Leadership Practices We Need to STOP Doing
October 5, 2026
I looked in the mirror and saw a monster. I had to look away.
It was the day after the first time I had to let someone on my team go. It had taken months to get to that point. There had been second, third, fourth, fifth chances, a lot of conversations, and many calls with mentors as I agonized over the decision. They all eventually told me the same thing: it had to be done.
There were mistakes made along the way, of course. I’m human, and I’m a human leader.
What shook me wasn’t only the decision itself. It was confronting the power that comes with leadership and what that power can mean in another person’s life. It required looking at what was mine to own, where things could have gone differently, and what kind of leader I wanted to be.
Leadership has a way of putting a mirror in front of us if we allow it.
Especially during hard moments, we get to see what we actually believe about power, responsibility, authority and care.
We’re seeing that mirror on a much larger scale right now.
We’re living through a turbulent sociopolitical time, and some of the leadership practices we have been taught, rewarded for, or simply learned to accept are becoming harder to ignore. They show up in government, corporations, nonprofits, churches, schools and community organizations.
The systems we create are shaped by how we relate to one another. If we want organizations and communities that are more loving, accountable, just and humane, then we also have to look at the ways we have learned to lead.
Some of those practices need to stop:
My Way or the Highway
Most of our institutions are still built around hierarchy. There is usually one primary leader, and everyone else is somewhere “under” that person.
That structure can quickly turn into a belief that the person with the highest title knows best. Decisions move from the top down. Information often does too. People lower in the hierarchy may have little influence over decisions that directly affect them.
Over time, people can stop speaking up, stop trusting what they know, or stop offering ideas because they’ve learned that their voice carries less weight.
Organizations lose something when that happens.
There is wisdom throughout an organization. People see different things depending on where they sit. The person closest to the work may understand something that someone at “the top” simply cannot see from their position.
Being the leader doesn’t mean being the source of all wisdom.
At the same time, collective leadership doesn’t mean there is no leadership or that everyone makes every decision. Leaders still have responsibility. Sometimes they have to hold boundaries, make difficult decisions, or make the final call.
The question is how that power is held.
Can we use positional power without diminishing the power, wisdom and leadership of others?
Skirting Accountability
This has probably been one of my harder lessons as a leader over the last few years.
For a long time, I placed a lot of weight on intention. If my intentions were good, that felt like it should matter most, even when someone experienced what I did differently than I intended.
That came with a rude awakening.
Impact matters too.
You would think I would have lived and breathed that as an evaluator, but apparently when the evaluation is about you, the perspective can get a little skewed. :)
Accountability helps us hold both.
What did we intend? What actually happened? What was our role? Is there something that needs to be repaired, changed or done differently?
That can be difficult when we see ourselves as “good people” or “good leaders.” Sometimes acknowledging that we hurt someone, mishandled something, or simply got it wrong can feel like an indictment of who we are.
But accountability doesn’t require self-punishment.
Shame can actually make accountability harder because we become so focused on proving that we’re not a “bad person” that we lose the opportunity to really listen.
Accountability gives us a chance to see ourselves more clearly and do something with what we see.
That matters deeply for trust, which feels like a hot commodity these days. People need to know that when something goes wrong, those with positional power will listen, reflect, take responsibility where needed, and make changes.
Strong relationships require accountability. Strong organizations do too.
Speaking in Half-Truths
This one is complicated.
It can be difficult as a leader to figure out what transparency really means. There are things that happen in organizations that everyone does not need to know every detail about. Confidentiality, personnel issues, finances and timing all require judgment.
I used to think full transparency was always the goal.
Then, a few years ago, BECOME went through a financially difficult period, and I tried to be very transparent about what we were facing.
People freaked out.
That experience helped me understand the difference between transparency and disclosure.
People don’t necessarily need every piece of information a leader has. They do need enough truth to understand what is happening, what it may mean for them, and what they need to know to make informed decisions.
That requires discernment and honesty.
There is a difference between thoughtfully deciding what needs to be shared and giving people a partial version of reality that leads them to believe something that isn’t actually true.
Half-truths can be especially damaging because they sound like honesty.
Sometimes we use them because we’re scared. We don’t want conflict. We don’t want people to be upset. We may be trying to protect the organization, the relationship, ourselves, or even the person we’re speaking to. But people can usually feel when something isn’t adding up.
Truth-telling requires both courage and compassion.
So What Do We Practice Instead?
Changing these patterns takes more than learning a few new leadership techniques. Some of these ways of leading are deeply ingrained in us and embedded in our institutions.
They take practice to unlearn.
1. Practice Collective Leadership
We need to get more comfortable with not being the smartest person in every room.
Sometimes someone else should lead. Sometimes someone else knows more. Sometimes the leader’s role is to listen, support, ask a question, or create room for another person’s strengths to emerge.
And, yet, sometimes the leader really does need to make the decision.
Collective leadership doesn’t require leaders to disappear. It asks us to become more conscious of how we use power.
Can we hold authority without needing dominance? Can we make room for other people’s power without feeling that it takes away from our own?
2. Practice Accountability Without Shame
Accountability can show up in many ways.
It may be someone asking a difficult question, telling us how something affected them, or helping us see something we missed. It may be recognizing for ourselves that something was handled poorly and going back to address it.
That doesn’t mean every criticism is accurate or that we have to agree with every interpretation of our actions.
It does mean being willing to listen to the lesson we need to hear….and do something with it.
It could be to apologize, repair, change a practice, have another conversation or make a different decision next time.
Accountability should help us grow.
3. Practice Courage and Compassion
Some of the hardest parts of leadership involve saying things people may not want to hear or making decisions we wish we didn’t have to make.
How do we hold power without dominating, hold ourselves and others accountable without dehumanizing, and tell the truth without causing unnecessary harm?
There may not be one perfect answer. But courage and compassion have to be part of it.
Compassion means remembering the humanity of the person in front of us. Courage means actually having the conversation. (For more on courage, also check out our blog on Authenticity and Courage.)
Tell the truth. Make the decision. Name what needs to be named.
We don’t have to use kindness as an excuse to avoid what is difficult, and we don’t have to use honesty as permission to be careless with people.
I’m still practicing all of this.
Leadership has shown me things about myself that I’ve been proud of and things I didn’t particularly want to see.
That day in the mirror was one of them.
Yet, leadership requires us to keep looking. To see ourselves beyond our intentions. To notice what our ways of leading create in other people, in our organizations, and eventually in our communities.
When what we see doesn’t align with who we want to be or the world we want to help create, we have an opportunity.
We can practice something different.
We can become.