89% of Managers Think Their Team Is Thriving. Only 24% Actually Are.

There is a particular kind of leadership blindness that does not look like blindness from the inside, the leader experiencing it typically feels informed. They have the one-on-ones. They have the team meetings. They have the pulse surveys and the engagement scores. They ask how people are doing. They get answers, and they walk away from those interactions genuinely believing their team is in better shape than it is, because the answers they receive bear only a passing resemblance to the truth their people are actually living.

This is not a niche problem. It is one of the most documented gaps in workplace research, and it is getting worse.

A 2024 study conducted with The Harris Poll found that 89% of managers believe their employees are thriving. When researchers measured the actual thriving level of those same employees, the number was 24%. That is not a slight misalignment, that is a more than three-to-one discrepancy between what managers believe and what is actually true about the people they are responsible for.

Understanding why that gap exists, what it costs, and what it actually takes to close it is not just a management question. It is a leadership character question, and the answer runs deeper than better surveys or more frequent check-ins.

The Gap in Full

89%of managers believe their employees are thriving, but only 24% of employees are actually thriving.Share on

That gap has a companion finding that makes it more troubling, not less, a 2025 study from the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School found that while U.S. employee wellbeing hit its lowest recorded level in 2024, manager and senior leader wellbeing was rising at the same time, the people closest to the problem were moving in the opposite direction from the people experiencing it.

This is not because managers are callous. Most managers genuinely care about their teams, the gap exists because caring about people and accurately seeing people are two different things, and in most workplaces, the conditions that would allow accurate seeing have been systematically removed.

Why Managers Cannot See What Is Actually Happening

The perception gap between managers and their teams is not random. It is the predictable result of several specific dynamics that converge in most management relationships. Understanding them is the first step toward doing something about them.

1. 01People stop telling managers the truth early and rarely announce itThe moment an employee learns, through a direct experience or by watching what happened to someone else, that honest feedback carries invisible costs, they stop giving it. They do not send a memo. They do not have a conversation. They simply shift to telling the manager what the manager wants to hear, and the manager usually cannot distinguish the performance of engagement from the real thing. By the time the gap is measurable, the trust that would allow honest reporting has often been gone for months.
2. 02One-on-ones are almost never designed to reveal real informationMost one-on-ones are structured as status updates, the manager asks about projects, the employee reports on projects. Occasionally someone says things are "a lot right now" and the manager says "I hear you" and they move on. These meetings feel like connection because they are frequent and face-to-face. They almost never produce the kind of information that would close the manager-reality gap because neither party is asking or answering the questions that would actually do it.
3. 03Managers see the edited version of their teamMost employees present a managed version of themselves in professional settings, particularly when they are struggling. They show up to meetings, deliver their work, maintain the required level of composure. They are good at it because they have practiced it, the manager sees the edited version and concludes from it that things are fine. They are almost never seeing the unedited version, which is what actually determines whether someone is thriving or surviving.
4. 04The manager's own state filters what they can receiveThe Johns Hopkins finding about manager wellbeing is relevant here in a way that cuts both directions, a manager who is themselves burned out, stressed, or overwhelmed has a compressed capacity to register signals from the people around them, the research on attunement is consistent: our ability to accurately perceive another person's emotional state is significantly reduced when we are in distress ourselves, a manager running on empty is often a manager who is getting significant signals from their team and not registering them.
5. 05Organizations reward the appearance of team health, not the reality of itIn most organizational systems, the manager who reports that their team is struggling is the manager who is perceived as struggling, the manager who maintains an outward appearance of a high-performing, thriving team, regardless of what is actually happening, is rewarded with continued confidence from leadership. This creates a systematic incentive to maintain the gap rather than close it, and most managers absorb that incentive without consciously choosing it.

What the Kingdom Framework Says About Seeing People

There is a moment in the Gospel of John that I have thought about more in the context of leadership than in almost any other context. Jesus asks the man at the pool of Bethesda a question that seems obvious to the point of being unnecessary: "Do you want to be made well?" The man has been sick for thirty-eight years. He is lying at a pool specifically known for its healing properties, the question appears redundant.

But what Jesus is actually doing in that moment is refusing to assume. He is asking because he wants to know. He is taking the time to hear what the person in front of him actually wants, rather than projecting onto them the need he assumes they have. He is seeing the person, not his idea of the person.

That is a radically different posture from how most management relationships work. Most managers assume they know what their team needs, how their team is doing, and what their team's experience is, because they have data, because they have experience, because they have been in leadership long enough to develop pattern recognition, and their pattern recognition is exactly what prevents them from seeing the actual person standing in front of them.

A leader who cannot see what is actually happening to their people is not leading. They are managing the version of their team that exists in their own head, and that version is almost always doing better than the real one.

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Genuine leadership in the Kingdom sense requires a posture of inquiry rather than assumption, not the performed inquiry of an HR-compliant check-in, but the genuine curiosity of a person who understands that the human being in their sphere has an interior life that is not visible from the outside and that matters to how they are led. Seventy percent of team engagement is attributable to the manager, that means the person most responsible for whether someone thrives at work is also the person most likely to be wrong about whether they actually are, the stakes are high enough to require a different kind of seeing.

What Genuine Seeing Actually Requires

Closing the manager-reality gap is not a skills problem. It is a posture problem. These are the practices that the research and clinical experience of leadership development consistently point toward.

1. 01Ask questions designed to produce real answers, not comfortable ones"How are you doing?" produces one kind of answer. "What is the hardest thing about your work right now that you haven't told me about yet?" produces a different one. "What would need to be true for you to feel like you're actually thriving here rather than just getting through it?" produces a different one still, the manager who wants to close the perception gap needs to start asking questions that make the comfortable non-answer difficult to give, and then sit in the silence that follows rather than rushing to fill it.
2. 02Create safety before you need informationPeople tell the truth in environments where the truth has previously been received well, if the last time someone on your team was honest about a struggle the response was advice, minimization, or a subtle shift in how they were perceived, the next honest conversation will not happen. Psychological safety is not built in a single meeting. It is built in the accumulation of responses to small truths over time, the manager who wants real information from their team needs to have handled small disclosures in ways that made larger ones feel possible.
3. 03Watch behavior more than you listen to wordsThe most reliable signals about a team member's actual state are almost never verbal. They are behavioral: the person who was engaged in meetings and has gone quiet, the person whose work quality has shifted in ways that do not match their usual standard, the person who used to push back on ideas and no longer does, the person whose humor has changed, whose availability has shifted, whose energy in the room has a different texture. These signals are available to any manager who is paying attention to the whole person and not just the deliverables.
4. 04Separate your own state from your perception of theirsThe research on emotional contagion and attunement is specific: a manager in distress has a measurably reduced capacity to accurately perceive the emotional state of the people around them. This means that the manager's own wellbeing is not a personal matter that can be kept separate from their leadership effectiveness, a manager who is burned out, chronically stressed, or emotionally depleted is a manager who is systematically underperforming on the most important part of their job: seeing the people they lead clearly enough to actually lead them.
5. 05Be willing to receive information that makes you uncomfortableThe deepest reason most managers do not know what is actually happening to their teams is not that the information is unavailable. It is that receiving accurate information about team struggle feels, at some level, like an indictment of their leadership, the manager who can hold that discomfort, who can hear that someone is not thriving without immediately becoming defensive or problem-solving away from the feeling, is the manager who will be told the truth, and the manager who is told the truth is the only one who actually has a chance to do something about it.

Your team is telling you something right now, not loudly, not directly, but in the texture of their engagement, the quality of their presence, the topics they avoid and the risks they do not take, the question is not whether the signal is there. It is whether you are positioned to receive it.

Closing the gap between what you believe about your team and what is actually true for them is the most important leadership work you can do right now, not because the numbers say so, though they do, but because the people on your team are human beings who deserve to be seen by the person most responsible for their experience at work, and most of them have stopped expecting that they will be.

Prove them wrong.