Leadership Insight
There’s a difference between knowing you lead and understanding how your leadership lands. One is about role. The other is about impact. And the gap between them is where most of the real work of leadership lives.
I came across a quote recently from Dr. Sue Johnson, researcher and founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy, that stopped me in my tracks:
“It’s much harder to see the impact of my responses on you.”
— Dr. Sue Johnson
That line has stuck with me, at work and at home. I can easily explain my intentions. Understanding how I actually land on others takes something different: humility, and a willingness to keep looking.
Intention and Impact Are Not the Same Thing
We often lead with good intentions. We want to support, to challenge, to move things forward. And most of the time, we assume people can see what we meant, even if the delivery was off.
But intention lives inside us. Impact lives in the other person. And no matter how clear our intent, we don’t get to decide how our words and actions are received.
This isn’t a failure of leadership. It’s part of being human. The question is whether we’re curious enough to close the gap, or whether we hide behind our intentions and wonder why things aren’t landing.
Intention What we mean to communicate. Our motivation, our care, our reasoning. Invisible to others unless we make it explicit.
The Gap Where misunderstanding lives. Where trust erodes silently. Where people disengage before you’ve noticed anything is wrong.
Impact How our words, tone, and presence actually land. Shaped by the other person’s history, context, and how safe they feel with us.
The Four Questions Worth Slowing Down For
In leadership, integrity also means being willing to pause and honestly look at the effect of how we show up. These four questions are ones I come back to often, not as a checklist, but as real inquiry:
| The Question | What It’s Really Asking |
|---|---|
| How did my response make this person feel? | Am I tracking the emotional reality of the people I lead, or only the task reality? |
| Did I create safety or tension? | Do people feel able to speak honestly around me, or do they edit themselves to manage my reaction? |
| Did I lead with curiosity or assumption? | Did I enter the conversation genuinely open, or had I already decided what was true before I arrived? |
| Did I make space for their voice, or unintentionally silence it? | Is the dominant voice in the room always mine? What am I missing because of it? |
These aren’t comfortable questions. But discomfort in self-reflection isn’t a warning sign. It usually means you’re close to something worth looking at.
The Space Between Intention and Impact
Real leadership, the kind that builds trust and strengthens relationships over time, grows in the space between our intentions and our impact. That space is where growth happens.
When we ignore that space, we lead on autopilot. We assume our good intentions translate cleanly, that people understand what we meant, that the culture we want is the culture we have. And we wonder why things don’t change.
When we step into that space with curiosity (slowing down, checking in, staying open to what we’re missing), people feel it. They can tell the difference between a leader who is trying to understand their impact and one who is managing their image.
What the space between intention and impact asks of us:
- Slow down. Reactive leadership closes the gap with assumption. Intentional leadership closes it with inquiry.
- Listen more closely. Listen more closely. Not to confirm what you already believe, but to hear what you haven’t understood yet.
- Check in, not check out. Ask how a conversation landed. Follow up. Make it a habit, not a crisis response.
- Own your blind spots with grace. Own your blind spots with grace. Not with shame or defensiveness, but with the openness of someone who is still learning. Because you are.
How We Show Up Shapes Everything Around Us
Our responses (the words we choose, the tone we bring, the body language we don’t notice) either build connection or wear it down. At work. At home. In every relationship in between. How we show up in one place shapes how we show up in all of them.
The leader who practises curiosity in a team meeting brings that home. The leader who owns their mistakes at work without getting defensive does the same with the people they love. That’s not a work skill. That’s character.
At Work Your team reads your mood before they read your memo. How you enter a room, respond to bad news, and react under pressure sets the emotional weather for everyone around you.
In Difficult Conversations The moment someone feels unsafe in a conversation with you (judged, dismissed, or unheard), they stop giving you accurate information. You lose sight of what’s actually happening.
Over Time Trust is built in accumulated small moments. How you responded last Tuesday matters more than the vision you articulated last quarter. People remember how you made them feel.
The Mirror Question
If we want to lead with real integrity, not the performative kind, we have to ask the question that’s easier to avoid:
What is the impact of how I show up?
Not what did I intend. Not am I a good person. The harder, more honest version: what is it actually like to be led by me?
That question doesn’t require perfection. It requires enough humility to sit with an uncomfortable answer without defending it away, and the willingness to use what you find as the next thing to work on.
I’m still learning to close that gap. I suspect I always will be. And I think that’s exactly right.
Want to Understand How You Show Up?
The Leadership Circle Profile™ (LCP) and the EQ-i 360 are thorough tools for understanding the gap between your intention and your impact. They give you real data on how your leadership is experienced by the people around you.
