The Belief Gap Is a Noticing Gap
- Debbie Braden
- Aug 10
- 3 min read
BCG published research last week naming what they call the belief gap — the distance between what a leadership team knows good leadership requires and what it actually does. Their fix: reframe, practice, hardwire. Leaders who reframe their beliefs are 168% more likely to outperform. (1)
Worth reading. But look at who's in the survey: leaders rating leaders. Self-assessment and peer-assessment, inside the same room. That measures one belief gap. It misses another one entirely, because front-line employees are running on their own beliefs about leadership, and nobody surveyed them.
I hear them in the confidential interviews I run inside companies mid-transition, with the people deep inside the organization responsible for executing strategy. Real people, real thoughts:
"I don't feel like I'm able to ask questions. That I'm going to be shut down."
"There are lots of communications to customers but very little to us. It's hard to learn about campaigns from them instead of the company."
"We never had where the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing until they took over."
Those comments are evidence of a belief already forming—leadership isn't actually listening, so there's no point saying more than I have to. Gallup's newest workplace data backs up how common that belief is — global engagement sits at 20%, down from 23% in 2022, and one of the questions Gallup uses to measure it is simply whether someone received recognition for good work in the last seven days. (2) Most people can't say yes.
There's a small detail in the BCG piece that's actually a response to this, even if the authors don't frame it that way. When Hubert Joly took over Best Buy, he didn't start with a strategy offsite. He spent a week on the floor, wearing a "CEO in training" badge, asking employees three questions: what's working, what's not, what do you need.
Good instinct — but what the BCG piece doesn’t say is whether he weighted all three evenly, or whether “what’s working” ended up as a footnote on his clipboard while the other two got the follow-through. Collect it and let it evaporate, and you've confirmed the belief instead of changing it.
I recently met a former CEO, Jeffrey Cartwright, who shared with me a system he built for that exact moment. Throughout the week, he and his team walked the manufacturing floor working through normal business priorities and issues. He carried 3x5 notecards, jotting down positive behavior as he noticed it. Every Friday, he’d review them and handwrite short notes in green ink so they would stand out—to eight to ten ordinary teammates, not the stars, but those who’d done something specific and right that week. Delivered through their supervisor, not directly. Teammates began displaying the notes at their workstations and others started asking what it took to get one—the behavior modeled itself, and others repeated it.
Within a few weeks, each time, there was a measurable shift in momentum.
That momentum is exactly what private equity is looking for in their deals too. McKinsey's latest read on private equity is that the industry has matured past the era where returns came from multiple expansion and cheap leverage. Alpha now has to be made, not found — through the operational choices firms make after close, leadership development chief among them. (3) Culture is starting to factor into how deals get underwritten and priced, even where firms haven't settled on how to measure it yet. That's a conversation for another post. But the direction is the same one this article is making: the belief gap on the front line isn't a soft-side concern anymore. It's underneath the number.
One employee I interviewed during a culture listening session put it simpler than any of this: "I guess what I want most is for us to have consistency. I'm at 100% doing everything I can, hands down, to make this thing work."
You can survey leaders about leaders all day. The front-line employees already know which answers are true — and whether anyone's asking.
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