A senior leader will describe their own strengths and weaknesses with total confidence, and that description is often wrong. Not because the leader lacks self-knowledge, but because self-knowledge is the one assessment no one can conduct on themselves. What a leader believes about how they operate and how the people around them actually experience them are two separate pictures, and the distance between them tends to widen with seniority because the more senior the leader, the less willing anyone is to tell them the truth. That unmeasured gap is where careers stall, and good leaders plateau without understanding why.
Dr. Luigi A. Pecoraro, Chief Growth Officer (CGO) at Next Level Leader Coaching, has spent 20 years advising executives and designing leadership development programs at business schools including SMU Cox, Case Western, and the University of Arizona’s Eller College. His central argument reframes self-awareness from a personal trait into a built system. “What we believe about ourselves and how others experience us are rarely the same thing,” Pecoraro states. The bridge between those two views is not introspection. It is a feedback loop, and most leaders have never deliberately built one.
One Source of Feedback Is a Distorted Mirror
The most common mistake leaders make is drawing their entire self-image from a single stream of feedback, usually their direct manager. The problem is not that the manager is wrong. It is that any one source sees only a narrow slice of how a leader operates, shaped by a specific relationship, context, and set of interactions. A leader who calibrates entirely to that one view is studying a distorted mirror and mistaking it for the full reflection.
Pecoraro’s correction is triangulation. Real self-awareness comes from pulling observations across peers, direct reports, clients, and validated assessments, because each lens reveals a different version of the same person. The leader a peer experiences is not the leader a direct report experiences, and neither matches what a client sees. None of these views is complete on its own, but the pattern that emerges across all of them sits far closer to the truth than any single one. The discipline is to stop trusting the most convenient source and start assembling the composite, because only the composite shows a leader what is actually consistent about how they operate rather than what one relationship happened to surface.
Annual Feedback Is Too Slow to Change Anything
Even leaders who gather feedback often trap it in the wrong cadence. The annual review is the default mechanism in most organizations, and it moves far too slowly to shape behavior. By the time feedback arrives twelve months after the moments that prompted it, the context is gone, the behavior is entrenched, and the insight has decayed into a vague performance note nobody can act on precisely.
Pecoraro’s alternative is to shorten the cycle, building a monthly or quarterly rhythm around two simple questions: ‘What should I keep doing?’ and ‘What is getting in the way?’ The simplicity is the point. A short, repeatable loop turns feedback from an annual event into an ongoing habit, and habits compound in a way events never do.
Each cycle sharpens the last, the leader adjusts while the behavior is still fresh, and self-awareness accumulates steadily rather than arriving once a year as a verdict. The leaders who grow fastest are not the ones who receive the most feedback in a sitting. They are the ones who receive it often enough that it actually changes what they do next week.
Closing the Loop Is What Builds the Trust
Feedback gathered and then ignored deteriorates trust, because the person who offered an honest observation watches nothing come of it and concludes that speaking up is pointless. A leader who solicits input and fails to act on it has not run a feedback loop. They have run a survey that quietly taught their people to stop being candid. Closing the loop is a specific, three-part act. When someone shares an observation, tell them what you heard, tell them what you intend to do about it, and then circle back later to show them how you actually changed. Pecoraro is direct about the payoff. “That one practice alone will build credibility faster than any leadership course you’ve taken.”
The reason it works is that it proves the feedback was real, not performative, and people extend far more honesty to a leader who demonstrates that honesty produces change. That completes the system. Diversify the sources to see clearly, shorten the cycle so the insight stays fresh, and close the loop so people keep telling the truth. Self-awareness is the foundation on which every senior leader stands, and it is not a gift some leaders are born with. It is a structure that the best ones build on purpose, which is exactly why they become the leaders people want to follow, and organizations fight to keep.
Follow Dr. Luigi A. Pecoraro on LinkedIn for more insights on leadership development, executive self-awareness, and building the feedback systems that accelerate growth.
