Only 7% of leaders get this right—and their teams outperform everyone else

I recently met with 300 leaders at one of the country’s top-performing transit authorities. I asked them to raise their hands if they’d ever worked for a leader who truly cared about them. Nearly every hand rose. The room lit up with warmth, as people recalled a boss who’d looked after them. Then I asked: on that team, how many of you were pushed to truly exceptional results? Lots of hands dropped. Then I turned the question around: Who has worked for a leader who drove performance like no other? Hands shot up. And how many of you felt valued and understood as a member of that team? Many hands fell.

Only a smattering of people kept their hands up through all four questions. And you could see that they were proud. Heads nodded, and there was a visible pride having worked with someone rare—an “Expect a Lot, Care a Lot” leader.

New data from FranklinCovey Institute’s The Case for the 6 Critical Practices Survey confirms just how rare they are.

·       Only 7% of leaders scored high on both expectations and care when rated by their team members.

·       Only 13% of leaders scored high on both expectations and care when rated by their leaders.

·       And the ones who do have an exceptional impact: 43% of their direct reports rate themselves in the highest engagement tier—what we call Creative Excitement—compared to just 20% of everyone else’s team members. That’s more than a two-to-one advantage.

·       Some 92% of leaders, who were rated as Expect A Lot, Care A Lot Leaders, inspire either Willing Cooperation or Creative Excitement from their teams, versus 78% of leaders who Expect A Lot or Care A Lot, but don’t do both.

·       And 76% of Expect a Lot, Care a Lot leaders are rated by their own managers as exceptional at delivering performance, versus just 23% of other leaders.

The Consistency Problem

Almost by definition, it requires consistency and balance to be an Expect a Lot, Care a Lot leader.

The late Joel Peterson, who served on FranklinCovey’s board of directors for more than 30 years, put it this way: a CEO’s real job, once the right team is in place and the direction is set, is to weigh in only on the true jump balls, the decisions where talented leaders genuinely need a tiebreaker. But your team has to know you’re consistent. If they can’t predict what you would do, how you would navigate a challenge, they won’t run far without you. And you need them to be willing to run a long way.

Imagine a leader who genuinely possesses both qualities, deep care and intense drive, but can’t regulate them. He revs high in the heat of the moment, says things he regrets, realizes he’s crossed a line, then floods the zone with warmth. His team members probably wouldn’t say they distrust him on a macro level, but day-to-day, his unpredictability erodes their sense of safety. In need of interim feedback on a big project—but reluctant to bring the boss something that he will tear apart—they slow down and wait for relevant insights they might pick up through back channels or in a chance encounter.

We found this in our data as well. FranklinCovey Institute’s recent Insight Report, AI Transformation & the Human Imperative, found 36% of employees hesitate to make decisions without manager approval, and 92% of employees spend hours every week waiting for clarity or resolving misalignment.

When care and demand are applied in inconsistent bursts, rather than together, performance is subjected to a kind of tax, paid in the form of hesitation and doubt.

Reality Check: What Is ‘Care,’ Anyway?

As we evaluate leadership along these lines, it’s easy to oversimplify what it means to care, reducing it to something that exists at the surface level—like asking how someone spent their weekend. It’s much more than that. One leader at the transit authority gathering described a colleague whose care was bidirectional: she cared deeply about her people and deeply about the organization’s mission. For leaders, care requires thoughtfully engaging with others in the context of what you’re all trying to accomplish together. It’s not just being nice or kind.

By the same token, a lack of care can show up in unexpected ways. If you never give someone performance feedback, never have a hard conversation, and then one day let them go—that’s demand without care. If you avoid difficult discussions because they’re uncomfortable, that’s not kindness. It’s abandonment. Most leaders I encounter struggle to give feedback. Most employees, as a result, work in a feedback-free environment. And I believe the gap stems from a misunderstanding—the idea that giving honest, direct feedback is somehow at odds with caring. It’s not. It’s one of its highest expressions of care.

A Walmart-Sized Example

Doug McMillon offers one of the clearest illustrations. When he became CEO of Walmart roughly 12 years ago, many had written the company off as a legacy retailer destined to be overtaken by Amazon. His first move was to advocate to the board for a $3 billion investment in employee wages. The stock took a short-term hit, but the message was unambiguous: This is a people business.

At the same time, McMillon told employees that just about everything was going to change, from roles and operations to expectations—with only a few exceptions, like mission and culture. And he promised to support teams as they made the transition into the new environment and took stock of the new expectations they’d be accountable for.

McMillon treated people with transparency and humanity. The results speak for themselves.

So You Want to Be an ‘Expect a Lot, Care a Lot’ Star?

If you’re a leader somewhere in the middle of an organization today—managing a team of six or sixteen or sixty, not setting enterprise strategy or being profiled in the business press for your leadership prowess—what should you do?

One starting point might be to think about which side of the ledger you’re undersupplying. Most leaders, when they’re being honest with themselves, already have a good sense of the answer. The manager who runs a tight ship but hasn’t had a real conversation with a direct report in months knows something. So does the department head who genuinely loves their team but habitually procrastinates on performance feedback.

You might also take a first, uncomfortable step by asking team members what they think. Maybe not everyone all at once, but a few individuals you trust to tell you the truth. Do you feel like I push this team toward work that genuinely stretches them? Do you feel like I care about our mission? About work-life balance? Most leaders never ask these questions because they’re afraid of what they’ll learn. But that reluctance, that avoidance is itself a form of the problem.

The leaders people remember, the ones whose current and former team members kept their hands raised through all four questions, were anything but avoidant. Somewhere along the way they’d resolved a) not to let the demands of the work make them strangers to the people doing it, and b) not to let their care for those people become an excuse to go easy on them.

Knowing where you’re strong or weak is only a starting point, however. To shore up one dimension of leadership without neglecting the other, while avoiding the trap of inconsistency, requires discipline and intention. But as the data makes plain, the few leaders who can sustain it, and their teams, get a payoff in terms of both how they feel at work, and how they perform.

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