In the relentless pursuit of growth and efficiency, corporate America has perfected a paradoxical and costly tradition. We identify our top individual contributors our sharpest engineers, our most prolific salespeople, our most meticulous analysts and as a reward, we promote them into leadership. We hand them a team, a title, and a pat on the back. Then, we watch, often in silent confusion, as performance stumbles, morale dips, and that once brilliant employee quietly burns out or walks out the door.
This isn’t a minor management flaw it’s a systemic crisis of lost potential. And according to Kendra Johnson, Canada’s leading soft skills expert and creator of the S.P.A.R.K. Method™, it’s a crisis born from a fundamental and unspoken disconnect that is bleeding organizations of their most valuable asset their people.
Johnson speaks from the trenches. “Fifteen years ago, I was that struggling leader,” she notes. “An IC promoted for performance, handed a team, and given no formal training on how to actually lead them. I was great at execution, drowning in leadership, and too proud to ask for help.” Her experience is not an anomaly it is the rule. We promote people for their technical skill and then expect them to magically possess an entirely different set of competencies: empathy, delegation, strategic communication, and inspiration.
The fallout of this “sink or swim” leadership pipeline is a cultural chasm. As Johnson observes, “Your senior leaders are talking, your middle managers are translating. No one’s sure they’re saying the same thing.” This translation gap isn’t merely about miscommunication it’s where strategy goes to die. Vision dissipates in the handoff. Strategic objectives become a game of telephone, leaving frontline teams executing a distorted version of the plan, frustrated and disengaged. The problem, Johnson has identified over eight years of working with 2,000+ leaders, “often isn’t capability. It’s that senior leaders and middle managers are speaking different languages.”
This is the gap where Johnson has built her practice, The Venned Group. Her approach rejects the one size fits all leadership seminar. Instead, it’s built on a diagnostic first framework she calls the S.P.A.R.K. Method™, which meets leaders “where they actually are.” The goal is not to create cookie cutter managers but to build what she terms “a shared operating language.” When senior leaders, middle managers, and teams finally operate from the same playbook with the same terminology and understood expectations, the friction that slows progress evaporates.
The cost of ignoring this gap is quantifiable and severe. It’s the cost of missed deadlines due to unclear priorities. It’s the cost of rework due to misunderstood directives. Most critically, it’s the astronomical cost of turnover. High performing individual contributors, thrust into leadership without support, often fail or flee. Their teams, lacking proper guidance and psychological safety, follow them out the door. “The best time to close the gap,” Johnson warns, “is before it costs you your best people.”
The solution requires a fundamental mindset shift. We must stop viewing leadership as a mere promotion a next step on the career ladder and start treating it as a distinct profession requiring dedicated training and apprenticeship. Upskilling a star coder in Python is an investment; upskilling them in empathetic feedback, strategic delegation, and conflict resolution is a non-negotiable necessity if we want them to lead.
Johnson’s work through targeted workshops and executive partnerships focuses on building the core skills that bridge the disconnect communication, collaboration, and trust building across all levels. It starts, she insists, at the top. “Executive partnership is critical because the disconnect starts at the top.” Alignment isn’t about agreement, but about shared understanding and a coherent cascade of context.
The modern workplace demands more than just “doers,” even exceptional ones. It demands leaders who can amplify the work of others, navigate complexity, and translate vision into actionable reality. By failing to equip our promoted stars with these skills, we are not setting them up to fail; we are actively choosing to fail them. And in doing so, we sabotage our own growth, our culture, and our future.
Kendra Johnson’s message is a clarion call to a more intentional, humane, and effective model of talent development. It’s a recognition that the soft skills the skills of leadership are the hardest and most critical ones to master. Closing the translation gap isn’t just good leadership development; it’s the ultimate strategic imperative for any organization that wants its best people to not only stay but to truly lead.
