In May 2026, Luis Velasquez wrote in Harvard Business Review about a leader he called Anna. She had been performing well for years. Then a feedback round told her she was a blind spot in the team. She had not seen it.
Few of us see what others see.
This is one of the quieter problems senior leaders carry. They rise on their strengths. Those same strengths, in new contexts, produce behaviour no one tells them about clearly. By the time the feedback arrives, the gap between how they read themselves and how they are being read is already months or years old.
A short personal example. For roughly twenty years of working life, I had a habit of looking for better, faster ways of doing things, at work and at home. It felt obviously useful. To several of my colleagues, it landed as criticism of how they already worked. They preferred the way they already knew.
Someone close to me eventually told me what was being read into the behaviour. Until that moment, I could not see it. That delay is normal. We cannot watch ourselves from outside the room.
The question underneath the feedback
In the coaching work I do now, when a leader arrives carrying feedback like Anna’s, the first question is rarely whether the behaviour is real. It almost always is. The more useful conversation is about what the behaviour shows. Capability still developing. An identity that has outgrown the role. A system that no longer fits the person.
Most often, it is a mismatch between leader and context, and the leader has done little wrong.
That distinction matters. A leader who reads themselves as the problem starts behaving like a problem. A leader who reads the situation as a mismatch starts designing for it. Different work. Different posture.
Coaching is one of the few places with enough time, and enough confidentiality, to tell the difference.
If you, or someone close to you in a senior role, has had one of those rough feedback moments recently, the most useful next step is often half an hour with someone outside the system. No charge, no obligation. We talk through what is on your mind and decide together whether continuing is worth it.
