Hello Kind and Curious Leader,
Welcome back to Let's Lead Better — Issue #2 of a special edition series written for leaders of teams, by someone who has been in your chair. I spent 35 years leading at the highest levels of some of the world's most recognized brands. Today I coach and advise C-suite leaders across industries. I know how hard your job is. And I believe you can do it better.
In the last issue, we talked about The Truth Gap — the distance between what you think is happening and what's actually happening. If that one stung a little, this one might sting more.
This issue is about The Access Illusion — the ways leaders convince themselves they're creating connection when they're actually performing it. You think you're approachable. You think your feedback is helpful. Your people might disagree.
Let's get into it.
Lesson 3: Stop Saying "My Door Is Always Open"
If you're still saying "my door is always open," I need you to hear something.
Nobody believes you.
It's not because you're lying. I'm sure you mean it. The problem is that an open door doesn't undo a closed system. The door was never the barrier — the power dynamic is.
Think about the last person who walked into your office and told you something genuinely uncomfortable. Something that challenged your strategy, your judgment, or your favorite initiative. What happened next? Did they get heard? Did something change? Or did they get a polite nod and then watch everything continue exactly as it was?
Your people remember that. They talk about it. And it becomes the story that determines whether anyone else ever tries.
I've led thousands of people across my career — across Disney, DreamWorks, Fox, Gap, Claire's — on four continents. And I work with C-suite leaders today who are wrestling with this exact gap. The distance between their intention and their impact. They genuinely believe they're accessible. Their teams genuinely believe they're not. Both things are true at the same time, and that's what makes it so hard to fix.
The best leaders I've worked with — the ones whose teams will run through walls for them — stopped waiting for truth to walk through the door. They went and found it.
They showed up in someone else's space. Sat in the break room instead of the boardroom. Walked the warehouse floor without an entourage. Asked real questions and then stayed quiet long enough for real answers.
Here's the shift: stop thinking about access as something you offer and start thinking about it as something you pursue. Don't invite people to come to you. Go to them. Sit in their space. On their terms. With their coffee.
You'll learn more in 15 minutes on someone else's turf than in a year of open-door policies.
Leadership isn't about access. It's about effort. Your people don't need to know your door is open. They need to see you walk through theirs.
Lesson 4: Your Feedback Is a Monologue
Let me ask you something honest. When was the last time you gave someone feedback and it actually changed something?
Not the kind of feedback where you talked for twenty minutes and they nodded politely. Not the kind where you said "great job" in a hallway and felt good about yourself. I mean feedback that landed. That shifted behavior. That made someone better.
If you're struggling to think of an example, you're not alone. Most senior leaders I work with believe they give excellent feedback. When I talk to their teams, I hear a very different story. What leaders call feedback, their people experience as a monologue — a performance review wrapped in a pep talk, delivered from a position of power with no real invitation to respond.
Here's what happens in most feedback conversations at the senior level: you do 80% of the talking. You've already decided what the problem is and what the solution should be. You frame it as a discussion, but there's nothing to discuss — you're narrating a conclusion you reached before the meeting started. The other person sits there, nods, says "that's really helpful, thank you," and walks out feeling smaller than when they walked in.
That's not coaching. That's a monologue with a captive audience.
Real feedback requires mutuality. It requires you to be as uncomfortable as the person sitting across from you. It means saying "here's what I'm observing" instead of "here's what you're doing wrong." It means asking "what's getting in your way?" and being prepared to hear that the answer might be you. It means creating enough safety for someone to push back, disagree, or tell you that your read on the situation is incomplete.
The leaders who do this well share a common trait: they ask more than they tell. They treat feedback as a conversation, not a verdict. They check in afterward — not to see if you complied, but to see if what they said actually made sense in the context of your reality.
And here's the hardest part: they ask for feedback on their feedback. "Was that helpful? What did I miss? What would you need from me to make this easier?"
If you're the only one talking in your feedback conversations, you're not developing anyone. You're just performing leadership.
The best feedback isn't a verdict. It's a conversation you're both brave enough to have.
That's it for this issue. Last time we looked at the gap between what you know and what's actually true. This time we looked at the gap between your good intentions and how your people actually experience them. Both are uncomfortable. Both are worth sitting with.
Next issue, we go deeper — into the things you're holding onto that are quietly holding your team back.
Until then — lead better. We all can. Our teams need us to!
In Community and Conversation, Jim
