By Cynthia Y. Chan, Managing Director, Catalyse | Founder of The Rewrite
Recently, I was speaking with a senior leader shortly after he had learnt that a member of his team had lodged a complaint about him. He was genuinely perplexed. After describing the situation, he paused for a moment before saying, almost to himself, “I thought I was the cool boss.”
He went on to explain why the complaint had caught him so completely by surprise. He maintained an open-door policy. He admitted when he did not know something. He encouraged questions rather than immediate answers. He made time for regular one-on-one meetings with every member of his team because he wanted people to feel supported. These were not symbolic gestures. They reflected how he genuinely wanted to lead.
The complaint was not about any of those intentions. Instead, it concerned how some employees experienced those regular one-on-one meetings. For some, they were valuable opportunities to receive guidance and discuss challenges. For others, they carried a different meaning altogether. Being called into the leader’s office prompted anxiety rather than reassurance. They wondered whether they had made a mistake, whether they were under scrutiny, or whether they were about to receive difficult news. The meetings themselves had not changed. The experience of them had.
Neither perspective was objectively wrong. The leader’s intentions were genuine, and the employees’ experiences were equally real. What struck me was not that the two differed, but that the difference had remained invisible until a complaint brought it into view.
That conversation has stayed with me because it captures a pattern I have encountered repeatedly. Many thoughtful and well-intentioned leaders assume they understand the impact of their leadership because they know the intentions behind their decisions. Yet those being led never experience intention directly. They experience behaviour, patterns, context, and interpretation. Leadership is always received before it is understood.
The Blind Spot
This distinction reveals what I have come to think of as one of leadership’s most persistent blind spots. Leaders naturally evaluate themselves according to what they were trying to achieve. Employees respond to what leadership consistently feels like from where they are standing. The gap between those two perspectives often remains hidden precisely because both are internally coherent.
This is one reason discussions about psychological safety have become so prominent. At its simplest, psychological safety refers to a shared belief that people can speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, or challenge ideas without fear of embarrassment or punishment. The concept has helped organisations recognise that culture is shaped not only by policies or values, but also by everyday interactions.
Yet psychological safety is often approached as something leaders create through particular behaviours. Leaders are encouraged to invite questions, acknowledge uncertainty, encourage participation, or express appreciation for dissenting views. These are valuable practices, but they can unintentionally reinforce another assumption: that demonstrating the right behaviours necessarily produces the intended experience.
The leader I spoke with had already adopted many of those practices. His surprise did not arise because he lacked awareness or commitment. It arose because he believed that the meaning of his behaviour was largely self-evident. His team reminded him that meaning is never determined solely by the person acting. It is also shaped by the person receiving. Once that distinction becomes visible, psychological safety begins to look less like an outcome produced by good intentions and more like an ongoing inquiry into how leadership is actually experienced.
Looking Beneath Behaviour
Much of leadership development understandably focuses on observable behaviour. Leaders learn to communicate more clearly, delegate more effectively, provide constructive feedback, and manage conflict with greater confidence. Behaviour matters because it is visible, measurable, and capable of change.
Over time, however, my own work became increasingly influenced by a psychotherapy-informed perspective. Not because psychotherapy offers a better model of leadership, but because it asks a different kind of question. Rather than beginning with what people do, it encourages us to become curious about what may be shaping those behaviours, particularly when individuals are under pressure.
That perspective proved useful because it explained something I had struggled to reconcile. Competent, caring leaders were often genuinely surprised by the feedback they received. Their surprise was rarely defensive. More often, it reflected a sincere inability to see how their own leadership was being interpreted. Like all of us, they had access to their own motives but not to another person’s internal experience.
Employees, meanwhile, interpret behaviour through their own contexts. Previous managers, organisational norms, workload, uncertainty, personality, and accumulated interactions all influence how a single conversation is understood. A leader may intend accountability while another person experiences unpredictability. A direct question may feel like healthy challenge to one employee and public exposure to another. Neither interpretation exists independently of context.
Seen this way, leadership is not simply a sequence of behaviours waiting to be perfected. It is an ongoing interaction between intention and interpretation. The behaviours themselves remain important, but they tell only part of the story.
From Intention to Discovery
Over time, I found myself returning to three ideas that gradually became less like techniques and more like disciplines of practice.
Lead with Intent.
Intent matters because leadership without purpose quickly becomes reactive. Decisions should be guided by values rather than convenience, and people deserve leaders who think carefully about why they make the choices they do. Clear intention provides direction, consistency, and integrity. It remains an essential starting point.
But intention is only the beginning.
Discover Experience.
Experience cannot be understood from a single engagement survey or one candid conversation. It emerges through patterns observed over time. It becomes visible through feedback that recurs across different settings, through investigations that reveal recurring themes, through coaching conversations that expose assumptions, through workshops where participants hesitate before responding, through observations that initially seem insignificant, and sometimes through moments of silence that invite further attention rather than immediate explanation.
Discovery requires leaders to treat experience as evidence rather than assumption. It asks them to recognise that different people can experience the same leadership behaviour differently without either perspective being dismissed. The objective is not to eliminate every variation in experience. That would be neither realistic nor desirable. Rather, it is to understand the patterns that consistently emerge and to consider what they might be revealing.
Stay Curious.
Curiosity is often described as an interpersonal skill, but I have come to see it as a discipline. A psychotherapy-informed perspective reinforced this understanding. Curiosity is the willingness to postpone certainty long enough to understand another person’s reality before evaluating it. It is not passive agreement, nor is it endless questioning. It is an active commitment to distinguish explanation from assumption.
This becomes particularly important when leaders receive difficult feedback. The instinct to defend intention is understandable. After all, intentions frequently are good. Curiosity interrupts that instinct just long enough to ask a different question. Instead of asking whether the feedback accurately reflects who the leader intended to be, curiosity asks what the experience might reveal about how leadership has been understood.
That shift does not weaken authority. It strengthens judgment because it expands the information available before conclusions are drawn.
The Leadership Question We Should Be Asking
Discussions about psychological safety have undoubtedly advanced leadership thinking by encouraging organisations to pay greater attention to the conditions that enable people to contribute openly. Yet there is a risk that psychological safety itself becomes treated as the objective, rather than as one expression of something more fundamental.
The more enduring challenge is understanding the relationship between intention and experience. Leaders inevitably act with intentions that others cannot directly observe. Employees inevitably interpret those actions through experiences leaders cannot fully see. Neither perspective is sufficient on its own. Leadership becomes more effective when both are held together rather than assumed to be the same.
Perhaps, then, the question is not simply, “How do I create psychological safety?” A more useful question may be, “How do I discover how my leadership is actually being experienced?”
That question shifts attention away from performing leadership behaviours and towards understanding their impact. It invites leaders to gather evidence patiently, to notice patterns before reaching conclusions, and to remain open to interpretations that differ from their own. It accepts that even the most thoughtful leaders will occasionally misunderstand the effect of their actions, not because they lack integrity, but because human experience is inherently more complex than individual intention.
Leadership begins with intention. It becomes visible through experience. It improves through curiosity.
About Author:
Cynthia Chan is Managing Director of Catalyse Consulting, a social enterprise founded by AWARE, and Founder of The Rewrite. With three decades of leadership across Asia and North America, she has led teams of hundreds and driven transformation at the highest levels. A Certified Organisational Coach with a psychotherapy-informed practice, she works with leaders ready to understand their story before they rewrite it.”
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