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Notice which skills you’re most confident about. Those are exactly the ones worth investigating.
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.
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