How to gather feedback from colleagues to understand your leadership approach?

Understanding how others experience your leadership is not something that happens automatically. The more senior you become, the more your self perception can drift away from the day to day reality your colleagues live with. It is not usually because you lack self awareness. It is because power, politeness, and unspoken incentives shape what people are willing to say in front of you. If you want a clearer picture of your leadership approach, you cannot simply wait for feedback to appear. You have to design a way of gathering it. This can feel especially delicate in cultures that value hierarchy and social harmony. Across many Southeast Asian and Gulf organizations, people are raised to respect authority, avoid direct confrontation, and protect relationships. Your colleagues may see your blind spots with uncomfortable clarity, yet decide that staying quiet is safer. That means the burden is on you to lower the social cost of speaking up and to make it obvious that feedback will be treated as useful input rather than disloyal criticism.

The first step is to clarify what you are actually trying to understand. Leaders often rush to send out a survey or ask people to be “brutally honest” with them. The result is usually vague comments that feel personal but do not guide change. Before you involve anyone else, sit with a few questions yourself. Where do people seem clear and supported when they work with me, and where do they look confused or hesitant. Under pressure, what kind of leader do I believe I am, and how confident am I that others would describe the same person. If I disappeared for two weeks, which parts of the system would move smoothly and which would stall, waiting for my sign off.

From these reflections, pick two or three focus areas. You might be curious about how you set priorities, how you handle conflict, or how you coach someone who is taking on a new role. Narrowing the scope makes it easier for colleagues to give feedback that is specific and grounded. You are not asking them to judge your personality. You are inviting them to comment on how your behavior affects their work.

The next decision is who to involve. The convenient path is to ask your closest allies or the direct reports you already feel comfortable with. Their input is still valuable, but if you stop there you will mostly hear variations of what you already know. To understand your leadership in a fuller way, look at the different vantage points around you. Include at least one peer who sees you in decision meetings, one or two direct reports who experience your daily management habits, and if possible, someone who works with you across functions, such as a partner from product, operations, or finance. If you report to a manager or a board representative, their perspective shows how your leadership travels upward as well.

When you invite these colleagues, be explicit about your intention. Tell them this is not a performance evaluation of them. It is an attempt to see your own leadership more accurately so that you can remove friction and support the team better. When people understand that the exercise is about improving the system, not finding someone to blame, they are more likely to contribute thoughtfully.

Once you know who you will speak with, you need to decide what to ask. Feedback becomes unhelpful when it drifts into labels like “inspiring,” “difficult,” or “intense.” These might be sincere reactions, but they do not tell you what to repeat or what to change. You want questions that pull people back into concrete situations and observable behavior. Instead of asking what someone thinks of your leadership style, ask whether they can recall a recent moment when your actions made their work easier or harder, and what you did in that situation. Ask what role they see you playing when projects feel stuck, and what they wish you would do more or less of in those moments.

Make room for both strengths and friction. One way to do this is to say, “If you had to keep three things about how I lead exactly as they are because they help you do your best work, what would they be. If you could adjust two things about how I show up that would remove recurring friction for you, what would you choose.” This framing keeps the conversation away from becoming a complaint session while still leaving space for uncomfortable truths. You do not need a long questionnaire. Five or six well chosen prompts are usually plenty for colleagues to give rich, usable feedback.

Then, choose the channels that fit your context. In small, tight knit teams, one to one conversations can open up honest and nuanced dialogue. Sitting down in a quiet setting and saying, “I want to understand how my leadership actually feels for you,” can show seriousness and humility. Yet in high power distance cultures, people may still soften their words when they have to look you in the eye. That is where written formats can help. Anonymous forms or written prompts often draw out candour that would never appear in a room with you. The trade off is that anonymous comments can sometimes be vague or harsher in tone. You need to read them for patterns rather than obsess over individual sentences.

Often, a hybrid approach works best. You might begin with an anonymous pulse survey to identify themes, then sit down with a few colleagues to explore certain points in more depth. You might use project retrospectives to surface observations about how you led during a specific sprint, then follow up with one to one conversations to ask how you could support them better next time. The exact mix matters less than your consistency in using it.

Before any feedback is given, the tone you set is crucial. People instinctively scan for signs of defensiveness. If they sense that you are fishing for validation or that you might punish honest criticism, they will retreat behind polite phrases. So start by owning your position clearly. You might say, “As your manager or founder, I know my behavior sets the tone for how this team works. I also know I have blind spots. I am collecting feedback so I can understand what it feels like to work with me and adjust where needed.” Then lay out simple ground rules. Ask for honesty that is respectful and focused on impact to the work. Promise that you will not argue or retaliate. Once you make that promise, you must keep it consistently. A single moment of coldness after someone shares something difficult can shut down trust for a long time.

When feedback starts coming in, it is natural to zoom in on the one remark that stings the most. Maybe someone writes that you cut people off in meetings or that you change priorities without explaining why. Your instinct may be to defend yourself or to mentally dismiss the comment as an outlier. Hold that impulse. Treat each piece of feedback as a data point, not a verdict. After you finish collecting responses, step back and look at everything together. Ask yourself which observations appear across different colleagues and contexts. Those repeating patterns matter more than any single sentence. You might notice that several people describe uncertainty about how decisions are made, or that a few colleagues hesitate to escalate issues because you always seem rushed.

Group these recurring comments into themes. One cluster might relate to communication clarity. Another might touch on delegation and how you share ownership. A third might reflect your emotional tone when things go wrong. Seen this way, feedback begins to draw a map of your leadership approach. It shows not only what you tend to do, but how reliably you repeat those behaviors.

From there, your task is to turn insight into action. Feedback on its own changes very little. The shift comes from translating what you have heard into specific leadership experiments. Choose one or two themes to work on first. If people say they do not understand how you set priorities, you could introduce a short weekly update where you list the top three priorities, explain what changed and why, and highlight what that means for their current tasks. If colleagues say you step in too quickly to solve problems, you might adopt a simple rule in meetings where you ask two clarifying questions and one coaching question before you offer any solution. Framing these as experiments helps you stay flexible and lowers the pressure. You can tell the team what you are trying, why it matters, and how long you will run the experiment before reviewing it together.

One of the most powerful but neglected parts of this process is closing the loop. When colleagues take the risk to give honest feedback, they need to see that their effort has consequences in the real world. After you have synthesized what you heard and chosen your experiments, communicate back to the group. Share a short summary such as, “Here are a few things I heard from multiple people, here is what I plan to adjust over the next quarter, and here is how I will ask you to tell me whether it is working.” As you make changes, occasionally point out where feedback shaped your choices. In a meeting, you might say, “Some of you mentioned last quarter that handoffs felt messy. That is why I am walking through this checklist before we sign off.” These small acknowledgements show that feedback is not disappearing into a black box.

Finally, treat this entire process as a recurring system rather than a one time clean up. Teams evolve, market conditions shift, and you grow as a leader. What is true feedback today may not be true two years from now. Build light weight checkpoints into your operating rhythm. Add one or two leadership questions into regular reviews. Run a short anonymous pulse twice a year. Use project retros as opportunities to ask how your style helped or hindered progress. The goal is not constant self criticism. It is ongoing calibration so that your intent and your impact stay in reasonable alignment.

When you approach leadership feedback from colleagues in this way, it stops feeling like a referendum on your worth and starts functioning like an internal diagnostic tool. You are not chasing popularity. You are designing a system that makes it easier for people to tell you the truth and for you to respond in practical ways. Over time, your team will learn that you are serious about closing the gap between the leader you believe you are and the leader they actually experience. They do not need perfection from you. What they need is a leader who remains curious, makes adjustments, and invites them into that learning process.