Here’s something most communicators know in their gut but rarely say out loud.
You can do everything right. Build a sharp transformation narrative. Map the cascades. Craft the talking points. Launch the internal campaign with the right channels, the right cadence, the right tone. And it can still fall flat — not because the communications were wrong, but because something underneath them isn’t holding.
The town halls get polite applause. Managers forward the emails. But somewhere between the executive floor and the frontline, the meaning drains out. People nod along in meetings and don’t commit. High performers quietly start exploring options. Initiatives launch with energy and stall without explanation.
Most of us, when we see this pattern, double down on what we know. Sharpen the message. Add a channel. Build a better FAQ. Create another cascade toolkit. And those things matter — I’m not dismissing them. But I’ve come to believe that the gap we’re trying to close isn’t a messaging gap. It’s a leadership experience gap. And no amount of well-crafted content can bridge it on its own.
Throughout my career, I’ve been brought in to work with leadership teams navigating the highest-stakes moments an organization can face. CEOs and their teams leading post-merger integrations. Executive groups restructuring entire business units. Leadership teams trying to land a cultural transformation while the ground is shifting under them. And the pattern I keep seeing isn’t broken communication from the top. It’s a disappearing act in the middle — the 54% of leaders everyone thinks are just fine.
Last year, we finally got the data to prove it.
What 2,206 Employees Actually Said
I partnered with The Harris Poll to survey more than 2,200 employed Americans across industries. We asked them to tell us about their boss — everything. What their leaders do well. where they fall short and how they actually feel working for them.
This research, and what it reveals about the gap between good and exceptional leadership, is the foundation of my new book, The Heart Work of Modern Leadership: 6 Differentiators of Exceptional Leaders, out today.
Only 30% of leaders were rated as “exceptional.” Sixteen percent were “outdated” — still running a command-and-control playbook that stopped working years ago.
But the biggest group — 54% — landed in the middle. Rated as “good.”
Your first instinct is probably the same as mine was. Good sounds fine. At least they’re not the problem.
Then we looked at what “good” actually produces when the world is unstable. That’s where the whole picture changed.
Why Good Messaging Can’t Fix a Good Leadership Problem
One of the most important findings is that leadership quality doesn’t add to the employee experience. It multiplies it:
Uncertainty × Leadership Quality = Employee Experience
Uncertainty paired with exceptional leadership produces confidence, safety, and trust. That’s the aspiration. But pair that same uncertainty with good leadership — the kind most organizations assume is sufficient — and you get anxiety, complacency, and drift.
The outcomes aren’t dramatic enough to trigger alarm. They’re just slow enough to feel normal — until you look up one day and realize the culture has quietly shifted underneath you.
This is why messaging alone can’t close the gap. The communication that matters most isn’t happening on the intranet or in the town hall. It’s happening — or not happening — in the daily interactions between a leader and their team. The one-on-one where a leader could provide context but defaults to task updates. The team meeting where people need meaning and get logistics. Think about how many of those moments happen in a single day across your organization — and how few of them anyone in communications can touch.
I saw this up close two years ago with a Fortune 200 client. The CEO and senior leadership team had been brought in to lead a major business transformation — new operating model, significant restructuring, the works. The top-level communication strategy was solid.
But during a site visit, I sat in on a skip-level listening session with about 30 frontline employees. And it became painfully obvious: these people had no idea why any of this was happening. Not because the strategy hadn’t been communicated. It had. The problem was their direct leaders — people everyone considered strong performers — had received the talking points, understood the rationale, and then basically gone silent. One employee said something I haven’t forgotten: “My leader sends us the emails but never talks about them. So we assume it’s bad news he doesn’t want to explain.”
That’s the 54% in action. And no cascade toolkit was going to fix it.
The Proof: The Gap Is Communication, But Not the Kind We Control
When we analyzed the top ten attributes that most separate exceptional leaders from good ones, nine out of ten were Heart attributes — what most people call “soft skills.” Only one fell on the Head side. The gap isn’t strategy or technical capability. Good leaders already have those. What they’re missing is gratitude expressed out loud, listening that goes past the surface, empathy people actually feel, and trust that holds when things get volatile.
In other words: the gap between good and exceptional leadership is a communication gap. But it’s not the kind of communication we typically own. It’s the daily, human, relational behaviors through which leaders create — or destroy — meaning for the people around them.
The six differentiators that separate exceptional from good are all communication behaviors. Here’s what they look like in practice:
Lead with gratitude is the single largest differentiator in the study — 2.30x stronger in exceptional leaders. Not generic appreciation. Personal, specific recognition: “I noticed what you did in that meeting, and it mattered.” When the ground is shifting, that kind of acknowledgment becomes an anchor. It tells people: I see you, and you’re safe here.
Listen and empathize, at 2.16x — which is less about technique and more about orientation. Are you listening to respond, or listening to understand? Exceptional leaders ask questions like “what are you carrying right now?” and then sit with whatever comes back. They treat empathy not as a nicety but as an intelligence system. It’s how you catch resistance before it hardens and burnout before it scales.
Foster an inclusive culture, at 2.24x, is where uncertainty does its worst damage if leaders aren’t intentional. Teams fracture into silos of self-protection. People stop bringing their real thinking to meetings. Exceptional leaders counteract this — not through programs, but by creating an emotional climate where people feel they belong and their voice matters. I tell leaders all the time: you make the weather. Whether you mean to or not.
Communicate with context, 2.20x stronger. Good leaders share information when they have complete answers. In uncertain times, that means they go quiet — and quiet feels like abandonment. Exceptional leaders show up without the full picture. They name what they know, what they don’t, and why it matters. That takes courage. Most leaders were never trained for it.
Connect strategy to employee growth at 2.22x. Good leaders communicate the what — “here’s our new strategy.” Exceptional leaders add the why and the you. “Here’s where we’re going, here’s why it matters, and here’s how the path forward includes you specifically.” During uncertainty, everyone is silently asking the same question: do I still have a future here?
Enable employees to meet the moment came in at 2.28x. This one surprised me, because it’s less about what leaders say and more about what they signal. Good leaders default to tighter control when stakes rise. Exceptional leaders do the opposite — they extend trust, give people authority to act, and make themselves more visible instead of less. Their presence itself communicates something: I’m not going anywhere.
Exceptional leaders are more than twice as effective on every single one of these dimensions. And every one sits squarely in the communications professional’s domain — even if it hasn’t traditionally been in our job description.
The Number That Makes It Real
The finding that stopped me wasn’t a multiplier. It was this:
Under “good” leadership, 35% of employees feel “valued and appreciated.” That’s recognition of contribution. “I see what you do.” Good leaders deliver on that reasonably well.
But only 16% feel “what is important to me is valued.” That’s relational depth. “I see who you are.”
Nineteen points. That gap — between being valued for your output and being valued as a person — is the entire good-to-exceptional story in one data point.
And here’s why it matters for communicators specifically: this is the gap that no message can close. You can’t write a town hall script that makes someone feel known. You can’t design an email campaign that makes someone feel heard. Those feelings are created — or not — in the moments between a leader and the people they lead. The moments we don’t script.
Only 19% feel heard. Only 14% feel they’re reaching their potential. These aren’t people working for bad bosses. Often this leads to less discretionary effort. They show up. They do the work. They’ve stopped investing.
So What Do We Actually Do About It?
If we can’t message our way past it, what can we do?
This is where I think the opportunity for communicators gets genuinely exciting — because it asks us to step into the fullest version of what our profession actually is. At its best, our role has never been just about what to say and how to say it. It’s about what to do and how to do it. The six differentiators aren’t messaging recommendations. They’re behavioral ones. And shaping leader behavior is communications work — it just hasn’t always been recognized that way.
Reframe leadership development as risk mitigation. When it’s positioned as “development” or “growth,” it becomes discretionary — and gets cut precisely when it matters most. The Leadership Formula gives you the framework to show your executive team that “good enough” leadership isn’t neutral. It’s compounding complacency and drift right now.
Stop investing only downstream and start investing upstream. We’ve gotten very good at crafting the message. The bigger leverage point is equipping leaders to carry it — not just deliver the talking points, but create the context, connection, and meaning that make messages actually land.
Bring emotional data into the room. Engagement surveys tell you what people think. This research tells you what people feel — and there’s a world of difference between the two. Feeling unheard, unseen, and stuck is what actually drives disengagement. That kind of emotional data is more diagnostic than anything in most annual surveys, and it belongs in your next conversation with HR and the C-suite.
And own the “leader as communicator” agenda. Gratitude is communication. Listening is communication. Providing context, connecting strategy to growth, fostering belonging — all communication. If our profession doesn’t champion building these capabilities in leaders, nobody else will. And the 54% will keep drifting.
Where This Leaves Us
Uncertainty isn’t going away. This is the operating environment now. And in it, good leadership produces drift — no matter how strong your communications plan is.
Our profession has spent decades building expertise in exactly the capabilities this moment requires. How meaning gets made and what trust actually looks like at scale — not as a campaign theme, but as a lived experience between a leader and a team. We know this territory better than anyone in the building.
The question is whether we’re willing to step out of the messaging lane and into the leadership capability lane. Because that’s where the 54% problem gets solved. That’s where communicators stop supporting the strategy and start shaping it.
The gap between good and exceptional isn’t talent. It’s training. And honestly? It’s ours to lead.
