Over the last few months, we asked our LinkedIn network and a smaller group of leaders a handful of pointed questions about work: Who do you trust? What’s driving your stress? Do you believe you can actually get where you want to go at your current organization? The results, drawn from a seven-question LinkedIn poll series and a follow-up SurveyMonkey questionnaire of directors and executives, confirm some things we’ve long suspected — and complicate a few others.
A note on the data: the two surveys didn’t draw from the same audience. The LinkedIn poll reflects a broad, self-selected professional network, while SurveyMonkey respondents were primarily directors and executive leaders. That difference shows up in the results — most visibly in confidence about long-term career growth — so the comparisons below are worth reading with that context in mind.
Here’s what stood out.
Integrity Isn’t Just Nice to Have. It’s the Whole Game.
Across both surveys, one trait outranked every other quality leaders can offer their teams: integrity. In our LinkedIn poll, 83% named integrity the quality they value most. Communication and accountability tied for a distant second at 8% each, and transparency didn’t register a single vote. The SurveyMonkey group echoed it almost exactly, naming integrity by nearly unanimous agreement, with accountability, vision, and transparency rounding out the list.
Leaders spend a lot of energy on communication training, vision workshops, and culture decks. Those matter. But this data is a reminder that none of it lands if people don’t trust you’re telling them the truth. Integrity isn’t a soft skill sitting alongside the others — it’s the precondition for the others to work at all.
Leadership Quality Beats Pay, Perks, and Everything Else
We also asked what actually drives career satisfaction, and the answer wasn’t close. 56% of LinkedIn poll respondents pointed to leadership quality — more than double the next closest factor, growth opportunities, at 22%. Work-life balance and compensation, often treated as the big levers in retention conversations, tied for last place at 11% each.
A related poll on support for professional growth pointed to the same polarization we saw elsewhere in this survey: respondents split evenly between the most positive and most negative options, with nobody landing in the middle. Put together, the message is consistent — people don’t file leadership under “nice to have” next to salary and benefits. They treat it as the thing that makes everything else worth it, or the reason none of it is.
Stress Was the Only Number with Consensus
If nothing else in this survey is unanimous, this is: 100% of LinkedIn poll respondents said workplace stress or conflict has increased over the past two years. The SurveyMonkey sample, drawn from a different audience, confirmed it — a clear majority reported the same rise.
This is the finding that should stop leaders in their tracks. Not because stress at work is new, but because of how consistent it is across two very different respondent pools. When a number is this close to unanimous, it stops being an opinion and starts being a condition of the workplace itself — one that has to be managed, not shrugged off.
Leadership Perception Is Split Right Down the Middle
When we asked how people perceive leadership at their organization, half described it as “mostly positive.” The other half didn’t land anywhere near the middle — they split evenly between “very positive” and “very negative.” Nobody chose a lukewarm option.
That polarization shows up again in the SurveyMonkey results, where “mostly positive” and “mixed” were the top two answers. Put simply: leadership, in the eyes of the people being led, rarely reads as average. You’re either building trust or you’re losing it — and the data suggests there isn’t much neutral ground in between.
Confidence About the Future Depends on Who You Ask
Here’s where the two surveys diverge in an interesting way. On the LinkedIn poll, nobody said they were confident they could achieve their long-term career goals at their current organization — two-thirds said they simply weren’t sure. But among the SurveyMonkey respondents, mostly directors and executive leaders, five out of eight believe they can get where they want to go from where they already are.
The gap is worth sitting with. It may reflect seniority — leaders further along tend to have more visibility into their own path, or more influence over it. It may also reflect who self-selects into each channel. Either way, if the people below the executive level are this much less confident about their own trajectory, that’s a retention conversation waiting to happen.
What People Are Actually Asking For
The open-ended responses in the SurveyMonkey survey filled in the “why” behind the numbers. When we asked what would improve culture, the same themes kept surfacing:
Greater transparency and access to decisions currently made behind closed doors. Clearer vision and direction from the top. More autonomy for individual contributors, and less groupthink. Leadership that’s better informed about AI and emerging technology. More face-to-face interaction, and faster, more decisive decision-making.
None of these are radical asks. They’re the basic mechanics of trust — and they line up almost exactly with what the polling data already told us people value most.
The Takeaway
Put the two surveys side by side and a simple pattern emerges: people are more stressed than they were two years ago, they’re not entirely sure leadership deserves their trust, and the one trait that would change that is integrity — not a new perk, not a new tool, just leaders who do what they say they’ll do.
That’s the work. It’s also, not coincidentally, the work we spend most of our time on with the leaders we coach.
