Summary
The traits that get leaders promoted aren’t the traits their teams actually need from them. New research shows the gap is wider than most organizations realize, and it points to a layer of leadership development most companies skip entirely: the relational one. Execution frameworks alone produce compliance, not commitment. Bloom Growth OS™ was built to close that gap, with a multi-year Relationship Curriculum structured directly into how the system works.
INDEX
The data companies don’t want to see
A new global study from Hogan Assessments compared personality data from more than 21,000 executives against survey responses from nearly 10,000 full-time employees worldwide.
The result: zero overlap between the top five competencies executives display and the top five leadership traits employees say they want.
The traits that help leaders get promoted are not what their teams need once they’re in the role.
What organizations reward:
- Inspiring and motivating toward shared goals
- Competing aggressively to outperform peers
- Taking initiative without waiting for direction
- Driving innovation and creative thinking
- Presenting ideas with confidence and command
What employees actually want:
- Communication that is diplomatic, tactful, and sensitive (75% of U.S. respondents)
- Sound decision-making grounded in data, not gut instinct alone (70%)
- Accountability—owning outcomes regardless of results (97% globally)
- Integrity and ethical behavior (97% globally)
- Emotional control and steadiness under pressure (89% of U.S. respondents—the single most cited quality)
What connects all five employee-desired traits is self-awareness. Leaders who understand how their behavior affects their teams are better positioned to build trust and drive performance.
The cost of ignoring this gap is measurable. According to Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, global employee engagement fell to just 20%, with declining people manager engagement cited as a primary driver.
Why the wrong leaders keep getting promoted
Hogan describes this as selecting for emergent leadership over effective leadership. Emergent leaders are skilled at getting promoted. Effective leaders are skilled at building teams that perform. The two profiles overlap far less than most organizations assume.
The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: leaders who rose by being visible reward the next generation of visible candidates, and the qualities that actually drive team performance get filtered out before they ever reach the top.
“Organizations have long tended to reward visibility, confidence and ambition in leaders,” said Allison Howell, CEO of Hogan Assessments. “But employees are telling us they want something more fundamental: leaders they can trust, leaders who communicate clearly and leaders who create the conditions for teams to succeed.”
Hogan also found that the same traits that help leaders rise can undermine them once they’re in role. The “dark side” of personality emerges when leaders stop self-monitoring under stress, fatigue, or complacency. The confidence that commands a room can read as arrogance to a direct report. The competitive drive that earned the promotion can become an inability to listen.
The behaviors U.S. employees find most damaging:
- Emotional volatility and unpredictability: 89%
- Arrogance and entitlement: 82%
- Passive-aggressive behavior and stubborn resistance: 78%
- Extreme caution and fear of failure: 68%
🧠 Bloom tip: Pull your most recent leadership development initiative. Map what it actually measured against the five traits employees say they want. The gap between those two lists is where you’re losing people.
What new research says about leadership potential
The Hogan data reveals a gap in how organizations select leaders. Separate research suggests the gap starts even earlier—in how leadership potential is measured at all.
Research found that students most likely to take on leadership roles were those who could quickly shift strategies under pressure—a quality called cognitive flexibility.
Two other predictors surfaced alongside it:
- Future leaders distribute their attention across competing priorities rather than optimizing for a single high-reward task.
- They’re comfortable working through uncertainty rather than defaulting to a “move fast and break things” approach.
None of these qualities show up on a resume. None are captured by a standard personality assessment. For decades, leadership identification has relied on personality assessments, interviews, and performance history—tools that capture how someone acts day to day, not how they think when conditions shift.
Cognitive flexibility, tolerance for uncertainty, distributed attention—these are behavioral patterns, not personality types. And that distinction matters for how you develop the leaders you already have.
🧠 Bloom tip: In your next leadership team meeting, introduce a constraint: present a problem without a solution attached and ask the group to sit with it for five minutes before proposing any fixes. Notice who tolerates the ambiguity and who rushes to resolve it. That’s useful data.
The discomfort effective leaders avoid
Cognitive flexibility and comfort with uncertainty don’t emerge on their own. They require sustained developmental work—the kind most leaders never sign up for.
Dr. Natasha Thapar-Olmos, an associate professor at Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Education and Psychology, writes that effective leadership requires tolerating not knowing, receiving feedback without defensiveness, and accepting that growth as a leader has no endpoint.
She identifies three types of discomfort most leaders actively avoid.
1. The discomfort of not knowing
Leaders are often—and unfairly—expected to have all the answers, when in reality leadership is about chasing a moving target, often with a blindfold on. Leaders who model the capacity to sit with uncertainty create something valuable: a culture where not knowing is normalized, and creative problem-solving can actually happen.
🧠 Bloom tip: You can now confidently capture insights mid-meeting, knowing your work is protected when the conversation shifts to the next topic.
2. The discomfort of unintended impact
Well-intentioned leaders still cause harm they didn’t anticipate. Cultural humility means pausing the impulse to defend intent and instead asking to understand how the impact landed. That response builds trust in a way defensiveness never can—and it maps directly to what Hogan’s data shows employees want most.
🧠 Bloom tip: After a difficult conversation, follow up with: “I want to make sure I communicated that well. How did it land for you?”
3. The discomfort of ongoing process
Researchers Steve Gulati and Catherine Weir note that cultural competence in leadership development is not a destination but a process. There’s no finish line, which means a one-time training or quarterly workshop can’t do the job.
This is where most organizations stall. They invest in a leadership retreat or a 360 review cycle, check the box, and move on. The growth doesn’t compound because the structure isn’t there to sustain it.
The costs of skipping this work are measurable. According to the 2023 Women in the Workplace report by McKinsey and Co., women who experience microaggressions are three times more likely to consider leaving their jobs and four times more likely to experience burnout.
Poor leadership isn’t a culture problem in isolation—it’s a retention and performance problem with a price tag.
The gap most operating systems leave open
Put the data together and a pattern becomes clear.
Organizations promote leaders who impress, not leaders who build trust. Most leadership development focuses on execution frameworks rather than relational capabilities. And the developmental discomfort required to grow those capabilities is rarely built into any sustained structure.
As Flourish states directly: “Technical skills without inner work create leaders who can execute but can’t inspire. Inner work without practical application creates self-aware leaders who can’t drive results.”
Most systems solve for one side. The execution framework exists. The relational layer doesn’t.
Structure without relational work produces compliance, not commitment. Leaders who haven’t developed self-awareness, emotional mastery, or the capacity for genuinely honest conversation will hit a ceiling—regardless of how good the system around them is.
How Bloom Growth OS™ addresses it
The Bloom Growth OS™ (Bloom Growth operating system) was designed with relationships as one of its eight core essentials. Not a supplementary module. Not an annual retreat. A structured, multi-year curriculum built into how the system works from day one.
The Relationship Curriculum covers five sequentially built capabilities:
- Self-awareness
- Emotional mastery
- Relational skills
- Influence and impact
- Human flourishing
According to Flourish, the first four build on each other progressively, moving from inner work to outer impact. The fifth—human flourishing—amplifies everything else.
This isn’t a weekend intensive. It’s a 2.5-to-3-year journey. The first 90 days alone focus on three foundational functions: creating psychological safety and trust, challenging limiting beliefs and assumptions, and building genuine emotional connection between team members. Without those three in place, the depth of conversation required for real growth can’t happen.
The curriculum also addresses what derails most leadership teams.
In roughly 40–50% of client organizations, Flourish notes a predictable pattern: someone speaks in a particular tone, another person reacts defensively, and a productive conversation becomes a source of friction. The “Managing Emotional Triggers” work helps leaders see what’s happening in those moments—and choose a different response rather than repeat the cycle.
That maps directly to what Hogan’s data found: 89% of U.S. employees identified emotional volatility as the most damaging leadership behavior. Emotional control is what employees want most, and emotional trigger work is what most leaders have never formally developed.
Flourish also distinguishes between resilience and robustness. Resilience is bouncing back after difficulty. Robustness is building systems that prevent those difficulties in the first place. Most leadership teams are skilled firefighters. The Relationship Curriculum builds fire prevention.
What this looks like in practice
A 28-year-old marketing director at a commercial real estate company was stepping into her first leadership role when she started working with Bloom. She was capable, but giving feedback or following up on status made her uncomfortable. Her team often got defensive. Projects slipped as a result.
After working within the Bloom system for a few months, here’s what she said:
“The weekly meetings and the shared priorities have changed everything. Now when I ask how something’s going, it doesn’t feel like I’m singling someone out. It’s just part of how we work. People aren’t defensive anymore. I can actually lead.”
She didn’t change her personality. The system gave her a structure that made the relational work feel natural. Within the first quarter, she was managing fewer fires. Her team was delivering on time, without the stress that had been constant before.
That’s what it looks like when the relational layer is built in—not bolted on.
What you can do right now
The research points to a clear direction. Here’s where to start.
This week:
- Map your leadership development program against the five traits Hogan’s study identified as most important to employees. Note the gaps.
- Introduce one moment of structured uncertainty into your next leadership meeting. Observe how the team responds.
This quarter:
- Review your promotion criteria. Is your organization selecting for emergent leadership or effective leadership?
- Add a trust and communication metric to your next engagement survey or leadership evaluation.
For your leadership team’s long-term growth:
- Consider whether your operating system is building the relational layer, not just the execution layer.
- Explore how Bloom Core’s Relationship Curriculum can become the structure that sustains that development over time.
“Leadership pipelines are strongest when organizations align how they identify and develop leaders with what employees value. Trust, accountability, and sound judgment are not secondary qualities. They are central to team effectiveness and long-term performance,” said Allison Howell, CEO of Hogan Assessments.
Bloom Growth OS™ was built around exactly that principle.
Ready to start?
Start with chapter one of Flourish to see the process from the inside, then book a call if you want to talk through what it would look like for your team.