Ethical Leadership Principles

Underrated leadership lesson: Be radically transparent. Feedback shouldn't happen just once a year. It should be a daily, continuous loop. During my 10 years at Bridgewater, I received 12,385 pieces of feedback. And, it wasn't just reserved for formal reviews. Feedback was given LIVE throughout the day. In the middle of a presentation? Feedback. Right after answering a question? Feedback. Truthfully, as an employee, I didn't always love it. But I valued it. After all, they're called blind spots for a reason. This was all the result of one key principle: Radical transparency. A system that integrates candid feedback into daily work life, Allowing employees to constantly assess and be assessed. Here's why it works: ✅ Good thinking and behavior increase ↳ Processes improve when logic is analyzed in real time. ✅ High standards are maintained  ↳ Problems get fixed faster when everything is visible. ✅ No more workplace hierarchies ↳ Continuous improvement happens when everyone is accountable. It's a principle that didn't just change my resilience to feedback. It completely transformed my leadership as a whole. So managers, Consider implementing radical transparency for these 7 reasons: 1. Faster problem-solving ↳ Small issues are easier to fix than big ones. 2. Openness saves time ↳ Less time wasted on gossip and tracking information. 3. Accelerated learning  ↳ Teams grow faster when they understand each other’s thinking. 4. Long-term success ↳ Ongoing feedback improves leadership and the organization. 5. Building an idea of meritocracy ↳ Transparency builds trust and rewards good ideas. 6. Reduced workplace inefficiencies ↳ Open communication cuts wasted time and confusion. 7. Proactive issue resolution ↳ Fixing small problems early prevents bigger ones. While getting scores live in the mid-presentation may not be for everyone: Becoming more transparent has real, tangible benefits, And can put you on a streamlined path to success. Leaders - are you brave enough to try it? ♻️ Repost to help other leaders become radically transparent. 🔔 And follow Dave Kline for more. 

I frequently encounter CEOs who unknowingly sabotage their team's potential through a common but costly assumption: They expect others to think, work, and exhibit motivation exactly like they do. Consider the case of a recent coaching client who exemplified this pattern. Despite his business acumen, this CEO consistently: - Expected his team to match his 70-hour workweeks - Dismissed approaches that differed from his rapid-fire decision-making style - Interpreted ideological challenge and debate as "lack of dedication" The real cost? Declining staff engagement, increased turnover, and—most critically—unexplored opportunities to scale that could only come from the diverse perspectives of his team. The solution isn't complicated, but requires accepting direct feedback and willingness to change: 1. Acknowledge that “different” doesn't mean “wrong” 2. Actively seek out and leverage varied perspectives 3. Create space for people and ideas that make you uncomfortable 4. Measure results, not working styles The strongest teams aren't built on uniformity—they're built on complementary differences. What diverse perspectives from your team are you failing to hear and appreciate? #Leadership #ExecutiveGrowth #BusinessGrowth #TeamDevelopment

When the Palisades fire erupted near my home in Los Angeles, it brought devastation that felt deeply personal. Like many around me, I’ve seen friends lose homes, cherished keepsakes, pets, livelihoods—and their children’s sense of safety. Even for those of us fortunate to be outside of the inferno's relentless path, the grief for what has been lost is shared. Disasters like these aren’t just stories of loss—they reveal the ripple effects on communities and organizations. They’re a call to action for leaders to step up with empathy and support. Here’s how leaders and businesses can help their teams navigate the unexpected: 1️⃣ 𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿 𝗙𝗹𝗲𝘅𝗶𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗨𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 Give employees space to handle crises—whether through flexible hours, remote work, or paid leave. 2️⃣ 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗣𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲𝘀 Connect your team with mental health services, disaster relief organizations, housing assistance, and other resources. Leaders don’t need all the answers, but facilitating help can be life-changing. 3️⃣ 𝗙𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Create safe spaces for employees to share and process their emotions, whether in group check-ins or one-on-ones. Sometimes, being heard is the first step toward healing. 4️⃣ 𝗠𝗼𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘇𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝗢𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘀 Engage your team in relief efforts. Here are a few examples in addition to the 𝐋𝐀𝐅𝐃 𝐅𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 and 𝐑𝐞𝐝 𝐂𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐬. 🔹 𝐅𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐬𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 who’ve lost classrooms and school supplies. 🔹 Partner with organizations like 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐂𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐊𝐢𝐭𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐧 to provide meals for firefighters and evacuees. 🔹 Support 𝐂𝐎𝐑𝐄 (Community Organized Relief Effort) to aid underserved communities. 5️⃣ 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗻 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗟𝗼𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝗲𝗿𝗺 Disasters are inevitable, but preparation makes a difference. Build a crisis plan that prioritizes employee well-being, clear communication, and community response. Leading through crises isn’t about having all the answers—it’s about showing up with empathy. People will remember how you supported them when it mattered most. Los Angeles, like so many communities facing fires, floods, and storms, will rebuild. Thoughtful leadership can help workplaces play a vital role in that resilience. #ILoveLA #LeadershipInCrisis #EmpathyInAction #StrongerTogether #EmployeeWellBeing #januscoaching 𝘗𝘩𝘰𝘵𝘰 𝘰𝘧 𝘗𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤 𝘗𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘶𝘯𝘴𝘦𝘵 - 𝘣𝘦𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦 - 𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘵: 𝘓𝘦𝘵𝘺 𝘚𝘢𝘭𝘤𝘦𝘥𝘰 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘤𝘬

Wednesday Q&A Q: "I am an experienced leader preferring a command-and-control approach, and this leadership style has helped me build and maintain highly effective teams for many years. However, in today's rapidly evolving environment, my style feels outdated. I am open to change but unsure how to create an environment of empowerment—delegation, letting control go, and giving freedom to make decisions—without compromising performance?" First, it's important to acknowledge your willingness to adapt—a crucial first step in leadership evolution. As the environment shifts, so must our approaches to leading others. Your command-and-control style has merits, particularly in situations requiring strict compliance and efficiency. However, it's important to note that promoting an environment of empowerment can drive even greater performance by unlocking your team's full potential and inspiring confidence in the transition. Here's how you can transition to a more empowering leadership style without compromising performance: 1️⃣ Recognize your team members' strengths and competencies. Focusing on their past strengths and achievements will help you TRUST them to make decisions and handle responsibilities. 2️⃣ Delegate with clarity. DELEGATION doesn't mean dumping tasks. It's about entrusting team members with meaningful responsibilities that align with their skills and growth areas. When you delegate, provide clear objectives and expectations, allowing them to determine how to achieve those goals. 3️⃣ Create a culture of ACCOUNTABILITY by encouraging individuals to contribute to the outcome, take the initiative, and offer solutions. This will help them to become more invested in the team's success. Remember, empowerment doesn't mean you disappear from the process and entirely give up control. It means you provide the resources, guidance, and feedback they need without prescribing what to do or micromanaging. Although you may initially feel you're losing grip, you'll gain a more engaged, innovative, and high-performing team. To start to shift, ask yourself today: 🔹 How can you begin to delegate more effectively this week? 🔹 What small steps can you take to build trust and encourage ownership within your team? #trust #delagation #accountability

Trust and transparency are foundational for a high-performing team. Throughout my career, I’ve seen how these values drive continuous improvement and innovation. Here’s how you can emphasize these values in your team: 1. Build a Foundation of Trust: Be reliable, consistent, and open with your team. Share your thought process behind major decisions and be transparent about your reasons. 2. Promote Psychological Safety: Ensure your team feels safe to speak up without fear of negative consequences. Acknowledge their concerns and ideas, even if you can’t act on them immediately. 3. Practice Radical Transparency: Share as much information as you can with your team, from business performance to customer feedback. Transparency builds trust because it shows you have nothing to hide. 4. Encourage Mutual Trust and Responsibility: Make it clear that their input is expected and valued. Encourage transparency and honesty from your team members as well. 5. Celebrate Transparency and Accountability: Recognize and celebrate when team members are transparent and hold themselves accountable. This reinforces the behavior you want to see. 6. Foster Open Communication Channels: Maintain regular team meetings, suggestion boxes, and open-door policies to ensure everyone has a way to share their thoughts. By emphasizing trust and transparency, you create a culture where continuous improvement is possible. Your team will feel safe to share, innovate, and grow, leading to a more dynamic and successful organization. Have you experienced working on a team with a high amount of trust? #techleadership #trust #teamwork

Trust is the *make-or-break* for remote teams… Yet many remote startups struggle with building it. Here’s how I’m creating a culture of trust at mine ⤵ 1️⃣ An open booking policy My calendar is *always* open for 1-on-1 employee calls. I have weekly syncs with every department, too. But it doesn’t stop there— Any team member can book me to discuss: → Feedback → Questions → New ideas …some say this isn’t a smart use of my time. But for me? It’s invaluable— → Strengthening team bonds → Signaling trust and respect → Encouraging open dialogue …with my closest colleagues. The ROI is infinite. 2️⃣ Giving real autonomy I don’t micromanage or question every call… Team members *own* their roles, ↳ And we trust them to deliver results. This autonomy: → Promotes accountability → Supports everyone’s growth → Motivates talent to do their best work …all while allowing for honest mistakes and bold thinking. 3️⃣ Constant communication You can’t over-communicate when working remotely. At Squad, we make time for: → Bi-weekly updates → Quarterly town halls → Weekly team check-ins …where we share wins, challenges, and plans in the open. This radical transparency? It’s how we build REAL trust. You see, trust isn’t given— It’s hard-earned through consistently showing your team they’re valued and heard. And I’m putting in that work every single day. Because that sort of unshakable trust? That’s what brings out my team’s fullest potential.

Leadership Principle 3: Engage all team members in culture AND make culture the top metric in annual reviews A couple leaders can greatly change a culture but they can only take it so far. As a leader, you must inspire every employee to own the culture. This means rewarding culture champions and driving a direct connection between culture participation and pay. So often, leaders talk about culture but it doesn’t even come up at review time. I'm convinced that culture and results are directly linked. Even if I'm wrong, I'd much prefer to have a legacy of happy employees that enjoyed their interactions with me, the business and customers. We all work way too many hours to not have fun doing it. Call to Action (for you and your team): 1. Consider replicating the Culture Champions initiative. Each quarter, employees nominate their peers as those that best make work a positive place. Highlight them and affirm the behaviors in quarterly all employee meetings. Behaviors to really call out and reward: deep experts openly providing their knowledge without attitude, team members who go out of their way to welcome new members, those that step up when others are down and those that are constantly smiling while inspiring others do the same. 2. Make Employee Insights scores or culture impact your first and main discussion in annual reviews. If your business doesn’t ask employees their opinions, start doing this tomorrow. Every team has those that have been taught to execute regardless of the devastation left behind. To break this cycle, you must show that culture isn’t a side initiative but the initiative. You must create a link to pay. I’d argue this is done <5% of the time and that is a big mistake. When employees are engaged, everyone lives better, results come and people work hard even when you aren’t watching.  3. Culture is like safety, when walking around you should look for positives (immediately compliment them) and negatives (immediately address them).  4. Consider taking a group of your newest and youngest employees out once a quarter to build a community amongst them, allow them to grow comfortable with you in a non-intimidating atmosphere, allow them to ask questions they’d never ask in a formal setting, to get a pulse for how your team is doing with welcoming new employees and to encourage them to nominate those that have best welcomed them as Culture Champions. It's fun and effective! 5. Spend the money to do something as a team after the quarterly staff meetings. Getting people out of work mode to get to know each other is critical in helping your team know where each other is coming from and getting all to value everyone’s differences fully. Better yet, don't spend money and go make a difference together at a food bank, orphanage, etc. Can’t wait to hear your thoughts on where you’ve seen any of the points work, what hit you the hardest, what I missed and where you disagree.  #caterpillar  #leadership  #culture

In my journey as a leader, I've come to cherish the profound significance of trust and transparency. It's not just a checkbox on the leadership to-do list; it's the very essence that fuels meaningful connections and drives collective success. It was a challenging time for our team, facing uncertainties and setbacks. In the midst of it all, I made a conscious decision: to prioritize building trust and fostering transparency, even in the face of adversity. Here are six guiding principles on how to prioritize building trust and transparency in your leadership approach: Authentic Communication ➡️ Embrace open, honest, and authentic communication with your team. ➡️ Share insights, challenges, and successes transparently, fostering an environment of trust and collaboration. Lead by Example ➡️ Demonstrate integrity, accountability, and fairness in all your actions. ➡️ Lead by example, showing your team what it means to prioritize trust and transparency in every aspect of leadership. Empowerment Through Information ➡️ Provide your team with the information they need to excel. ➡️ Empower them with knowledge, insights, and context, enabling them to make informed decisions and contribute meaningfully. Active Listening ➡️ Listen actively to the perspectives, concerns, and ideas of your team members. ➡️ Create space for open dialogue and constructive feedback, demonstrating that their voices are heard and valued. Consistency and Reliability ➡️ Be consistent in your words, actions, and decisions. ➡️ Build trust through reliability, predictability, and follow-through, earning the confidence of your team over time. Transparency in Decision-Making ➡️ Be transparent about the reasoning behind significant decisions. ➡️ Share the thought process, considerations, and implications, fostering understanding and alignment within the team. How do you prioritize building trust and transparency in your leadership journey? Share your insights and experiences below, and let's continue to learn and grow together! 👇 #StandoutLeadership #Trust #Transparency #Communication #EthicalLeadership

"We don't believe in fairness." - Me to my children We apply this concept to material and life decisions for each child. (Love is not in view here.) For example, if one kid gets to grab a coffee with me on the way home from the gym, it doesn't mean I owe the rest of them a coffee. More than likely, that coffee stop is more about 1-1 time than it is about coffee anyway. If someone gets a new winter jacket because last year's model is too small, it does not follow that everyone else gets a new jacket, too. A neurodivergent child must attend an expensive private school for a highly customized education. Others will thrive in a public school setting, which we contribute to through our taxes. The problem with seeking fairness carte blanche is that no two people are alike. Each of my children is distinctly different and unique. They have unique gifts, talents, weaknesses, strengths, foibles, and joys. Some are neurodivergent, and others are not, creating particular challenges and needs. Equity, I believe, seeks what's best for each person. It seeks the best possible circumstances, and what will enable them to thrive in whatever they're doing. (Sidebar: "best" is frequently unavailable.) Applying this principle to business— This statement, "We don't believe in fairness," was one of the first principles I introduced to one of my revenue teams the first day we were together. I told them upfront that I would not seek fairness across the responsibilities and tasks I might assign, even for two people with the same title. Instead, I would strive for equity, meaning I would strive as a manager to help people work well within the roles that fit them best. Then, I asked them to do the same. We were a new team, new to working with each other, so strengths and weaknesses weren't apparent immediately. So, I asked people to be vocal about what they did well, what they didn't do well, and what they hated or loved doing. When one team member disclosed that they had ADHD, that meant working with them to find ways to maximize the benefits of ADHD and apply tools and time management to minimize the impact on their work. Another expressed that working with a particular customer was causing them much stress, so we rebalanced account assignments. The belief that I asked them to embrace was that high-performing teams do best not when individuals are well-rounded but when TEAMS are well-rounded—which requires that every person on the team be able to use their strengths each day at work. (Source: Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, "Nine Lies About Work") Some may read this and pick on my word choices here. Fairness. Equity. That's fine and not the point. The point is, if you're a manager, parent, or leader—my encouragement to you is to practice enough empathy and listening to put your team into the best application of their talents to succeed.

Executive directors hiding funding issues? It happens more than you think. I've seen a nonprofit leader who rarely cashed paychecks to help with finances. And another who took out personal loans to donate to the organization. While these actions stem from good intentions, they often create more problems than they solve. Here's why: 1. Hiding financial struggles prevents boards from fully understanding the organization's health. This limits their ability to provide strategic guidance and support. 2. Leaders forgoing paychecks can lead to burnout and resentment. And of course, there are some labor law issues, putting the nonprofit at risk. 3. Personal loans to the organization blur professional boundaries and can create conflicts of interest. By concealing financial realities, leaders unintentionally make it harder for boards to provide effective oversight and support. This lack of transparency can erode stakeholder trust and hinder the organization's ability to address challenges proactively. This is why I advocate for a culture of openness in nonprofit financial management: - Regular, detailed financial reports to the board - Open discussions about fundraising challenges and successes - Clear policies on executive compensation and benefits Implementing these practices offers several benefits: 1. Improved decision-making: With accurate financial information, boards can make more informed strategic choices. 2. Enhanced donor confidence: Transparency builds trust, potentially leading to increased donations and long-term supporter relationships. 3. Better resource allocation: Understanding the true financial picture allows for more effective budgeting and program planning. 4. Stronger partnerships: Open communication about finances can lead to more productive collaborations with other organizations and funders. By fostering a culture of financial transparency, we're creating an environment of trust and collaboration. This allows nonprofits to focus on their core missions without the burden of hidden financial stress. Remember, transparency isn't just about sharing numbers – it's about creating a culture of honesty, accountability, and shared responsibility for the organization's financial health. What steps is your nonprofit taking to increase financial transparency?