Plus: The 'loving critics' most leaders never find.
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Monday, July 27, 2026
 

Most senior leaders assume they're self-aware. Research shows they aren't

Most senior leaders spend their days deciding, directing, and responding. Very few spend meaningful time examining whether their own assumptions are still right. The ones who do are nearly twice as confident their organizations can adapt to change, according to a McKinsey survey of more than 10,000 executives.

That confidence extends beyond a general feeling. Reflective leaders in the survey were also more than twice as likely to have clear visibility on their organization's must-win battles and more attuned to external threats like geopolitical shifts. They didn't spend more time reading reports. They had developed a sharper sense for what mattered because they'd been honest with themselves about what they had gotten wrong.

Most managers globally are going through the motions. Gallup estimates that only about one in five are genuinely invested in their teams and their work. At the organizations Gallup ranks highest for workplace culture, four out of five actually are. The leaders in those organizations are far more likely to regularly examine their own assumptions.
 
Most leaders at senior levels don't reflect regularly because they already believe they're doing it. Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich's research across nearly 5,000 participants estimated that only 10-15% of people are genuinely self-aware, even though the vast majority believe they are. In a separate study of more than 3,600 executives, higher-level leaders overvalued their own abilities on 19 of 20 skills researchers tested. More experienced managers rated themselves less accurately than less experienced ones.

Leaders become more overconfident as they gain seniority because the people around them stop pushing back. Senior leaders have fewer people above them willing to be candid, and the more power someone holds, the less comfortable anyone feels delivering honest feedback. Leaders end up with plenty of data about the business but very little truthful feedback about themselves. Those dynamics reinforce each other as leaders climb. In Eurich's research, the executives who broke the pattern actively sought critical input from bosses, peers, and direct reports, and ended up rated as more effective by others.
Willie B. Thomas / Getty Images
Willie B. Thomas / Getty Images
The most self-aware people in Eurich's research asked themselves "what" instead of "why." A leader who asks "what situations drain my energy" and "what do they have in common" gets somewhere useful. A leader who asks "why do I feel so burned out" tends to stay stuck, because "why" questions ask people to rehash what went wrong, not figure out what to do next. Eurich's team saw this pattern clearly in hundreds of pages of transcripts from self-aware individuals. In them, the word "what" appeared more than 1,000 times and "why" appeared fewer than 150. People who frequently asked themselves "why" reported worse job satisfaction and well-being. The instinct to dig into causes feels productive, but it tends to produce excuses rather than answers.

Leaders who reflected regularly were also the ones who moved fastest on the biggest operational disruptions. Reflective leaders in McKinsey's survey were more likely to champion AI adoption personally and to have rolled out AI systems across most departments. They reported stronger performance pressure and still moved faster under it.

Gen Z had the clearest read on how AI would reshape their organizations and the most confidence in how quickly those changes would take effect. That they showed the strongest appetite for daily reflection in McKinsey's survey should then come as no surprise. The next generation of leaders treats regular self-examination as a basic professional habit rather than an occasional exercise. Organizations that build time and space for it now will be better positioned as that expectation becomes the norm.

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That's harder to implement than it appears. Forty-seven percent of leaders in McKinsey's survey say they're too buried in meetings, decisions, and daily demands to carve out time to think. They also cite a fear of failure or judgment and rigid hierarchies as top barriers. But every one of them is something a senior leader can change by redesigning how meetings run, how feedback travels upward, and how mistakes get discussed.

Leaders who know their own values and understand how others perceive them build stronger relationships and make sounder decisions. But Eurich's research showed that knowing yourself and knowing how you come across to others are independent of each other. A leader can have a clear sense of their own purpose and still be oblivious to how their team experiences them. Leaders have to work on both skills deliberately. The executives in Eurich's research who did so sought out what she calls "loving critics," people who cared enough about them to tell the truth.

Even still, these "loving critics" can only help leaders who've created room for candor. Most haven't.

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