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Leadership Insights
Our 2025 Professional Development Survey asked respondents to rate leadership competence across multiple skill areas: their own, their unit leaders’, and those of their senior leaders. The results followed a predictable pattern: people rated themselves highest, their direct supervisors somewhat lower, and senior leadership lower still.
That part isn’t surprising. What’s worth paying attention to is which competencies showed the largest gaps.
The three areas where respondents most sharply downgraded senior leaders relative to themselves: self-awareness, fostering collaboration, and giving constructive feedback.
Notice anything about that list? Those are precisely the skills that are hardest to accurately self-assess. You don’t know what you don’t know about your own blind spots. You can’t fully see how your collaboration style lands on the other side of the table. You may feel like you give good feedback without actually having a clear picture of how it’s received.
The skills where people are most confident their leaders are falling short happen to be the skills where confident self-assessment is least reliable. That’s not a coincidence—it’s a pattern worth examining honestly.
The Self-Awareness Trap
Self-awareness is almost universally rated as a leadership strength. Across decades of organizational research, the overwhelming majority of people describe themselves as more self-aware than average, a statistical impossibility that tells you something important about how the skill works.
Real self-awareness isn’t a feeling of knowing yourself well. It’s an active, ongoing practice of seeking information about how you’re actually landing, and then doing something with it. It requires external input—from colleagues, from direct reports, from people who will tell you things you didn’t ask to hear—because the internal experience of being self-aware and the external reality of being self-aware are two very different things.
The same logic applies to fostering collaboration. Most leaders believe they create inclusive, participatory environments. However, fewer regularly check on whether the people in those environments experience them that way.
What This Means for Your Own Development
The survey finding about senior leaders may be accurate. It may also partly be a projection of the same bias that makes self-awareness so difficult to assess in the first place. Probably it’s some of both.
Either way, the leadership development question it raises isn’t really about senior leaders. It’s about you.
Where are you most confident in your own competence? What feedback mechanisms do you actually have in place to verify that confidence? Who in your life will tell you when your collaboration style is shutting people out rather than drawing them in, or when your feedback is landing harder than you intend?
The Five Paths to Leadership® framework is useful here specifically because it doesn’t ask you to rate yourself. It identifies patterns from how you actually tend to respond and then maps the shadow side (the version of your strengths that surfaces when you’re under pressure or operating on autopilot). Most leaders find something surprising in that picture. That surprise is the beginning of actual self-awareness, not the confident sense that you already have it.
Pause & Reflect
Pick one of the three competencies from the survey: self-awareness, fostering collaboration, or giving constructive feedback. Now ask yourself: What’s your actual evidence that you’re doing this well? Not your sense of it, but concrete feedback from people who would know. If you can’t name it readily, that’s useful information.
Pro Tip: In your Academic Impressions account, try this prompt in Sophia: “I want to get more honest feedback about [self-awareness / how I collaborate / how my feedback lands]. Help me design a simple way to invite that input from my team without making it feel like a formal evaluation.”
Want to see the full data? Read the complete findings in the 2025 Academic Impressions Professional Development Survey.