There is a conversation I have with almost every executive team I work with, and it almost never happens in the first meeting. It usually surfaces around month two or three, when the team has started to trust that what gets said in the room stays useful rather than becoming ammunition. Someone will finally name the thing that's been true the whole time: that some meaningful portion of what isn't working traces back to the person who called the coaching engagement in the first place.
This is not comfortable to say. It is almost always true.
Research by Tasha Eurich, an organizational psychologist, found that 95% of people believe they are self-aware, but only about 10 to 15% actually are. That gap is significant in any context. In a CEO, it can shape the culture of an entire organization, because a CEO's blind spots don't stay private. They become the operating norms of every team the CEO touches.
A Merryck and Co. analysis looked at the self-assessments of 500 leaders alongside feedback from 10,000 of their peers over fifteen years and found that the areas leaders identified as needing work barely ever overlapped with what their peers actually saw as the problem. Leaders are mostly oblivious to how their colleagues experience their weaknesses. That means the CEO who is certain they know what's limiting the team is working from a map that may have very little relationship to the actual terrain.
What it usually looks like
It's rarely the things a CEO would recognize as leadership failures. The obvious version: the yelling, the berating, the clear abuses of power. Those are visible enough that someone usually addresses them eventually, or at least documents them. The version that does more lasting damage is subtler.
The CEO who has opinions so strong that their team has stopped forming their own does the most lasting damage. Not because the team lacks capability, but because they've learned that having a different view costs more than it's worth, so they've gradually stopped having views that differ. The CEO who is so decisive that the speed of their decision-making has made deliberation feel like friction has trained everyone around them to skip the deliberation. The CEO who mistakes comfort for agreement, who reads a smooth meeting as a sign of alignment when it's actually a sign of a team that has figured out how to manage them, is the hardest version of this problem to fix.
I watched this pattern for years before I had language for it. At The Marriott Theatre, where I worked as Artistic Director for fifteen years, I had enormous positional authority over every production decision. And I was genuinely interested in collaboration. What I came to understand, slowly, and only after enough people told me honestly, was that my interest in collaboration and my team's experience of collaboration were not the same thing. My enthusiasm for an idea, my speed in reaching a conclusion, my confidence in my own read of a situation, all of it was shaping how much room other people felt they had to bring a genuinely different view. I thought we were deciding things together. We were watching me decide things.
Why it's so hard to see
The same research that shows how rare genuine self-awareness is also shows why: you need self-awareness to realize you lack it. The CEO whose decisiveness has silenced the room doesn't experience the room as silenced. They experience it as aligned. The one whose opinions have crowded out everyone else's doesn't feel the crowding. They feel engaged. The feedback that would correct this perception almost never arrives organically, because the conditions that would allow it to arrive are the same conditions the blind spot has been eroding.
There's also a selection effect at work. The behaviors that got a CEO to the top are often the exact behaviors that create problems once they're there. Confidence, decisiveness, certainty, a strong point of view: those are assets at earlier career stages. At the top of an organization, where the job is to get the best out of a room full of capable people, the same qualities can become the thing that's making the room smaller.
What actually changes it
It starts with access to honest information, which almost always means a mechanism that bypasses the normal social pressures that filter feedback before it reaches the top: a 360 assessment with genuine access to direct reports, a coach who reports back without managing the message, or a direct conversation from someone with enough relational equity and enough psychological safety to say the uncomfortable thing.
In my experience, the conversation almost never goes the way the CEO expected. The most common reaction isn't defensiveness. It's a long pause, followed by something like: I've been hearing pieces of this for years and didn't know that's what it was. The data doesn't create the insight. It gives the CEO language for something they already sensed but couldn't name. That's usually when the work actually starts.
The Korn Ferry Institute found that companies with strong leadership self-awareness scores delivered nearly three times higher financial returns than those with lower scores. Which means this isn't a personal development indulgence. It's a business variable, and it's one of the most consequential ones in the building.
The hardest part isn't the diagnosis. The hardest part is what happens when a CEO discovers that the very things they were most proud of, the clarity of their vision, the speed of their decision-making, the strength of their conviction, are the same things that have been making it harder for the people around them to do their best work. That's not a comfortable place to sit. It's also the only place the real change starts from.