.

Not because he was unkind. Because somewhere along the way, they had learned to manage the conversation before they had it. Think about timing. Pre-edit the hard part.

He had no idea.

And here is why that mattered more than it sounds.

He was six months into a restructure.

Every week, the information he needed most was exactly the information his people had quietly decided not to bring him. Not the numbers. The friction. What was breaking. What they had stopped believing would work.

He was navigating the most consequential change of his career on filtered data.

That is the cost of the gap. Not hurt feelings.

Speed.

The Research Is Clear

McKinsey's State of Organizations 2026 surveyed more than 10,000 senior executives across 15 countries.

What the data shows:

➡ 72% of leaders say their organizations are not fully ready for what is coming.

➡ Even among the optimists, only one in three feel prepared.

➡ Leaders who reflect regularly on their own assumptions and impact are nearly 2X more likely to believe their organizations can adapt quickly. 30% versus 17%.

That last number is the one I keep returning to.

The difference was not strategy. Not budget. Not market position.

It was whether the leader had built the habit of looking inward.

And I think the mechanism underneath it is simple.

Leaders who examine how they land discover where people are holding back.

Once people stop holding back, a leader finally sees what is actually happening inside their organization.

Adaptation runs on information. Information runs on whether your people feel safe handing it to you.

McKinsey calls this leading from the inside out. And they put numbers on what it produces:

➡ Employee satisfaction and retention: 56%

➡ Stronger trust: 56%

➡ Better decision-making: 42%

➡ Organizational adaptability: 40%

Self-awareness is not the soft part of leadership.

It is the thing that determines how fast you can move when it counts.

What I'm Seeing In The Field

The leaders with the widest gaps are rarely the ones who do not care.

They are the ones moving fast enough that no one has found the moment to tell them.

I see the leader who believes she is approachable, because her door is always open. Her team experiences every conversation as an interruption of something more important. The door is open. The signal is not.

I see the leader who believes he gives his people autonomy, because he does not micromanage. His team experiences him as unreadable, because no one ever made the criteria explicit. He thinks he stepped back. They think they cannot find him.

I see the leader who knows she holds a high bar and assumes her team respects her for it. They experience a bar that moves. What was excellent last quarter is simply expected this quarter. She sees rigor. They see a ceiling that keeps rising without anyone noticing how far they have already climbed.

None of these leaders are failing.

They are leading the way they believe is working.

But each one is making decisions with a piece of the picture missing. And in a year like this one, that missing piece is usually the one that mattered.

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What We Teach Leaders Inside Spark Brilliance

When I work with leaders on this, I ask one question first.

Not what kind of leader they are trying to be.

When did you last learn something true about how you actually land?

Most leaders cannot remember. Not because they are avoiding it. Because nothing in their week is designed to surface it.

The leaders who close this gap do three things:

1. They ask instead of assume
​ Every leader runs a private assessment of how things are going. Very few test it. Try: "Where am I making your job harder without realizing it?" Ten minutes of that beats a year of watching.

2. They pause before they react
​ Not hours of contemplation. Two minutes before a hard conversation to ask what you are carrying into the room. Five minutes after a meeting that went sideways to ask what your part in it was.

3. They treat the gap as information
​ When the picture does not match, the instinct is to defend. The leaders who grow get curious instead. They ask what the gap is telling them, then change one thing, visibly.

⭐ Leadership Challenge

Before your week gets moving, think of one person who works closely with you.

Then ask yourself:

• What word would they use to describe working with me?
• What are they choosing not to bring me right now, and why?
• When did I last make it genuinely safe for someone to tell me the truth about my impact?

And the hardest one:

If they described me to someone outside this organization, would I recognize the person they were describing?

The leader your team experiences is the only leader who exists to them.

Not the one in your head. Not the one you intend to be.

The one they meet on a Tuesday when they are unsure and watching how you respond.

You will never see that leader on your own.

But you can ask.

And in a year that will ask you to change faster than you planned, that answer is the most useful thing you can get your hands on.

With gratitude,
​Jackie

P.S. – If a name came to mind while reading this, ask them this week. Not in a review. In a hallway, on a walk, over coffee. The best answers rarely arrive in formal settings.✨

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