A recent global study by Hogan Assessments landed with a sobering finding: there is virtually no overlap between the leadership traits organizations tend to reward and the traits employees say they actually want from their leaders. Drawing on personality data from more than 21,000 executives and survey responses from nearly 10,000 employees across 25 countries, the study exposes a deep structural misalignment in how leadership is identified, promoted, and reinforced.

For the legal sector, this finding should feel uncomfortably familiar.

The profession tends to elevate leaders, partners, practice group heads, senior counsel, general counsel, not primarily because of how they lead people, but because of how effectively they perform expertise, confidence, decisiveness, and visibility. Meanwhile, the qualities that lawyers and legal staff say they want from those leaders, clear communication, fairness, integrity, accountability, and genuinely human leadership, remain peripheral to promotion decisions and largely absent from formal evaluation.

What this study reveals is not a problem limited to “corporate employees.” It describes, with remarkable precision, the lived experience of many people practising law today.

1. What the Study Shows, and Why It May Translate Directly to Law

According to the Hogan research, executives most commonly exhibit, and are rewarded for, traits such as assertiveness, competitiveness, confidence in presenting ideas, initiative-taking, and driving innovation. These are familiar currencies in law: the rainmaker who commands the room, the litigator who never wavers, the in‑house leader who is relentlessly decisive under pressure.

By contrast, employees say they want leaders who communicate clearly, make sound and fair decisions, demonstrate integrity, take accountability when things go wrong, and can actually lead people, not just files, deals, or cases.

Replace the word employee with junior associate, staff lawyer, law clerk, legal assistant, or new call, and the message does not change. The human needs underneath the data are the same.

There is not one set of leadership needs for “workers” and another for “professionals.” Lawyers are not immune to the basic psychological conditions required for trust, dignity, and safety. If anything, the intensity, adversarialism, and ethical complexity of legal work heighten those needs.

2. The Legal Sector’s Unique Version of the Leadership Gap

On the surface, law likes to believe it selects leaders differently, through merit, expertise, or excellence. In practice, however, leadership in legal environments is often rewarded based on upward performance rather than downward impact.

• Who speaks most fluently in executive meetings?
• Who reassures institutional clients or senior partners?
• Who gives the impression of control, confidence, and certainty?

Meanwhile, far less weight is placed on how that leader treats people day to day: whether they explain decisions, distribute work fairly, intervene early when behaviour crosses lines, or create space for dissent without punishment.

This gap rarely produces villains. More often, it produces technically brilliant, ethically serious lawyers who were never selected, trained, or incentivized to lead humans well.

And the consequences show up quietly, until they don’t.

3. What This Looks Like Inside Legal Workplaces

In legal organizations, the leadership mismatch often presents in ways that feel normal because they are so common.

A senior lawyer is elevated because they are commanding in court or persuasive with clients. Once in a leadership role, they avoid difficult interpersonal conversations, discourage challenge, and explain decisions only after they are made. Junior lawyers stop raising concerns, not because they lack judgment, but because they’ve learned that speaking up carries reputational cost with no upside.

Another leader prides themselves on efficiency and decisiveness. Files move quickly; directives are short. Decisions are made behind closed doors with minimal explanation. When outcomes create downstream harm, burnout, client complaints, ethical breaches, responsibility is quietly dispersed. Over time, people experience this not as strong leadership, but as unfairness and indifference.

Then there are leaders who articulate professionalism and civility beautifully in firm-wide messages while behaving inconsistently in everyday interactions. Rules are enforced unevenly. Certain lawyers are given latitude others never receive. Public criticism enters meetings under the guise of “training.” Respect exists as a value statement, not a lived experience.

None of this requires shouting, slurs, or overt misconduct. Most incivility in law emerges not from monsters, but from ordinary leadership habits that fail to meet basic human expectations.

4. Why This Becomes a Legal and Ethical Risk

This leadership gap is not merely cultural. It is a risk multiplier.

Workplace investigations and professional responsibility complaints repeatedly show that environments with poor communication, low trust, and weak accountability are far more likely to generate allegations of harassment, bullying, discrimination, and retaliation. When people do not trust leaders to listen or act fairly, minor moments escalate quickly. Silence is interpreted as approval. Delay feels punitive. Inconsistency feels discriminatory.

Critically, leaders who lack the competencies lawyers actually value, especially accountability, integrity, and clarity, are also more likely to mishandle complaints. Reports are minimized, reframed, or deferred. Early intervention is missed. Neutral processes are compromised by defensiveness or reputational fear.

From an investigative lens, many serious files do not begin with egregious behaviour. They begin with leadership failure: the offhand comment that went unchecked, the pattern no one addressed, the high performer who was exempted from boundaries.

Leadership selection, in this sense, is upstream professional risk control.

5. The Kind of Legal Leadership This Century Requires

When legal leaders embody the qualities people actually want and need, several protective and performance-enhancing effects follow.

• Clear communication reduces suspicion and resentment. People understand expectations, rationales, and limits. This is especially critical in environments governed by discretion and power imbalance.
• Accountability builds credibility. Leaders who acknowledge mistakes and apply standards consistently reduce the tendency to personalize conflict or assume bad faith.
• Integrity and accessibility encourage early disclosure. Lawyers who trust leaders raise concerns informally and early, before issues calcify into grievances, claims, or investigations.
• And finally, leaders who genuinely lead people, not just outcomes, model professionalism in action. Civility stops being an aspirational policy and becomes observable conduct.

6. Closing the Gap in Law

The Hogan study ultimately invites the legal sector to pause and reflect on a fundamental question: what are we truly rewarding when we select and elevate our leaders?

Confidence, ambition, and intellectual force are not flaws. They are often valuable attributes in legal practice. But on their own, they are incomplete measures of leadership in a profession grounded in judgment, ethics, and human discretion.

What legal professionals may seek from their leaders is not lowered standards or diminished rigor. It is coherence, between stated values and daily behaviour, between authority and accountability, between professional power and human care. When those elements align, leadership feels legitimate, protective, and worthy of trust.

The leaders the legal sector needs in this century are those who understand that how law is practised, and how people are treated while practising it, which is inseparable from excellence. Increasingly, it is also inseparable from institutional legitimacy, public confidence, and risk.

To those legal leaders who already embody this integration of performance and humanity, and to the individuals and systems that support them: your leadership matters. It deserves recognition, amplification, and emulation.

And to those who enable leadership based primarily on performance metrics or visibility alone, this moment offers an opportunity, not for blame, but for recalibration. To ask who we are supporting, why, and what additional capacities might be required for leaders to be not just successful lawyers, but truly excellent legal leaders. Closing this gap is not about redefining excellence downward. It is about understanding it more fully, and leading the profession forward together.

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