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Leadership
What CEOs don’t hear and why it matters
There is more to feedback than a simple process of transmitting information. IMD’s Anand Narasimhan argues that what an employee tells a CEO is settled long before it’s spoken, by anxieties about safety and standing that neither party can see.
Rapid read:
- A CEO cannot insist on candor from their subordinates. What they can change is the cost of candor.
- What someone tells a CEO depends on what they believe the relationship between a superior and a subordinate can withstand.
- CEOs are authors of well-worn narratives about themselves and their companies, repeating them to audience after audience throughout the day.
What everyone else already knows
Most advice about CEO feedback rests on an old information engineering model: feedback is a message, the organization is a channel that can distort it, and the leader’s job is to strip out noise. Clean the channel and the truth arrives.
That is the Shannon-Weaver model of communication, devised in 1948 for analogue transmission channels and applied to human beings ever since. It is why organizations install the standard channels: the 360-degree review, the pulse survey, the skip-level meeting. It is also why CEOs who have installed all three are still the last to learn what everyone else already knows.
Feedback between people is not the transmission of information across a channel. Feedback is a relational act, and what someone tells a CEO depends on what they believe the relationship between a superior and a subordinate can withstand.
The CEO gets cast in a role: visionary, disruptor, savior, or the one who will finally impose order.
Every conversation in an organization runs on two levels. Above the table sits the content: the numbers, the plan, the customer complaint. Below the table runs a second conversation, largely outside awareness, about safety, standing and belonging.
Every employee is working out what they can say that will be useful to the listener without costing them their standing as someone worth listening to. When the listener controls their fate in the organization, that calculation tightens. What the CEO hears is whatever survived it.
Talk is the work
The higher you go in an organization, the more likely it is that the key calls are verbal.
- A CEO mulls over the acquisition of a competitor with the CFO in a short hallway meeting. Weeks later the products of that conversation arrive as written reports and slide decks justifying the proposal to investors. The formal record obscures the brief verbal exchange that set the whole thing in motion.
Peter Gronn, who studied administrators at close range, put the point more strongly: talk does not report the work, it accomplishes it.
- The utterance is the act. So the quality of talk that a culture permits is not a soft matter sitting alongside the real business. It is the medium in which the business gets done.
Where relational safety is low, people withhold what they know to be vital, and the withheld material hardens into an open secret. But suppressing talk takes effort, and as the pressure ratchets up the secret gets out. What cannot be said between two employees is eventually said to the board, to a whistleblower line, or to a reporter, at a moment the CEO does not choose.
Bernard Looney’s exit from BP in 2023 and Laurent Freixe’s dismissal from Nestlé in 2025 both arrived that way, as board crises, after long stretches during which many people knew and none dared to say it.
Cast in a role
Any group carries a great many anxieties, and those anxieties gravitate to the person at the top. To quell the anxiety, the CEO gets cast in a role: visionary, disruptor, savior, or the one who will finally impose order. Nobody chooses the casting and it is rarely stated aloud, yet such casting governs what each employee brings into a conversation and what they leave outside it.
Satya Nadella’s shift of Microsoft from know-it-all to learn-it-all was work at this level. It changed the shared, unspoken assumption about what it costs an employee to admit ignorance, and it changed what people were then willing to say.
A CEO who is unaware of these roles does more than miss information. They conduct the dynamic. A leader operating from a defender self meets a dissatisfied subordinate by explaining, correcting and justifying, and leaves the meeting with the dissent unspoken and the subordinate less willing to try again.
The same leader occupying a curious self hears it, acts on it, and remedies the situation. Identical information was available in both cases. The role the CEO occupied in the relationship determined which of it was ever said out loud.
The narrative defends itself
CEOs are authors of well-worn narratives about themselves and their companies, repeating them to audience after audience throughout the day. The mind screens incoming feedback against the narrative: what fits is acknowledged and assimilated, what does not fit is discarded before it has been examined. The people around the CEO are conditioned to sustain the same story, so they filter too, usually out of loyalty rather than cowardice.
The screening is fast and it does not feel like screening. It feels like being right, and the CEO usually has a reason to hand. So, the thing to watch is the speed. Feedback dismissed quickly by the unconscious belief in the narrative.
If a piece of feedback is dismissed before the CEO has had the discipline to think it through, the narrative has done its work. Irritation that a CEO feels when hearing feedback is the useful signal here. When a comment produces a flash of annoyance, that is worth a second look, because the annoyance suggests that something out of line with the standard narrative has landed.
Change what candor costs
Only now do the mechanisms earn their place. A 360-degree review collects feedback from the subject’s manager, peers and subordinates to build a fuller picture of their approach and performance. Skip-level meetings bring senior leaders together with employees a few rungs further down, giving the former on-the-ground feedback without filtering it through middle management.
Pulse surveys track employee views in real time. Each of these works when people already feel safe enough to be honest. Where they do not, the same tools return nothing but carefully worded agreement. Setting them up is the easy part.
The harder part is getting these tools to convey the truth. What happened to the last person who said something unwelcome? Were they thanked in the room and quietly passed over six months later? People read that outcome closely, and no survey instrument recovers what they stop saying afterwards.
A leader operating from a defender self meets a dissatisfied subordinate by explaining, correcting and justifying.
The warning signs show up in how people behave, not in the numbers in a 360-degree survey report. Everyone agrees too quickly and too easily. The real conversation takes place in the corridor after the meeting. A CEO who learns to read these signs is getting better data than any dashboard will provide.
A CEO cannot insist on candor from their subordinates. What they can change is the cost of candor. That means knowing the role they have been cast in, noticing the narrative they are defending, and paying attention to what happens to the people who tell them something they did not want to hear.
The isolation that CEOs describe is not distance from information. Instead, it is produced continuously through the relationships between the CEO and their followers. To change the outcome, look to the talk first.
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