What Your Team Is Waiting For (And Not Getting)

Late last year, my husband and I checked into a fancy Melbourne hotel to celebrate our wedding anniversary. We were looking forward to it. On arrival, the front desk staff greeted us warmly and offered us something lovely: a bottle of champagne to be sent to our room. We didn’t ask for it, nor were we expecting it. But once the offer was made, we were delighted.

We headed upstairs, waited…and the champagne never arrived.

Nobody followed up. Nobody apologised. The offer simply evaporated, and with it, a small but meaningful piece of trust.

What was interesting was that we walked in with no expectation of champagne, but the moment it was offered and not delivered, we felt the gap. Not because we were entitled to it, but because a promise had been made and broken.

That experience stayed with me, and not because it ruined our anniversary, but because it captures something I frequently see play out in workplaces.

The Expectation Gap in Leadership

There’s a name for what happened in that hotel lobby, and it happens in leadership too.

Expectation-disconfirmation theory, originally developed in consumer satisfaction research1 and later extended to other settings, proposes that people evaluate experiences by comparing perceived performance with prior expectations or an implied standard.

We judge the experience we receive not against an absolute standard, but against what was promised or implied. When reality falls short of expectations, the gap is felt acutely, regardless of how reasonable the original expectations were.

In leadership, this plays out constantly.

A leader who promises to be present, communicate clearly, follow through, and then doesn’t, creates something more corrosive than a leader who never made those commitments in the first place.

Inconsistency breeds distrust, and distrust, once established, is extraordinarily difficult to reverse.

New research from Hogan Assessments makes this concrete2.

Drawing on personality profiles of more than 21,000 executives and survey responses from 9,794 workers across 25 countries and 1,900 organisations, the 2026 Hogan Global Leadership Effectiveness Study asked the question: Do the leaders of organisations match what the people being led actually want?

The striking answer is ‘No’.

The Competency Chasm

Hogan found zero overlap between the top five competencies today’s executives demonstrate and the top five competencies employees want their leaders to display.

Executives are rewarded for inspiring others, competing, presenting ideas confidently, taking initiative, and driving innovation. These are the qualities that get people noticed.

The team members, in contrast, want something fundamentally different. Across all 25 markets surveyed, the top five expectations were consistent: clear communication, sound decision-making, accountability, integrity, and the ability to lead others effectively.

More than 96% of respondents rated integrity and accountability as important or extremely important in an ideal leader. Nearly half of all survey respondents wanted leaders who value teamwork, networking, and belonging; yet this ranked lowest among the values executives actually hold.

Think about what that means. Team members are walking into their workplaces every day, hoping for leaders who communicate clearly, own their decisions, and prioritise the team. They are not getting it.

There is a further complication.

The qualities that get leaders promoted don’t simply become irrelevant once they arrive. Hogan’s data show that under pressure, strengths such as confidence, boldness and competitive drive can tip into arrogance and emotional volatility.

So, the very traits that earn the role can erode the trust the role depends on.

The Cost of the Gap

This isn’t about an abstract leadership philosophy.

Research on leadership and organisational outcomes consistently demonstrates that leaders have an outsized effect on performance, for better and for worse3.

If the leader at the top is operating with a fundamental mismatch between the leadership they project and the leadership their team needs, that influence compounds downward through every level of the organisation.

When leaders fail to deliver on the expectations they set, people disengage. They don’t necessarily quit (though many do). They check out, do enough to get by and stop bringing their best thinking and genuine commitment.

Who ultimately pays? You. Because you carry the cost in performance, engagement, and results.

The Consistency Imperative:

So what does it take to close the gap?

There is one non-negotiable quality: consistency.

Consistency is the foundation of trust, and trust is the foundation of everything.

It is really hard to work for a leader who is thoughtful one day and self-centred the next. Who is focused one day, scattered the next. Who is interested one day, and disinterested the next.

As you read this article, I am challenging you to think about how consistently good you are.

Here are a few prompts to assess yourself against.

1. Say what you mean and mean what you say

The champagne that never arrived wasn’t a catastrophe, but it was a broken promise.

In leadership, small broken promises accumulate. Over time, they become the lens through which every subsequent commitment is evaluated.

Your team members want a leader who follows through. Every time, no matter how small, you miss, forget, or sidestep a commitment, an element of trust is eroded.

Integrity is not just about grand ethical moments; it lives in whether you did what you said you would do, by when you said you would do it.

2. Communicate before people have to ask

Clear communication was rated the single most important competency by global survey respondents in the Hogan study.

This is about communication as respect: keeping people informed, acknowledging uncertainty honestly, and never leaving team members to interpret silence. In the absence of communication, your team members will tell themselves it means something, and it may well mean something different to your intent.

Proactive clarity is one of the highest-leverage behaviours available to any leader.

3. Own the outcomes, not just the wins

Your team members don’t need you to be infallible.

They do, however, need you to take ownership of decisions, consequences and course corrections.

Leaders who deflect, blame, or quietly rewrite history when things go wrong are the leaders whose teams disengage fastest.

4. Manage yourself under pressure

The question is not whether you have derailing tendencies under pressure; everyone does. The question is whether you know what they are and have the discipline to manage them.

Strategic self-awareness is the metacognitive skill that separates emergent leaders from effective ones.

When you develop this capacity, you are better able to adapt your approach to the context, rather than defaulting to what’s comfortable when the pressure rises.

5. Prioritise the team’s success over your own visibility

Your team members want a leader who serves the team, not a leader who uses the team to serve themselves.

This approach requires a genuine shift in orientation from ‘How do I appear?’ to ‘What does this team need?’

It is a shift that not all leaders make naturally, but it can be developed intentionally through coaching, feedback, and accountability structures that reward both team performance and individual achievement.

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Close the Leadership gap

The gaps the Hogan research identified are not new and neither is the gap between how leaders see themselves and how their teams experience them. The good news is that the workers surveyed were not asking for impossible perfection. They were asking for leaders who communicate clearly, make sound decisions, take ownership, act with integrity, and show up for their teams.

They are essentially asking for leaders who deliver on their promises.

So, your challenge today: Where have you made an offer, implicitly or explicitly, that you haven’t followed through on?

Perhaps, there is a champagne moment sitting unclaimed in your team.

Republished with courtesy from michellegibbings.com.

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