What your team knows, that you don’t

And why an anonymous survey can do the heavy lifting……

When I first sit down with a leader I ask one question early: what do your people tell you?
They either say everything is fine, people seem happy. Or they look at me and say honestly, they don't tell me anything. I hear both versions often, and both tell me something important.

The first gives false reassurance. The second admits the distance already exists. Either way, the leader is working with incomplete information, and that's exactly where the survey comes in.

So I ask: when do you gather feedback?
At their performance review. At a team meeting. In passing.
And then I ask the question that usually lands quietly in the room: do you think you're asking the right questions in the right environment?

The gap between how leaders see themselves and how they are actually experienced by their team is one of the most consistent patterns I encounter in organisations. It's not about bad leadership. It's about the fact that most leaders never get honest, unfiltered feedback about their impact, because the environment they've created, often unintentionally, makes it genuinely difficult for people to tell them the truth.

This is where a well designed anonymous feedback survey does something that a meeting, a check in, or a performance conversation simply cannot. It creates a space where people can share what they actually think, rather than what feels safe to say in a room with you in it.

And this is where leaders push back: why anonymous? Why can't they just tell me directly?

Most people aren't built to deliver uncomfortable feedback face to face to someone who holds authority over their career, their pay, and their day to day experience. It's not weakness, it's human nature. The power dynamic in that room is real whether you acknowledge it or not. So when you ask your team how's everything going in a meeting, what you're mostly hearing is what they've calculated is safe to say. Not dishonesty, just self-preservation.

What they will do, when you ask the right questions in a carefully crafted anonymous survey, is select the answers that feel most real to them. And if someone fills in your survey at all, they care. And you want your people to care.

There is no need to be afraid of the feedback. You will make calls that don't land. Every leader does. The survey gives you enough to see where that's happening, not as an attack, but as a pattern worth paying attention to. And just as importantly, you'll see what is working, what your team genuinely values about how you lead.

Most leaders are surprised by how much positive feedback sits alongside the harder an more critical feedback. Both deserve your attention.

If you havent collected feedback via a survey in the last couple of years, there's no time like the present :).