This is what you'll see once your team has responded.

•For every development conversation you open, schedule the follow-up before you leave the room. The follow-up is where the growth actually happens.

•Before introducing a new direction, explicitly acknowledge the state of the current one. Did it close? Did it ship? Did it fail? Name it.

•Ask people directly what kind of growth they are looking for right now, not what you think they need. The most useful thing you can do for their development comes from that answer.

•When you notice yourself excited about a new possibility, run a quick gut-check: do the people involved have enough capacity to take this on without dropping something else?

Based on 11 respondents

“I trust Mara to look out for my best interests.”

You rated yourself higher than your team did. You see yourself at 5.0. They see you at 3.2.

This is the combination that most urgently needs to be understood. Your team is experiencing regular burden that you don't recognize as burden. A small overestimate (0.5 to 1.0) usually means a specific process that you think is efficient and they think is overhead. A larger overestimate usually means a systemic pattern: chronic late decisions, meeting bloat, or a steady flow of after-hours requests that you read as informal and they read as obligatory.

Move first on the easiest thing to verify. Before you try to redesign your leadership, confirm with specific data (your team's calendar, your own sent-message timestamps, the list of decisions pending for more than two weeks) where the gap actually lives.

This week, audit your own sent messages for the last fourteen days. Count how many were sent outside working hours to your team. Count how many of those could have waited. If the number surprises you, that's where the gap lives.

Both you and your team read this as a strength. You rated yourself 5.0. They rated you 5.2.

Your team experiences you as safe to disagree with. You see yourself the same way. That agreement on openness is one of the most durable strengths a leader can have: the team is telling you when you're wrong, when a plan has a hole, when bad news needs to surface, and you're hearing it. Most leaders here didn't get here by accident. They got here by consistently handling the specific moments (someone pushing back, someone admitting a mistake, someone raising a concern) with curiosity instead of defense.

The move up from here is almost entirely about going first. Leaders here have built safety for others. The next step up means modeling it yourself by admitting uncertainty, changing your mind publicly, and being the first to name a mistake you made. The team will take the same risks they see you take.

In the next meeting where you're presenting a direction, name one thing you're unsure about before anyone else speaks. Not performatively. Specifically: "here's the part I'm not confident on, and here's what would change my mind." Watch what happens.

You rated yourself higher here than your team did. You see yourself at 5.0. They see you at 3.6.

This is the most actionable combination at a middle-zone read. Your team is experiencing less directional clarity than you think you're providing. The gap is almost always between the priorities you have in your head and what actually reaches the team. Direction feels clear to the person who decided it; it often feels ambiguous to the people who have to act on it without the background.

You don't need to rethink your priorities. You need to communicate the existing ones more clearly.

Write your team's top three priorities on a whiteboard at the start of your next planning session. Ask: "is this what you thought I thought the priorities were?" The answer usually contains the specific translation gap.

You rated yourself higher here than your team did. You see yourself at 5.0. They see you at 4.0.

This is the most actionable combination at this score level. Your team is experiencing lower standards than you think you're providing. The gap almost always comes from one of two places: you think you've communicated what the standard is, and the team doesn't see it that way; or there are areas where you've softened the bar and told yourself you were managing the relationship. Both show up the same way in the data.

Before changing anything, confirm what specifically is creating the gap. Ask one person on your team where they'd most like more clarity on what good looks like.

At your next 1:1, ask: "is there an area of your work where you're not sure what good looks like to me?" Listen. That's the standard that hasn't been communicated.

Both you and your team read this as a strength. You rated yourself 5.0. They rated you 5.4.

Your team experiences you as someone who actively invests in their growth, and you see yourself the same way. Agreement here is unusual: growth behaviors are among the easiest for leaders to overrate (they assume good intent equals impact) and underrate (they forget the small moments). Your team is telling you that your coaching is actually working, not just that you're trying.

The move up from here is about depth, not frequency. Leaders at this level tend to coach broadly and evenly. The next step usually means picking one or two people whose capability you're going to develop specifically this quarter, with an explicit outcome in mind.

Name one person on your team whose growth you want to treat as a personal project for the next 90 days. Write down one specific capability you want to develop in them and one concrete opportunity you'll create to stretch them toward it. Start this week.

Both you and your team read this as a strength. You rated yourself 5.0. They rated you 4.8.

Your team experiences you as someone who follows through, and you see yourself the same way. That agreement means you have a reliable follow-through practice and you're aware of it, which is the condition for protecting it. Most leaders with a strong record here built it through small, consistent follow-through rather than grand gestures: each kept commitment adding to a reputation over time.

The move up from here is almost entirely about the hard cases. Leaders at this level are consistently reliable under normal circumstances. The test at the top of this score is consistency under pressure: when keeping a commitment creates friction with someone senior, when delivering on a promise costs you something, when what you said publicly turns out to be harder than expected.

Think about the last commitment you kept that cost you something. Name what it cost. That's the version of you your team is responding to. Look for the next opportunity to do the same.

Your team experiences your communication as sincere. You're not sure that's how it reads. They rated you 4.5. You rated yourself 4.0.

On whether your communication feels genuine, your team's perception is the only data that matters, and theirs is clear. What they're responding to is the pattern they've lived: the moments when you said something that cost you something, the times you didn't have an answer and said so, the communications that didn't feel prepared. Leaders who underrate themselves here tend to be aware of every time they crafted a message, rehearsed a framing, or tempered a view for the audience. Your team is registering the moments when none of that was visible, which is most of them.

The risk in underrating yourself here is specific: leaders who don't trust their own sincerity tend to over-prepare communications, and over-prepared communications are often what make leaders read as less authentic, not more. The habit you're most likely to default to (more crafting, more control over the message) is the opposite of what produces the score you already have.

In your next team meeting, say one thing you're uncertain about without following it up with a hedge or a reframe. Name the uncertainty cleanly: "I don't know the answer to that and I'll find out" or "I'm not sure this is the right call and here's why." That's the register your team is responding to.

You trust your own loyalty to the team more than they trust it. They see you at 4.5. You see yourself at 5.0.

The score here is still solid, so this is a calibration note. Your team believes you're mostly on their side. They're not as certain as you are. The most common source: advocacy you've done on their behalf that was invisible to them. You pushed for them. They didn't see it. Their read is based on the evidence available to them, which is incomplete relative to what actually happened. The gap is often less about actual advocacy and more about the visibility of it.

The move is to make your advocacy more visible. Not by announcing it, but by giving the team enough context that they know when you've gone to bat for them.

Think about one time in the last quarter where you advocated for someone on your team or for the team as a whole in a room they weren't in. Tell that person directly, briefly, what happened. Not as a performance of loyalty: as information they deserved to have.