Project Plan Have you ever delivered what you believed was a clear direction to your project team, only to discover weeks later that they understood something entirely different? Or perhaps you’ve championed open communication, yet feedback reveals your team sees you as unapproachable? This gap between your intent as a leader and how your team perceives that intent isn’t just an uncomfortable reality; it’s one of the most significant yet overlooked threats to project success. As organisations invest heavily in sophisticated project management tools, methodologies, and AI-driven analytics, we’re becoming increasingly adept at managing the technical aspects of project delivery. Yet projects continue to fail, and often the root cause isn’t found in the Gantt chart or the risk register. It’s a human problem most often found in the space between what leaders think they’re communicating and what their teams actually understand. More elaborate planning frameworks and governance processes won’t solve this problem, but cultivating our emotional intelligence, and specifically one key skill, Applied Curiosity, will. The Real Cost of Misalignment When your team’s perception of your leadership doesn’t align with your intentions, the consequences cascade through every aspect of project delivery. Team members start to second-guess decisions, stakeholders disengage, and the psychological safety required for problem-solving and innovation evaporates. Trust is dented, and everything slows down. Empowerment can be perceived as disinterest. Autonomy might feel like abandonment. Some of the most capable executives I’ve worked with have been genuinely shocked to discover this perception gap. The perception gap isn’t about their competence; it is about awareness. The harsh truth is that our intentions as leaders don’t matter as much as how we’re perceived. Applied Curiosity: A Framework for Closing the Gap Applied Curiosity offers project leaders a systematic approach to identifying and addressing perception gaps before they derail delivery. Unlike passive curiosity, simply wondering about things, Applied Curiosity is a deliberate process that transforms how we gather information, make sense of it, and take action. The Applied Curiosity Model consists of three interconnected phases: Research, Reflect, and React. This creates a virtuous cycle where each revolution builds on the previous one, continuously refining our understanding and improving our leadership effectiveness. When we apply this framework to guide our actions and address a challenge such as the perception gap, we move from unconscious misalignment to conscious, informed leadership that drives project success. Phase 1 – Research: Discovering How You’re Really Perceived The research phase is where we actively gather data about how our leadership is being experienced. We can start by having conversations with the project teams at all levels. Sounds simple, and on the surface it is. However, we need to be self-aware when we do so and recognise that we will apply our own distortions and perceptions to the conversations. Naturally, we will seek out information that confirms our views, so we need to be able to put our confirmation bias to one side and to ask great and balanced questions that explore all the options. We need to listen to what we hear with the intent of understanding what we are being told, rather than answering or correcting the speaker. And that can be hard when we are used to setting direction. Doing this will deepen your relationships and generate feedback you can take action on, so it is a great start; however, it will be coloured by the very perceptions you are trying to understand. To get an accurate picture, we are going to need to lean into the wisdom of the crowd as the more people we ask, the closer we will get to the truth. But let’s be real, you don’t have time to talk to everyone, so a well-constructed survey-based approach that looks into the factors that perceptions impact, like how trusted you are, your ability to influence and how you apply your leadership, can provide the human-centric data needed to get a more complete and actionable picture. Combining this with a neutral third party asking the questions and the technology available to us now, this can be done in but real time. Phase 2 – Reflect: Making Sense of What You’ve Discovered Gathering data is valuable, but without reflection, it’s merely noise. The reflect phase is where we assimilate what we’ve learned, add context, and determine its relevance. In the fast-paced, busy world we inhabit, especially around projects, making time for this phase is often rushed or skipped altogether. Yet it is where we turn the data we have collected into actionable insights and build a genuine understanding that enables better leadership choices. It’s time to examine patterns in the feedback you’re receiving. What themes are there? What might people be missing? What assumptions have you made that need to be challenged? Reflection also allows you to explore how new insights link to everything else you know about effective project delivery. For example, how does this perception gap relate to recent project delays, to stakeholder concerns? Reflection does not have to be a solo activity; consider discussing your findings with a trusted colleague, coach, or mentor who can help you see blind spots and find the connections. Phase 3 – React: Taking Action That Drives Project Success Understanding the perception gap is valuable, but without action, it’s merely an interesting academic exercise. The react phase is where we form hypotheses about what might work and experiment to see what happens—creating new information that starts the Applied Curiosity cycle again. What the best actions are will, of course, depend on the insights you gain in the reflection phase. Do you need to provide extra information or clarifications, extra guidelines, or do you need to take some away? Do you need to change your behaviours? I encourage you to experiment with different approaches and observe the results. How does team behaviour shift when you explicitly address the perception gap? These experiments provide new data that feeds back into the research phase of the next cycle of Applied Curiosity, creating continuous improvement in your leadership effectiveness. The Strategic Imperative For C-suite executives and decision-makers, addressing the perception gap through Applied Curiosity isn’t just about being a better leader—though it certainly achieves that. It’s about removing a critical barrier to project success and organisational performance. When your team’s perception aligns with your intent, trust grows, decisions flow more smoothly, escalations happen at the right time, innovation flourishes, and projects deliver not just on technical metrics but on the human outcomes that drive true organisational value. Applied Curiosity transforms this from a one-time exercise into embedding a critical leadership capability. The research-reflect-react cycle becomes part of how you lead projects, creating continuous feedback loops that prevent small misalignments from becoming project-derailing crises. In an era where we’re investing millions in project management technology and methodology, perhaps our greatest return on investment comes from investing time in understanding how we’re actually experienced by the people we lead. The question I would like to leave you with is this: What would you discover if you got genuinely curious about the gap between your leadership intentions and how your team experiences them? Bekka Prideaux
The Hidden Project Killer: Why Your Team’s Perception of Your Leadership Matters More Than Your
