The Slow Drift Between What a Leader Believes and What Is Actually Happening

Ask a chief executive to describe the culture of their organisation and you will get a confident, coherent answer. Ask fifteen of their colleagues the same question and you will frequently get a different one. The gap between those two accounts is not a communication problem. It is the single most expensive blind spot in senior leadership, and it widens quietly over years.

Executives rarely notice it happening, because every individual step is reasonable. A leader forms a view. The view is broadly correct at the time. The organisation changes. The view does not. Contradicting information arrives, but it arrives softened by people who have learned what is worth saying. The leader continues making decisions from a map that is slowly ceasing to describe the territory.

The brain is not neutral about this

Arvid Buit, an executive coach who works with C-suite leaders across Europe, argues that the mechanism is psychological before it is organisational. The brain does not record facts; it records interpretations. Every leader carries a self-narrative — decisive, calm under pressure, fair, demanding but caring — and those narratives function as perceptual filters. Information that contradicts the story tends not to register, because registering it would be costly to the identity built around it.

Psychology calls this confirmation bias. Buit prefers a different framing: the comfort of self-coherence. It is not arrogance, he argues, but safety. A leader needs to believe their leadership makes sense, because the alternative produces cognitive dissonance that is genuinely painful to sit with.

The practical test he uses is disarmingly simple. He asks clients when they were last surprised by their own data. If the answer is never, they are not measuring reality. They are managing an image.

How it compounds through the organisation

Distortion at the top does not stay at the top. It propagates, because organisations adapt to what their leader can hear.

Buit describes coaching a German chief operating officer who was confident that his leadership team was fully aligned. Invited to observe one of their meetings, Buit tracked process rather than content. In ninety minutes, only two people spoke more than twice. The rest sat silent. When this was pointed out, the executive’s explanation was immediate: they agree. The alternative reading — that they had learned disagreement was expensive — had not occurred to him.

Both explanations fit the observable data. Only one of them was survivable for his self-narrative, so that was the one he reached for. Meanwhile the silence itself had become a genuine operating risk, because a leadership team that cannot disagree cannot surface problems early.

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Why conventional development does not fix it

This is one reason leadership training so often fails to change anything durable. McKinsey’s long-standing analysis of the field notes that US companies spend close to fourteen billion dollars a year on leadership development, and that programmes routinely fall short because they are decoupled from real context and sidestep the underlying mindsets that drive behaviour.

A workshop cannot correct a distorted perceptual filter, because the filter operates on the workshop too. Leaders absorb frameworks and apply them to a version of reality that remains unexamined.

What correction actually requires

Buit’s approach begins with observation rather than intervention — no vision work, no strategy sessions, no goal setting until the picture is accurate. He describes it as measuring reality: seeing what is, without the filter of what one wishes were true or the defensive narrative explaining why it turned out that way.

In practice that means several things running in parallel. Structured stakeholder interviews, conducted confidentially and at sufficient volume that patterns become undeniable. Observation of process rather than content in real meetings — who speaks, who defers, where conversations stall. And a discipline of noticing internal signals, since the body frequently registers what the conscious mind is still declining to accept.

The questions Buit puts to clients after meetings are deliberately unglamorous. Who did I expect to contribute, and who actually did? What did I observe and then set aside because it made me uncomfortable? Which patterns repeat, and what breaks them? None of these require new data. They require a leader to stop discarding the data already available.

The Dutch chief executive he asked to spend ten minutes after every meeting writing down what she had observed — body language, tone, who spoke when, how often she interrupted, how many questions she asked versus statements she made — found the pattern undeniable after three weeks. She had not needed new information. She had needed to stop editing the information already in front of her.

A leadership problem, not a personality problem

It is worth being precise about what this is and is not. Distortion is not a mark of weak leadership; it is a predictable consequence of authority, and it affects capable executives at least as much as anyone else. Arguably more, since success supplies the strongest evidence that one’s read of the world is correct.

Understanding how reality distortion takes hold at senior levels is therefore less about identifying flawed individuals and more about accepting a structural feature of power: the more of it someone holds, the harder they must work to be told the truth.

Leaders who treat that as an operating requirement rather than a personal insult tend to make better decisions. Not because they are more self-aware in the abstract, but because they are working from a more accurate map.