If you are looking to grow your career and move into the leadership space, either as a manager or director or whatever, here’s a lesson I’ve learned that I’ve never read in a book or heard in a training class. This actually probably applies to everyone, but is of particular interest if you are a decision maker or influencer.

Your senior leaders probably do a lot of one-way downward directed communications. Things like speeches, keynotes, emails, presentations, fireside chats, all those types of things, where they are presenting their vision and strategy. Those things are all important, because it reveals to you what your customer-facing messaging is on your organization’s priorities and mission.

But…and this is an important but…

An important soft skill you have to learn is how to read between the lines and figure out what is actually important to your boss. Frequently you can do this by paying attention not only to what metrics and KPIs are being measured, but which of those metrics and KPIs does your leadership actually pay attention to and ask questions about?

Here’s an example. Let’s say your boss has their quarterly all-hands and says something like, “Our strategic goal is to deliver the highest-quality software. We should spare no expense in fixing all the bugs and defects.”

But then you observe during project status reviews, your leader asks pointed questions on budget and schedule, and maybe even sets the budget and schedule for you with no room for system testing. You start to think to yourself, “Wait a second, I thought we were willing to incur extra expense to improve our quality?”

Well, guess what. You’ve just experienced a business leadership reality, which is what you executive leaders say out loud in public, and what they actually want, are frequently two different things.

Is it difficult to navigate, and maybe it even seems unfair? Yes, probably. But this is also the pragmatic reality of many organizations.

Maybe your organization doesn’t operate like this. If so, great. But if not, you have to learn to read the room. Look at what things are actually measured, but more importantly which measurements are actually looked at and taken seriously. You probably measure something like “Defect burndown rate” but your business leader probably doesn’t really care if that KPI turns red because you are not fixing defects at a fast enough rate. Your business leader probably DOES care about your KPI on budget overruns and release date slippage.

So as a leader, you need to figure out what your organization really wants and expects, because it does not always align with what is said out loud.