Kevin Simpson – AEX Executive Development
Let that number sink in for a second.
Leadership IQ surveyed 1,204 employees about their leaders’ blind spots — the behaviours their teams see clearly and live with every day. The question was simple: when leaders are told directly about those blind spots, does anything change?
84% showed no improvement. None.
Source: Leadership IQ, 2024. Study of 1,204 employees across manager, director, VP, and C-suite levels. leadershipiq.com/pages/leadership-blind-spots
The easy read is that leaders are stubborn. Arrogant. Too comfortable to change. And honestly — some of them are. I’ve been in enough rooms to know ego is real.
But that’s not the main issue.
Most leaders are given feedback and handed nothing else. They’re told where they’re off. Nobody shows them how to actually close the gap — under pressure, in real situations, when the stakes are high and the room is watching. They walk out with a list of their own deficiencies and no working method to do anything about it.
That’s not development. That’s diagnosis without a prescription.
We’ve built an entire ecosystem around surfacing the problem. 360 assessments. Annual reviews. Pulse surveys. Feedback sessions. Offsites where people finally say the quiet part out loud. None of it is wrong. But awareness alone does not create behavior change — and the leadership development industry has been pretending otherwise for decades.
The problem isn’t knowledge. It’s practice.
Think about how elite performers in any serious discipline actually develop. They compete. They study what happened — frame by frame if necessary. They go back to the practice field and work the specific gaps before they compete again. That cycle never stops.
Now think about how most executives develop their leadership. They lead. And then they lead some more. No film review. No practice rep. The leader is always in the game and never in the preparation room. And then six months later someone hands them another feedback report and acts surprised that nothing moved.
No serious athlete would accept that model. We ask our leaders to operate that way as a matter of standard practice — and wonder why the same blind spots keep showing up in every review, every year, with the same people.
I have led CEOs through a debrief who agreed completely with every finding, articulated the problem better than the assessor did — and then walked into the next leadership meeting and did the exact same thing, word for word. Not because they didn’t understand the feedback. Because they had never practiced a different response. When the pressure hit, the old pattern ran. It always does. Pattern beats intention every time until the pattern itself gets replaced.
The market is not short on leadership content. There’s an Instagram account, a podcast, a book, and a keynote speaker for every blind spot on the list. Most of them aren’t wrong. Some of them are genuinely useful. But consuming content about leadership behavior is not the same as changing it. You cannot fix a behavioral pattern with a highlight reel. You cannot close a blind spot with a concept. At some point the reading has to stop and the reps have to start. That is not a criticism of the content. It’s just how behavior actually changes.
The other thing a podcast can’t do is hold you accountable to anything. You can listen to the same episode three times, highlight every insight, share it with your team — and on Monday morning walk into the same meeting and run the same pattern. Nobody noticed. Nobody tracked it. Nobody asked you what changed. Accountability isn’t a soft concept — it’s the mechanism that converts intention into behavior. It’s also the single area where great coaching creates the most measurable impact. Not because the coach has better ideas than Alex Hormozi. Because the coach is in your corner at 8am on Tuesday asking what you actually did differently, and you know they’re going to ask again next week.
What AEX is building around this?
This is exactly the gap we’re focused on at AEX.
Like a lot of serious firms, we’re leveraging AI in both the solution and the toolset. But here’s where we part ways with most of what’s being built in this space: we’re not training our tools on generic leadership content scraped from the internet. We’re training them on real-world coaching experience — over 100 years of it, combined, across the practitioners behind this work. There’s a meaningful difference between a tool that sounds like a leadership program and one that behaves like a seasoned coach who has seen the pattern before and knows exactly where it breaks down.
Part of what we’re developing puts leaders into realistic, high-pressure scenarios — the kind where blind spots actually surface — and gives them the opportunity to work through their response before the real moment arrives. Think less workshop, more flight simulator. The mechanics will be clear when we’re ready to show them. What matters right now is that the gap is real, the need is documented, and we decided to do something about it rather than talk about it.
The honest ask
If you’re a CEO or an executive who has sat through a feedback session, nodded at every finding, and then watched yourself repeat the same patterns six months later — don’t dismiss that too quickly. That’s not a character flaw. That’s what happens when capable people are handed a mirror and told to figure out the rest on their own.
The 84% statistic is not a verdict on leaders. It’s a verdict on the process.
If you want to be in the 16%, awareness is where you start — not where you finish. The rest requires structured methods to actually practice the behaviors you’re trying to build. Not identify them once a year and hope something shifts.
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IF THIS RESONATES
We’re working with a small group of executives and organizations who are done mistaking awareness for progress. If that’s you, reach out directly.
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