Earlier this year, while participating in the Texas Municipal League’s Leadership Academy, a fellow local government leader made a statement during an open discussion that has stayed with me:
“When the leader hates what they’re doing, it’s felt all the way down.”
At the time, I did not even know he was a city manager. I simply wrote the statement in my notes because something about it landed HARD. I have thought about it differently ever since.
Leadership is experienced in two directions.
There is the leadership that senior executives see from above: budgets, reports, projects, performance measures, deadlines, presentations, and operational results.
And then there is the leadership employees experience from below: communication, consistency, trust, support, accountability, development, responsiveness, conflict, and the everyday climate of the workplace.
Those two experiences are not always the same.
A director may look successful upward while employees are experiencing something entirely different downward. And that raises a question I believe organizations should be willing to ask:
Who evaluates the leader from the perspective of the people being led?
Performance Is More Than Production
We evaluate leaders all the time.
- Did the department stay within budget?
- Were projects completed?
- Were strategic goals achieved?
- Were performance measures met?
- Were reports submitted?
- Were operations maintained?
Those things matter. They should matter.
But they do not tell us everything we need to know about leadership.
A department can be operationally productive and organizationally unhealthy at the same time.
Traditional performance measures tend to focus on outputs. Organizations measure what was accomplished, how much was spent, whether deadlines were met, how many people were served, and whether established goals were achieved.
Those measures help answer an important question:
Did the department perform?
But leadership requires another question:
What did it take from the people inside that department to make that performance possible?
There is a difference.
A department may continue delivering services while employees are exhausted.
Projects may continue moving because one or two highly capable employees repeatedly step in when something goes wrong.
Conflict may remain invisible to executive leadership because employees have learned how to work around it.
Communication gaps may be filled informally by staff members who make sure everyone else knows what is happening.
Broken processes may continue functioning because somebody quietly created a workaround.
The work gets done.
But that does not necessarily mean the system is working.
When Strong Employees Hide Weak Systems
High-performing employees are an asset to any organization.
But there is an organizational risk that is discussed far less often: highly capable employees can unintentionally make dysfunctional systems appear healthier than they really are.
- They solve problems before those problems reach senior leadership.
- They mediate disagreements.
- They translate unclear instructions.
- They create processes where none exist.
- They mentor employees who are not receiving adequate guidance.
- They absorb responsibilities outside their positions because something has to get done.
- They become the person everyone calls when there is a problem.
From the outside, the department continues operating. From the inside, however, the organization may be relying on individual resilience rather than institutional strength.
That distinction matters.
If an organization’s strongest employees must continually compensate for leadership or structural weaknesses, their capability can unintentionally prevent the underlying issue from becoming visible.
The organization sees that the work was completed.
It may never see what it cost to complete it.
And eventually, the question becomes:
Are we developing high-performing employees, or are we consuming them?
Leadership Travels Downward
The statement I heard at TML — “When the leader hates what they’re doing, it’s felt all the way down” — speaks to something organizations sometimes underestimate.
Employees feel leadership.
- They feel disengagement.
- They feel inconsistency.
- They feel avoidance.
- They feel unclear expectations.
- They feel when a leader has stopped developing people.
- They feel when conflict is repeatedly ignored.
- They feel when communication becomes reactive rather than intentional.
- They feel when accountability depends on who is involved.
- And they feel when the leader has emotionally disconnected from the work long before that disconnect appears on a performance report.
This does not mean every difficult workplace is the result of a disengaged leader.
Leaders inherit staffing problems, budget limitations, organizational history, policy constraints, vacancies, competing priorities, and problems they did not create.
But what they do with those conditions matters.
Leadership is reflected in what gets addressed, what is allowed to continue, what is reinforced, and what is changed.
Culture Is an Organizational Outcome
We often talk about workplace culture as though it simply develops on its own.
It does not.
Culture is shaped through thousands of decisions about what leaders reward, tolerate, address, ignore, communicate, and model.
- Who is held accountable?
- Who receives development?
- Who gets heard?
- How is conflict handled?
- How are decisions communicated?
- What happens when an employee raises a concern?
- Are high performers developed, or simply given more work?
- Are struggling employees coached?
- Does information move freely, or is it concentrated among a few people?
- Do employees have room to grow, or does the organization become dependent on a handful of people who know how to keep everything together?
Those choices accumulate.
Eventually, they become culture.
That is why I believe culture should be viewed as an organizational outcome of leadership rather than something separate from it.
Employee Experience Is Data
This is also why I believe executive-level performance evaluations should include structured input from employees.
That does not mean employees should determine whether their director keeps a job.
And it certainly should not mean turning an annual evaluation into an anonymous complaint box.
Leadership is not a popularity contest.
Sometimes good leadership requires making decisions employees do not like.
Sometimes accountability creates discomfort.
Sometimes organizational change creates resistance.
One dissatisfied employee should never become the measure of an entire leader. But neither should repeated patterns be dismissed simply because they involve workplace culture.
If employees across different positions consistently describe unclear expectations, poor communication, unresolved conflict, inconsistent accountability, lack of development, fear of speaking openly, or dependence on a handful of people to keep the department functioning, those patterns deserve attention.
That is leadership information.
It should sit alongside other organizational indicators such as turnover, vacancies, grievances, exit interviews, absenteeism, employee engagement, succession readiness, departmental performance, and service outcomes.
No individual data point tells the entire story. Together, however, they can reveal a pattern.
If Leadership Flows Downward, Feedback Must Flow Upward
This is where I believe organizations should think more seriously about 360-degree leadership accountability.
If the impact of leadership is felt downward through an organization, then there must be some mechanism for information about that impact to travel back upward.
Otherwise, senior leadership may only see half the picture.
- They see the director’s presentations.
- They see completed projects.
- They see budget performance.
- They see reports.
- They see outcomes.
But the employees inside the department experience the daily leadership environment that produces those outcomes.
Both perspectives matter.
If I were designing an evaluation process for department directors, I would include some form of confidential, structured employee feedback as part of the annual review.
The questions would not ask whether employees “liked” their director. They would be tied to leadership competencies.
For example:
- Does the leader communicate expectations clearly?
- Does the leader provide employees with the information necessary to perform their work?
- Does the leader address conflict appropriately?
- Does the leader provide meaningful coaching and development?
- Does the leader hold employees accountable consistently?
- Does the leader encourage appropriate upward communication?
- Does the leader delegate effectively?
- Does the leader support collaboration within the department and across the organization?
- Does the leader create conditions in which employees can perform successfully?
- Does the leader build capacity in others, or does the department remain dependent upon a few individuals?
The executive leader reviewing the feedback would not need a collection of individual complaints or comments identifying who said what.
What matters are the…
- Themes
- Patterns
- Consistency
- Movement over time
The purpose should not be punishment. The purpose should be visibility.
Because senior leadership cannot address organizational conditions it cannot see.
The Difference Between Functioning and Healthy
Perhaps the most important distinction is the difference between a department that is functioning and one that is healthy.
A functioning department gets the work done.
A healthy department can get the work done without continually sacrificing its people to accomplish it.
A functioning department may depend heavily on one (or two) exceptional employee(s).
A healthy department develops multiple capable people.
A functioning department may survive leadership transitions.
A healthy department can get the work done without continually sacrificing its people to accomplish it.
A functioning department may depend heavily on one exceptional employee.
A healthy department develops multiple capable people.
A functioning department may survive leadership transitions.
A healthy department prepares for them.
A functioning department may quietly work around broken processes.
A healthy department examines and improves those processes.
A functioning department may meet its numbers.
A healthy department asks whether those results are sustainable.
The strongest organizations should be measuring both performance and organizational health.
Because results matter. But so does the system producing them.
What Leaders Allow to Continue Matters
Leadership is not about creating a perfect workplace.
There is no such thing.
Every organization has conflict. Every department has difficult personalities. Every leader inherits problems. Every workplace experiences periods of stress, change, uncertainty, and competing priorities.
The measure of leadership is not the absence of problems.
It is what happens when those problems become visible.
A leader may not have created every condition they inherited.
But leadership is reflected in what they address, what they allow to continue, what they reinforce, and what they are willing to change.
That is why evaluating leadership cannot stop with the question:
Did the department get the job done?
We also have to ask:
What kind of organization is being created while the work gets done?
Budgets tell us something.
KPIs tell us something.
Projects, deadlines, and service statistics tell us something.
But the people working inside an organization know something too.
And if we truly want to understand the health of a department, we should be willing to listen.
Because if leadership can be felt all the way down, feedback about its impact must have a way to travel back up.
Culture is not separate from leadership performance.
Culture is one of the results.
