Leadership visibility: what employees really mean when they say leaders aren’t visible enough
Employees who say their leaders aren’t visible enough may not be asking to see more of them, but for better communication, greater trust and more authentic leadership.
Nearly every week I hear the same challenge: “Leaders aren’t visible enough”. It comes up in employee engagement surveys and conversations in employee forums, leaving HR and communication teams somewhat stumped.
The regular town halls, weekly emails and presence back in the office all seem to be missing the mark when it comes to “leadership visibility.”
So what do employees really mean when they say this, and how can it be fixed?
Visibility isn’t what people actually mean
When the data is reported that leaders need to be more visible, it’s often interpreted literally: we need to see them more.
But this isn’t what employees actually mean.
When asked, those in employee forums struggle to articulate the outcome or impact they are expecting from leaders in terms of their visibility. When the question of more comes up, employees can be quick to say they don’t really know what they want – and that makes finding the solution difficult for HR and comms teams.
Employees don’t want to see leaders more. They want better access to real conversation, belief that the messages being shared are genuine, and they want to see leaders' actions align to the culture and values being talked about.
That’s what visibility really means, and from a comms and HR perspective, it’s about connection.
The risk of data in isolation
It’s easy to jump on an individual data point like this in a survey and start to plan out more campaigns to increase visibility, but like anything, you can’t take this point in isolation.
If you’re also asking questions about trust, the culture and management, you need to consider all of those alongside this one to get a true picture of what’s really going on. I see data points from industry surveys contradict themselves often, without the analysis to explore why and what it really means for those trying to improve things internally at organisations.
And we have a habit of looking at individual elements in employee surveys to tick them off one by one, without looking at the whole picture. To address the culture, communication and employee experience, we need to look at it all together and paint the full picture.
Why we shouldn’t ask about leadership visibility
Asking about whether leaders are visible doesn’t really help anyone. With any employee survey, we should be looking at it with a hypothesis of what we want to do or what we think.
If we believe that we have a leadership visibility problem, define what that actually is and address it with the leaders; discuss it with internal comms teams.
Most internal comms teams will be creating space for leaders to be visible through the channels they have, balancing the time of the leadership team. And it’s this balance that is key.
So I’d make sure you’re clear on why you’re asking about it and whether visibility, in the truest sense of being seen, needs to be fixed.
How do we improve leadership visibility?
Firstly, you have to dig into the data. If you have a survey result that shows leaders need to be more visible, look at other data points around trust, communication and line managers as well.
Surveys only go so far, so you need to add on conversations with representatives of the workforce. Explore the themes you’re seeing and talk about visibility.
Then you have the data and insight from your people.
The results will point you in the right direction, and they will point to leadership behaviour and communication, not how often they are seen.
Jenni Field is the founder and director of Redefining Communications and author of Influential Internal Communication. She has created tailored resilience workshops for clients around the world.
Further reading
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