In a very short period of time, what defines effective leadership at top companies has dramatically changed. For decades, “good enough” leadership teams were common. If you hit targets or were close to them, showed up prepared, and didn’t get a lot of complaints, that would be enough to run a company well.
I have worked with senior leaders for more than three decades, and I have watched the ground underneath them change. Artificial intelligence is remodeling every knowledge job. Hybrid work has redrawn the boundary between home and office. Gen Z is now the fastest-growing part of the workforce, and they ask questions their parents never would have dared to ask out loud.
Uncertainty is the operating environment now.
This is not a future-of-work problem. It is a right-now problem. The leaders walking into meetings Monday morning are already being evaluated against what today’s workforce actually needs. The research tells us what that is.
The research behind the gap
We partnered with The Harris Poll to survey 2,206 employed Americans about what separates exceptional leaders from everyone else. Only 30% of leaders were rated as “exceptional” by the people they lead. Fifty-four percent were rated as “good.” Sixteen percent were rated as “outdated.”
The good group is the one nobody is worried about, and that is exactly the problem.
When you pair good leadership with the level of uncertainty organizations are living through right now, the result is not a collapse. You would see a collapse. You would respond to a collapse.
What you get instead is slower, quieter, and harder to catch. Engagement scores drift down a point or two per year. Your best people quietly update their resumes. Initiatives launch, stall, and get replaced by new initiatives that also stall. No single moment tells you something is wrong.
Exceptional leadership, facing the same pressures, produces confidence, trust, and loyalty.
What good leaders are getting wrong
When we asked employees to describe how they actually feel working for their leader, 35% under good leaders said they feel valued and appreciated. Thirty-four percent said they feel supported. Those numbers are real wins, and good leaders should keep doing whatever is producing them.
Three other numbers tell a harder story:
- Only 16% of employees under good leaders feel that what is important to them is valued.
- Only 19% feel heard.
- Only 14% feel they are reaching their full potential.
That last number is the lowest score on any dimension we measured. Eighty-six percent of people working for a good leader do not feel they are growing.
When people can see every other job opening in their field on their phone, the cost of that number is not abstract.
The heart skills are the skills that matter now
Here is the part that surprises most senior leaders when I share it. When we ranked the top ten attributes that most separate exceptional leaders from good ones, nine of them were heart-based. Gratitude. Listening. Empathy. Trust. Inclusion. Well-being. Only one was a traditional head skill: communicating with transparency.
This is the same finding Google’s Project Oxygen reached nearly two decades ago. Of the top ten markers of a great manager at Google, nine were soft skills and one was overtly technical.
The top leadership skills were identified as good coaching, team empowerment, and communication. Interestingly, the project launched after Google leadership realized in exit interviews that many people were leaving because of poor leadership from their managers. Different decade, different methodology, same result. And we are still underinvesting.
My opinion: calling these “soft skills” is the most expensive branding mistake in corporate leadership. It puts many of the most vital leadership skills in the same budget line as lunch-and-learns, which means they get cut first when quarters get hard.
They are the skills artificial intelligence cannot replicate, the ones employees choose jobs based on, and the ones that separate companies people stay at from companies people leave. That is not soft. That is the whole game.
In our research, exceptional leaders were more than twice as strong as good leaders on every dimension that matters. The biggest multiplier was gratitude at 2.30 times stronger.
The six differentiators
The research pointed to six specific practices that consistently separated exceptional leaders from the rest. I will go deep on each one in individual articles that follow this one. Here is the frame.
Differentiator 1: Lead with gratitude. Acknowledging people in ways that are specific, personal, and frequent enough that employees believe you actually see them. This was the #1 differentiator in our research, and the one with the biggest gap between good and exceptional.
Differentiator 2: Listen and empathize. Hearing what people are actually carrying, not just what they say in meetings. Exceptional leaders treat listening as an early-warning system, not a courtesy.
Differentiator 3: Build an inclusive culture. Making belonging real, not rhetorical. People stay engaged through disruption when they feel their voice matters and their perspective counts, regardless of title.
Differentiator 4: Communicate with context. Telling people what you know, naming what you do not, and explaining why the decision matters to them. In uncertain times, silence feels like abandonment. Presence is itself a form of communication.
Differentiator 5: Connect strategy to employee growth. Answering the question people are silently asking during every period of change: Do I still have a future here? Exceptional leaders make the path forward visible, and they make sure it includes the person they are talking to.
Differentiator 6: Enable employees to meet the moment. Giving people the trust, tools, and authority to act when the playbook is being rewritten in real time. Control slows things down. Trust accelerates it.
The case for doing this now
The gap between good and exceptional is a training gap, and it is closeable. None of the six practices require charisma or unusual gifts; they require intention and repetition, and they can be built.
What the research makes clear, and what I want every senior leader to sit with, is that the organizations treating leader development as a “nice to have” budget line are going to be outcompeted by the organizations treating it as risk mitigation. That is the challenge senior leaders are facing right now, and it is the one most boards are still not asking their CEOs about.
Uncertainty is the constant. Great, not just good, leadership is the variable. The employee experience is the outcome.
The work ahead is what we call the “heart work,” and it starts with naming what good leaders are missing. Over the next six articles, I will cover one differentiator at a time. Gratitude first.
Look for it on Allwork.Space on May 12, or subscribe to our newsletter to get it straight in your inbox.
