Most senior leaders believe they are well informed. They receive reports, attend briefings, sit through leadership presentations. What they rarely see is how much has been edited before it reaches them. Athalie Williams, a global C-suite executive and former CHRO whose career spans senior roles at BHP and BT Group (British Telecommunications), has spent enough time inside executive committee rooms to recognise the pattern. A senior leader presents to the board. The data is carefully framed. The risks are present but softened. The recommendation lands cleanly. Nobody pushes back in a way that would make anyone uncomfortable. The leader walks away with a view of the business that is accurate in its facts and misleading in its texture.
“The higher you sit, the less unfiltered information you receive,” she says. “It is not usually deliberate. People learn very quickly what a leader rewards and what makes them uncomfortable, and they adjust what they say accordingly.”
This is the feedback gap, and it is one of the most discussed and least acted-upon dynamics in senior leadership. By the time information reaches the most senior leaders, it has passed through several layers of careful editorial: stripped of anything that might trigger a difficult conversation, repositioned to protect the messenger, and shaped around what the leader has historically rewarded with praise or punished with silence. The problem is most visible at CEO level, where the distance from the front line is greatest, but it applies across the senior leadership tier.
The gap carries real costs. When truth is filtered on its way up, decision-making suffers quietly at first. Small misalignments appear. Signals are missed. Timing becomes slightly off. Then the consequences compound. A strategy that seemed sound begins to falter. An initiative loses momentum without a clear explanation.
Williams has observed this pattern across industries and geographies. “I have seen instances where a substantial problem was known at three or four levels below the leadership for months before it surfaced,” she says. “By the time it reached the top, it was a crisis rather than a manageable issue. The information existed. It just never travelled.”
Why the Gap Forms
Most companies, when they attempt to address this through formal feedback processes, interview only the most senior leaders’ direct reports and board members, emphasising the interpersonal dynamics of a small group rather than surfacing what the broader organisation actually knows. The resulting output can feel like corporate navel-gazing, prioritised by frequency or emotional intensity rather than by what the business most needs to hear.
The structural problem runs deeper than process design. In a multi-layered organisational setup, information must navigate through several intermediary levels before reaching senior leadership, and with each layer it crosses, there is a chance it will be further screened or modified. Corporate misconduct cases repeatedly illustrate the pattern: problems known at lower levels fail to surface because the accumulated incentive to stay quiet outweighs any individual’s willingness to carry difficult news upward.
Korn Ferry research found that 86% of senior leaders believe their employees highly trust them, while only 67% of employees agree. The gap between those two figures measures something beyond trust. It measures what people are willing to say out loud, and to whom.
What Leaders Do That Makes It Worse
Williams is clear that the feedback gap has a structural dimension. Leaders also create and reinforce it through their own behaviour, often without realising it.
“When a senior leader reacts badly to difficult news, even once, even subtly, people notice,” she says. “They may not consciously decide to filter things differently from that point on, but they do. The signals you send about what you want to hear shape what people are willing to tell you.”
A January 2026 Harris Poll and Turas Leadership survey found that 90% of senior leaders say they wish their teams would challenge them and share constructive feedback more often, yet nearly two-thirds hesitate to ask for it for fear of appearing weak. The desire for honesty and the behaviour that would encourage it are frequently in tension.
Williams says that the senior leaders she has worked with or alongside who receive genuinely useful intelligence share a common trait: they make it safe, repeatedly and visibly, to bring bad news. “They ask for the unvarnished version. They thank people who push back. They do not shoot the messenger. And they do it consistently enough that their teams learn to trust the signal.”
Where Boards Come In
The feedback gap is also a governance question, and one that boards are well positioned to address if they are willing to treat it seriously.
A board that creates genuine transparency and open communication can help ensure senior leadership is identifying blind spots and anticipating challenges before they become crises. A strong board chair and lead director play a particular role in this: providing a sounding board for the CEO and maintaining independent lines of sight into the organisation that management reporting alone cannot provide.
Williams draws on her experience as both a board-level adviser and a member of executive committees at two major global organisations. Her view is direct: boards that rely solely on management reporting have, by definition, accepted a filtered version of reality. “The question a board should ask is not just what information it is receiving, but what information it is not receiving, and whether the conditions exist for that gap to close.”
That means investing in independent insight: speaking to people below the executive level, commissioning candid capability reviews, and examining whether senior leaders are hearing back from the organisation in a way that is genuinely useful.
Organisations that do this well tend to catch problems earlier, course-correct faster, and make decisions on a more accurate picture of where they actually stand. Those that don’t often discover the gap only after it has already cost them something material.
