The Calibration Gap
The Calibration Gap is the distance between how accurately a senior leader reads their own judgment and how accurate that judgment actually is. As responsibilities grow, leaders need reliable ways to test their assumptions. Seniority can make candid feedback harder to obtain.
Origin
Named by Yemi Mateola from his experience in enterprise technology leadership. The framework examines how leaders test the quality of their judgment.
When to use it
Any time the stakes of a leader's judgment have grown faster than the quality of feedback on that judgment: a new mandate, a bigger chair, a first board seat, a founder moving from builder to allocator.
An illustrative example
An executive promoted out of operations a decade ago still prices her own operational instincts as current. Nobody corrects her; the room defers. The gap is invisible until an integration plan built on those instincts misses badly. Calibration work would have priced the staleness in advance: which judgments are load-bearing, which are dated, and who is allowed to say so.
Related writing
A framework from my leadership writing. Explore leadership coaching.
By Yemi Mateola. Last updated: September 2026.