Promoting the wrong people

What Happens When the Leaders We Have and the Leaders We Want Share Nothing in Common?

🌶️ Bad leadership is the original workplace trauma. 

Like…we’ve all been affected before, right???

I’m not even sure if this could be considered a hot take anymore, but I guess you can be the judge of that!

Before quiet quitting and the great resignation, there was just someone’s terrible ass boss making everything worse and still getting promotions.

I’ve been in HR long enough to have plenty of stories and the mental scars that come with them: 

• The executive who would agree with everything in a meeting and then do the exact opposite the moment everyone left 
• The manager who got promoted because he gave incredible presentations and then spent six months making half his team want to cry before lunch
• The leader who had “executive presence,” which turned out to just mean “loud and confident in rooms full of other loud, confident people”

You totally know these people. Some of you are currently managing around one of them right now, and you have my deepest condolences!

✨I’m here to reassure you that NONE of this is your imagination. ✨

The enormous, completely avoidable distance between the leaders orgs promote, and the leaders that people actually want is as real as it is measurable. 

It’s been wrecking teams and burning out your best people for years.

Hogan Assessments has been studying this type of thing for decades, and their new Leadership Divide report surveyed nearly 10,000 employees across 25 countries and compared what those workers said they want in a leader with what the average executive personality in their global database looks like. 

Spoiler alert…there is exactly zero overlap between the top 5 competencies that global executives demonstrate and the top 5 competencies that employees say they want! 🙃

If that doesn’t make you want to flip a table, I don’t know what to tell you.

The findings are clarifying in the best and most uncomfortable way, so I want to get into what the data in the report says and highlight 5 things that stood out to me!

The Qualities That Get Leaders Promoted Are Not the Qualities That Make Teams Want to Follow Them

This one hit me hard because it’s so obvious in retrospect, but so ignored in practice.

✨What are the top competencies executives demonstrate? ✨

Inspiring others, competing with others, presenting to others, taking initiative, and driving innovation.

All very “look at me, I have vision and energy” competencies. Classic emergent leader characteristics, I’d say.

And what do employees want?

They’re looking for things like effective communication, sound decision-making, accountability, integrity, and leadership ability.

Two completely different lists, right??? 

In simple terms, the executives we have are doing a lot of performing, while the employees asking for leaders are asking for something MUCH simpler, which is just to be honest and own your mistakes.

I don’t know why that seems so revolutionary for so many orgs, but it’s something that should be screamed from the rooftops!

This is what Hogan calls the difference between emergent and effective leadership, which they wrote about at length here if you really want a deeper understanding. 

Here, I’ll give you the short and sweet version! 😇

Emergent leaders are excellent at getting promoted. They generally know how to work a room in a way that impresses an executive team and makes a compelling case for themselves. 

Effective leaders are excellent at actually building teams that perform. 

I can’t stress enough that these are not the same skill set, but orgs keep conflating them.

So what does it look like in practice? 

Someone gets promoted, dazzles in the first 90 days, and then slowly (or not so slowly), the team starts to erode. 

People start looking for other roles in their spare time, exit interviews say the same thing every cycle, and nothing changes, because the people making promotion decisions are not the people who have to work for the person they just promoted.

What Leaders Value Determines What Their Teams Are Allowed to Value

This one is subtler, but also lowkey kinda devastating.

According to the report, the values leaders collectively model are the org’s values, regardless of what the mission statement says or what the Glassdoor page claims. 

📣 Every day, people on teams are feeling the direct impact of what their leader prioritizes and incentivizes.

When employees were asked what they want their leaders to value, the most common answer was networking, teamwork, and belonging to a group. 

👀 48% said they want their leaders to actively prioritize this. 

Executives tend to value quality and aesthetics, tradition, authority, profit, and experience-based decision-making.

Again, two different worlds!!!

When your leader doesn’t signal that the team matters, the team stops believing the team matters. 

As a result, they start protecting themselves. People stop volunteering information and start working in silos. The culture becomes transactional. 

Eventually you’re sitting in an engagement survey debrief wondering why belonging scores are so low!

The simple solution is in leaders who actually model that belonging is a value, instead of something HR sends a Slack about during team appreciation week. 😒 

Some Leaders Have Strengths That End Up Working Against Them Under Pressure

Here’s where it gets really interesting, and where I genuinely think the Hogan Assessments framework offers something we’re not talking about enough…

The qualities that make someone effective in calm conditions can actively derail them under stress. 

Hogan Assessments calls this the “dark side” of personality, which is just what happens when someone stops self-monitoring and leans too hard into a strength.

The executive data shows that today’s leaders tend to be confident, assertive, charming, and willing to take risks.

Sure, these are legitimately good qualities, but with enough push and pressure, that confident executive becomes arrogant. 

That charming risk-taker starts pushing limits in ways that alarm people. 

What do employees say they don’t want? 

• Emotional volatility and unpredictability – 72% 
• Outward agreement and private stubbornness – 62%
• Arrogance and entitlement – 59% 
• Extreme caution and fear of failure – 56%

The confidence that gets someone the promotion can become the arrogance that makes their team disengage. 

The report is clear on this: when these mismatches persist, teams lose trust, talented people leave, and performance suffers.

You can’t fix this with a lil leadership offsite. You need data, baby! 

Assessment-based coaching helps leaders understand where their strengths tip over into liabilities, specifically when things are hard.

We Consistently Promote Performance Over Potential, Then Act Surprised When Leaders Can’t Lead

This is something I’ve watched happen so many times I’ve lost count! 

Someone is an incredible individual contributor, and so we reward them with management, as if being great at a thing automatically means being great at supporting other people who do that thing.

✨ Performance is not the same as potential. ✨

And yet, talent processes around the world are essentially built on the assumption that they are. Hogan Assessments has a whole article about this if you really want to highlight the differences between the two!

The report recommends rethinking what “high potential” means by defining it in the context of culture, strategy, and team outcomes, rather than just looking at who performed best in their last role. 

Personality assessments give you data on how someone is likely to lead, how they manage themselves under pressure, how they build relationships. 

That data exists, but unfortunately, most orgs just aren’t using it!

🤷‍♀️ Meanwhile, global employee engagement dropped to 21% last year, according to Gallup. 

The report attributes that drop significantly to increased disengagement among people managers. 

We’re filling manager roles with ineffective leaders because we’re using a process that was never designed to catch the right signal.

Trust is the Output of Everything, and Nobody Is Measuring It

Nearly 98% of survey respondents said they want leaders who communicate effectively. 

Around 97% each said leaders should use sound judgment, demonstrate accountability, and behave with integrity. 

These numbers are remarkable because they’re high in the same way that the question “do you want clean water?” would be high in a poll! 

🤯 The report makes a great point that I think is genuinely underutilized, which is that most engagement surveys don’t even ask about trust. 

They typically ask about satisfaction, connection, and career development. 

Trust is foundational, and it’s often not even on these damn surveys!

If you want to know where your org is on the leadership trust spectrum, you have to ask, then you have to actually do something with the answer.

And if you needed any more evidence that trust matters more than ever right now, the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer describes our current moment as a retreat into insularity. 

Basically, people are pulling trust inward, toward smaller circles, away from orgs and structures that keep letting them down. 

So WTF Do We Do With All of This?

If you’ve managed to never deal with these issues? Consider yourself lucky. 

But in reality, almost all of us already knew something was wrong with leadership structures. 

We’ve seen the exit interview patterns and run the engagement surveys. 

We’ve sat in talent reviews where someone’s name comes up and the room nods because they “have presence” while the person with the actual receipts doesn’t make the slate.

You’re not imagining it. The gap is real and it’s measurable, which fortunately means it’s also closeable!

But closing it requires more than awareness…that’s only half the battle. 

It requires changing how you identify and develop leaders. 

That means looking past the confident, charismatic, room-commanding emergent leader to ask whether this person can actually build a team people want to show up for. 

That also means building feedback loops that catch the derailment before it costs you your top performers. 

Hogan Assessments has been doing this work for decades! 

Their personality assessments are built on the science of reputation. 

The research and frameworks are all there. The question is whether your org is willing to act like the data matters.

Quite frankly, I think it does. I think you do too, or you wouldn’t be here!

I also think the full report is absolutely worth a look, since, you know…I can’t cover it all. 😇

Read the full report