When I arrived in London to lead the technology organization at Discovery, I thought I understood the situation. I had been briefed on the team, the products, the priorities, and the organizational structure. I had done my homework. I was prepared.
What I was not prepared for was the thing nobody told me.
My predecessor had been a loud American leader. “Caustic” was the word I eventually heard, though it was months before anyone used it. His approach had generated such deep mistrust of American leadership that by the time I arrived, the entire team had already decided who I was before I opened my mouth.
They assumed I would be the same. They assumed I was there to “get things moving” in the way he had, which apparently involved temper tantrums, unilateral decisions, and a general disregard for the expertise that the European teams had built over the years.
But nobody told me any of this when I first walked in. Not my peers, not my direct reports, and not the people I was meeting for the first time. They were polite, professional, and guarded in a way I initially mistook for that classic British reserve.
But this wasn’t reserve. It was self-protection. They had learned the hard way that trusting the American leader was dangerous… and they applied that lesson to me before they had a reason. Our working relationship was based on a defense mechanism.
As a result, I spent months operating inside an information gap I didn’t know existed. I thought I was quietly building relationships while they were keeping me at arm’s length—managing the “risk” of having me around.
This information gap can be a trap for quiet leaders, and it works in both directions.
Your team knows things about you, about the organization, and about how your leadership is landing that you cannot see from where you sit. They know which of your messages are landing clearly and which are being misinterpreted. They know which of your decisions have built trust and which ones have quietly eroded it. They know what the team says about you when you’re not in the room.
And most of them will never tell you unless you create the conditions for that honesty to surface.
This is not unique to quiet leaders, but quiet leaders are particularly vulnerable to it because the same energy that makes you trustworthy over time—your steadiness, your consistency, and your lack of reactivity—can also make you harder to read. When your team can’t easily tell what you’re thinking or how you’ll respond to difficult information, they default to caution. They hold back the things they think might land poorly, and they wait to see how you handle small pieces of the truth before they risk sharing larger ones.
The result is a leader who believes they have a clear picture of what is going on and a team that knows that picture is incomplete.
It took me a long time to learn this.
I have stood in front of teams believing they understood what I was doing and why. I thought I was being clear, and I thought my actions were communicating my intent. I thought that because I knew the reasoning behind a decision, the team must also see it.
They didn’t. Not because they weren’t paying attention, but because I wasn’t explaining myself with the clarity they deserved.
Quiet leaders often assume that their behavior speaks for itself. We believe that consistent action over time communicates our values, our priorities, and our intentions. And to some degree, it does. But behavior is ambiguous in a way that words are not. The same action, viewed from different perspectives, can communicate very different things.
A quiet leader who absorbs a difficult meeting without visible reaction might be seen as steady by one person and disengaged by another. A quiet leader who lets a team debate without intervening might be seen as trusting by one person and indifferent by another. The behavior is the same, but the interpretation depends on information the observer may not have.
That gap between your intent and the team’s interpretation is the information you’re missing, and that gap grows silently until something forces the information out into the open.
In London, the forcing function was time. Over months of consistently showing up differently than my predecessor, the team’s assumptions gradually loosened, and they started sharing things they had been holding back. Small things at first: context about why a process worked the way it did, history about decisions that predated my arrival, honest reactions to directives from our American offices.
However, as trust built, the information they shared became more substantive. Peers started telling me what my leadership style looked like from the outside, direct reports started sharing how the team was actually experiencing my decisions, and I started to receive honest feedback. Not all of which was glowing.
While I had earned their trust, they wanted more from me. Specifically, they wanted me to push back more forcefully against unilateral decisions made by our American offices. These were decisions that were often made without understanding the European context, the regulatory landscape, or the operational realities on the ground, and the team needed someone who would represent them upward, not just manage them downward.
That feedback changed how I operated for the next few years. I started to question uninformed decisions from above and enabled our European teams to have a genuine voice, while still driving toward the business objectives we were accountable for. But I was only able to make that adjustment because people finally trusted me enough to tell me what they needed.
Had I relied on my own assessment of how things were going, I would have continued believing I was doing well enough. The team would have continued performing, but the gap between what they needed and what I was providing would have persisted, invisible to me and corrosive to them.
The lesson I took from London, and the one I now coach other leaders on, is this: you cannot wait for trust to develop organically and then hope the information will flow. That works eventually, but “eventually” can take months or years, and in that time, you are leading with an incomplete picture.
Instead, you have to prompt the information. Actively, directly, and repeatedly.
This feels unnatural for quiet leaders. We prefer to create the conditions for openness and then let people come to us on their own terms. That instinct is not wrong, but it is insufficient. The people who most need to tell you something difficult are the ones who are least likely to volunteer it. They need an invitation, and sometimes they need the invitation more than once.
Some leaders I’ve coached have written what amounts to an operator’s manual for themselves: a document they share with new teams that explains how they work, what they value, how they prefer to receive information, and what they need from the people around them. I’ve never done this formally, but I understand the impulse. It’s an attempt to proactively close the information gap by telling the team who you are rather than waiting for them to figure it out.
What I have done, and what I wish I had done sooner in London, is introduce myself more deliberately. Not once, but multiple times. The first introduction is noise—people are too busy forming their own impressions to absorb what you say. The second and third introductions, delivered in smaller settings over the first few weeks, are where the real message lands.
Beyond introductions, the ongoing practice of prompting information is straightforward, but it requires discipline.
Ask your direct reports, in one-on-ones, how your leadership is being experienced. Not “how am I doing?” which invites empty affirmations. Instead: “What am I not seeing about how the team is operating right now?” or “Is there something the team needs from me that I’m not providing?” or “How did that decision I made last week actually land with people?”
These questions feel vulnerable because they are. That’s the point. You are signaling that you want the real answer, not the comfortable one, and you are creating a pattern where honest feedback becomes expected rather than exceptional.
There is a dimension to this that connects to the Leadership Energy Archetypes I’ve been developing.
The Anchor’s shadow is passivity. Anchors create stability, which teams value deeply, but stability can become stagnation when the Anchor isn’t actively seeking information about what the team needs to change. The team feels safe but unchallenged. They trust you but don’t tell you the hard things because the environment you’ve created is so steady that disrupting it feels wrong.
The Observer’s shadow is detachment. Observers read rooms brilliantly, but they can mistake their own observations for complete information. The Observer sees the dynamics, reads the unspoken tensions, and forms a sophisticated internal picture. But that picture is still just their interpretation. Without checking it against the team’s actual experience, the Observer operates on a model of reality that may be elegant but incomplete.
Both of these shadows create the same outcome: a leader who believes they understand the situation and a team that knows the leader is missing something important.
The fix for both is the same: ask, and make it safe to answer honestly.
I want to address something that quiet leaders sometimes resist about this practice.
The resistance goes something like: “If I have to ask for feedback, it means the environment I’ve built isn’t open enough for people to offer it freely.”
I understand that concern. It feels like asking for feedback is an admission that your culture of openness has failed.
It isn’t. It is a recognition that even the healthiest teams have information asymmetries, and your position as the leader inherently limits what people will tell you. This isn’t because they don’t trust you, but because the power dynamic makes certain kinds of honesty feel risky regardless of how safe you’ve made the environment.
Asking for feedback doesn’t mean your culture failed. Asking means you understand how organizations actually work, and you’re compensating for a structural limitation.
The leaders I’ve admired most over thirty years were not the ones who built cultures so open that feedback flowed freely without prompting. Those cultures don’t exist. The leaders I admired were the ones who asked for feedback consistently, received the answers without defensiveness, and visibly acted on what they heard enough to show that their interest in getting feedback was genuine.
That cycle- ask, receive, act, and repeat- is what closes the information gap over time.
The question I’d leave with you:
What does your team know right now, about you, about the organization, about how your leadership is landing, that they haven’t told you?
The information is there. It’s been there. The only thing between you and that information is a question you haven’t asked yet.
And for the quiet leader who prides themselves on reading the room: the room is also reading you. The question is whether you’ve given them enough to read accurately, or whether they’re filling in the gaps with assumptions you aren’t addressing.
