Last Thursday, we did the inside half of self-awareness. This Thursday, we do the outside half. They behave nothing alike.
THIS WEEK’S ALTITUDE
Base Camp: External Perception
At Base Camp, you can see your own gear. You can feel your breathing settle into the altitude. What you cannot see is yourself moving on the ice. Only the team can see that. External Perception works the same way. It is the accurate read on how others actually experience your leadership when you walk into the room. The BOK calls it the second half of self-awareness. Internal Clarity tells you who you are. External Perception tells you who others are following. The gap between the two has a name in the model. The Self-Other Agreement gap. It is the most common failure point at Base Camp. And it does not stay there. It rises.
FIELD REPORTS
Source: Reuters / CNBC / Automotive News, “Carlos Tavares ousted at Stellantis” (December 2024)
Tavares was the highest-paid auto CEO in 2023. The architect of the merger that formed Stellantis. By December 2024, his board removed him unanimously after what one source called a “totally untenable” relationship. The diagnosis was not strategy. It was style. Sources told CNBC he cast blame on US executives while ignoring his own mistakes. He saw himself as the operator who delivered the merger. The board, dealers, suppliers, and unions experienced him as brash and disconnected. That is the Self-Other Agreement gap with consequences attached. Stellantis dressed it up in the press release as “different views have emerged.” That phrase, in board language, is what every external perception failure looks like from the outside. The CEO was confident he was right. The room had stopped listening months earlier.
Source: Harvard Business Review, “For Your 360-Degree Feedback to Be Effective, You Need to Discuss It” by Brenda Steinberg (January 2026)
Steinberg opens with a senior leader on the verge of quitting. His career had been built on having a strong voice, challenging others, and “breaking things” so the organization could rebuild. The 360 showed his team experienced exactly that as destructive. Same behavior. Two completely different stories. That is External Perception in three sentences. The BOK predicts this exact pattern. The behaviors that promoted you are the same behaviors others may now be experiencing as toxic. The leader knows what he is doing. The team knows what he is doing too. They just disagree about what he is doing.
THE SUMMIT VIEW
I spent eleven years as a CFO sitting across the table from CEOs who were certain they were clear. Half of them were right. The other half were a board meeting away from finding out otherwise. The pattern has nothing to do with intelligence or experience. It has everything to do with whether the leader has installed the discipline of asking, regularly and from people who will actually answer, “How am I being read in this room?” GCC executives carry an extra weight here. Your boardroom holds Emiratis and Brits and Americans and Indians. Your team holds twenty nationalities on a quiet day. The Self-Other Agreement gap is not one delta. It is a delta per audience. Internal clarity without external perception is half a map. The half that does not show the cliffs.
One question for the weekend. When was the last time you asked someone who works for you to describe how you actually come across? Not how they hope you come across. How you actually do. If the answer makes you uncomfortable, that is the data.
SIGN-OFF
See you at the Summit!
Mohamed Isa
ABOUT THE PEAK LEADERSHIP MODEL
The PLM is a six-level leadership framework, Base Camp through Summit, organized around 21 capability domains. The Body of Knowledge (PLM-BOK) is the reference behind it. The architecture is progressive and cumulative. Skipping levels produces predictable failure.
ABOUT MOHAMED ISA
Mohamed Isa is a leadership keynote speaker, an Amazon best-selling author, and a former CFO. He is writing his first Arabic book, Everest: Leadership Lessons, drawing on a century of Everest history to explore what the mountain teaches us about leading under pressure.
SOURCES
1. Reuters / CNBC, “Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares lost control of the automaker with ‘arrogant’ mistakes, sources say,” December 10, 2024.
2. Euronews, “Stellantis CEO Tavares quits: Why his EV bet sparked his departure,” December 2, 2024.
3. Brenda Steinberg, “For Your 360-Degree Feedback to Be Effective, You Need to Discuss It,” Harvard Business Review, January 28, 2026.
https://hbr.org/2026/01/for-your-360-degree-feedback-to-be-effective-you-need-to-discuss-it
