Would You Know If Your Team Had Stopped Following You?

Hello,

You’re certain your team is with you.

You spend more time with them than almost anyone else.
You advocate for them in meetings they will never attend.
You believe you've created an environment where people will tell you the truth.

Then the feedback arrives.

The people you feel closest to are the ones who rate you the lowest.

That disconnect is more common than most leaders realize.

And it usually isn't because your team is against you. It's because the relationship you think you have is not the one they experience.

A leader I coach is known for pushing people to stretch. His success in part stems from saying the thing no one else in the room will say, and he expects his team to rise to it the way he would.

One day, he asked a high-potential employee to walk the group through a major initiative without warning. They froze.

From the leader's perspective, he'd offered an easy win.
From everyone else's perspective, he'd just put someone under a spotlight with no preparation and no safety net.

Silence looked like disengagement. Distance looked like everything was fine.

But that interpretation protected him from a harder truth: his team wasn't disengaged, it was protecting itself, and the way he pushes is what taught it to.

That's the uncomfortable reality of followership.

Your perception isn't the one that matters. The team's is.

People don't extend trust because you believe you're trustworthy. They extend it when they consistently experience safety, advocacy, and respect.

And when those signals disappear, followership often erodes long before a leader notices.

The first step is to stop assuming the relationship is healthy. Instead, make honesty easier than agreement.

Ask questions like, "What are you not telling me that I should know?"

Then reward candor instead of punishing it. If the first person who answers gets embarrassed or dismissed, everyone else learns to stay silent.

The second step is to remove unnecessary moments of exposure.

If you want someone to present in a meeting, give them advance notice. A spotlight people can prepare for feels like confidence in their abilities. A surprise spotlight feels like a test.

Finally, make your advocacy visible.

If you fought for your team's budget or priorities in a senior meeting, tell them. They can't appreciate support they never see, and invisible leadership gets mistaken for absent leadership.

The leaders who earn lasting followership aren't the ones who assume everything is fine.
They're the ones who keep checking.

Because the most important question isn't whether your team is with you.

It's whether you would know if they weren't.

If you've sensed a growing disconnect between how you think you're leading and how your team seems to experience you, I'd love to hear about it. Just hit reply and tell me what you're noticing. Those conversations often reveal the blind spots that matter most.

Onward — with clarity and conviction,

Kathryn