Quite often, I’ll meet with a business leader who’s adamant they don’t have a culture issue. They know their people. They’re accessible. They care about doing the right thing. But when I ask how they know what work feels like for their employees, they’ve never measured it.
Then we’ll talk about turnover. “Okay, so half your employees left last year. What are you doing to understand why?” Often, the answer is some version of that’s just how it is here. It’s the skills shortage. It’s a tough labour market. And the conversation moves on, as though losing that many people is a condition of doing business rather than something worth investigating.
If unplanned maintenance was disrupting production, you wouldn’t shrug and accept it. You’d pull the data you had, look for patterns, investigate the causes and, if you needed to, bring in someone with specialist knowledge. So why don’t we give people issues the same attention?
That difference in response is interesting. Leaders who would never make an operational decision without looking at the evidence can be remarkably certain about their culture without asking employees what they’re experiencing.
Some of that certainty comes with the role. To own a business or lead one, you need enough belief in your judgement to make difficult calls and keep showing up, even when people disagree with you. But the confidence that helps you lead can also make you less likely to question whether your people are experiencing the workplace you think you’ve created.
But that same confidence can create a blind spot. You can become so sure of the workplace you’re building that you miss the workplace your people are actually experiencing.
Gallup research released in 2025 found senior leaders consistently rated their own leadership between 16 and 29 percentage points higher than their direct reports rated them across every category surveyed.
That’s not a minor difference. It’s a significant gap between the leadership leaders believe they’re providing and the leadership employees experience in their everyday work.
And that space between the two matters, because employee experience influences how people communicate, contribute, make decisions, solve problems and choose whether to stay.
Part of the problem is that leaders and employees can work for the same organisation while having very different working days.
Your conversations might centre on revenue, profit, forecasts, strategy, planning and KPIs. Your employees’ conversations might centre on how a supervisor spoke to them, equipment that still doesn’t work properly, or coming to work exhausted because they’re doing the work of two people.
There’s no fresh milk in the fridge again. More time is wasted trying to work out what needs to be done, than actually doing the job. The office air conditioning keeps breaking down in the height of summer.
Compared with the decisions on a leader’s desk, those things can seem unimportant. But for someone dealing with them every shift, they’re part of what work feels like. And when they raise the same issue repeatedly without anything changing, the issue becomes bigger than the milk or the air conditioning. They start to wonder whether anyone is listening.
These frustrations accumulate alongside poor leadership and the moments when stated values don’t match what people see happening around them. They chip away at engagement, trust and people’s willingness to speak up. Some employees leave. Others stay, but are tired of trying to make things better.
That’s why I’m cautious when someone tells me they don’t have a culture issue. They may be right. But I want to know what they’ve used to reach that conclusion. Have they asked people in a way that lets them answer honestly? Looked at why employees leave? Paid attention to what keeps coming up in complaints, absenteeism or exit conversations? Measured the experience of work rather than relying on what leaders believe they’ve created?
You may be having a very good experience of your workplace. Your people may be having a different one. If you’d investigate a persistent operational problem, it’s worth asking why you’d accept a persistent people problem without doing the same.
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