What Your Employees Know About You That You Don't

There is a particular kind of discomfort that comes from receiving feedback about your leadership from your team. Not because the feedback is wrong. Because it is right — and it describes something you could not see from where you were standing.

This is not a character flaw. It is a structural feature of leadership: the person exercising authority is always, to some degree, in a different position than the people experiencing it. The gap between those two positions is where most leadership development actually happens. Or doesn't.

In our research on psychosocial mentorship and startup leadership, we did something that most studies of this kind don't do: we asked both sides. We interviewed ten early-stage founders about their leadership, and then we surveyed their employees. What we found when we put those two sets of data next to each other was instructive — not because it revealed failure, but because it revealed something more interesting. The founders were better than they thought in some ways, and less present than they realised in others.

What the employees said

The trust was real. Employees described their founders as visionary, resilient, and hardworking — the top three qualities they identified. 95% felt encouraged to seek feedback. More than 90% felt supported in their professional growth. 95% said they were inspired to align their work with the startup's vision. These are numbers that most established companies, with all their processes and HR infrastructure, do not achieve.

This matters. It tells us something important about what early-stage startups can offer that larger organisations frequently cannot: proximity to a founder who genuinely believes in what they are building, and whose belief is contagious. The founders in our study were inspiring people. Their teams knew it.

"Startup employees trust their leaders, feel inspired by them, and are motivated to support them. The area that could benefit from improvement is better communication of the startup's future plans."

But look at the one number that tells a different story. Only 66.7% of employees said they clearly understood their startup's mission for the next five years. A third of the people working inside these ventures — motivated, aligned, inspired — could not articulate where they were going.

This is not a communication technology problem. It is not solved by a better all-hands meeting or a more polished slide deck. It is a leadership depth problem. The founder's vision is vivid and real to them. It has not yet been translated into something that lives equally in the organisation around them.

The Flexibility Paradox

Something else appeared in the data that I find worth examining. When employees were asked about their founder's values and beliefs, responses split sharply. About a third described their founder as stubborn — committed to their values regardless of context. Another 43% described them as flexible. The remaining responses were somewhere in between.

This divergence rarely reflects a factual disagreement about the founder's behaviour. More often it reflects something about how the founder communicates their reasoning. When a leader makes a decision based on deeply held values without making the underlying values visible, some team members experience this as rigidity. When they explain the value at stake, the same decision reads as principled. The action is identical. The leadership is not.

Psychosocial mentoring addresses exactly this: the gap between who a leader believes themselves to be and how they are experienced. It is not about changing values. It is about developing the self-awareness and relational intelligence to make those values legible to others.

The hybrid and freelance complexity

One structural reality our research surfaced deserves attention. Every startup in our study was operating in a hybrid environment, with significant proportions of freelancers, part-time contributors, and distributed team members. This is now the default, not the exception.

In this context, the informal culture-building that once happened naturally — in a shared office, over lunch, in the moments between meetings — simply does not occur. The founder has to be more deliberate, more skilled, and more self-aware than ever before to create the sense of shared mission that their team is looking for. The old leadership toolkit was not designed for this environment. Neither was the old mentoring model.

The question I ask every founder

When I work with founders on leadership development, I often ask a question that sounds simple and is not: what do your team members tell each other about working here? Not in a survey. Not in a performance review. On a Tuesday afternoon, to a friend who asks how the job is going.

The founders who can answer that honestly — not with what they hope their team says, but with what they believe their team actually says — are the ones who are closing the gap between their inner experience of leadership and their team's outer experience of being led. That gap is the work. And it is more important, in the long run, than almost anything else on a founder's agenda.

Research Foundation :This blog draws on empirical research with 10 early-stage startup founders and a survey of 21 employees, exploring the alignment between founder self-perception and employee experience. Co-authored with Ivan Yong Wei Kit, Nanyang Angelz. Referencing Day, Fleenor, Atwater, Sturm & McKee (2014) on leader and leadership development, and Zaech & Baldegger (2017) on entrepreneurial leadership capacity

Closing the gap between how you lead and how your team experiences your leadership is one of the most high-leverage things a founder can work on. If you'd like to explore what that looks like in practice, I work on this directly with early-stage founders.NavigatingTransformation@amfortas.eu                                                                                   — Dr. Eleftheria Egel, NavigatingTransformation