The Five Pillars of Leadership That Actually Hold Weight
I didn’t learn leadership from a book or an MBA program. I learned it from bad bosses in retail jobs, from watching people with authority act like having a title meant they didn’t owe anyone an explanation. I was young and naive enough to think adults in charge would behave like adults. That illusion didn’t last long.
Over twenty years of leading support and services organizations — from a 10-person team in my first management role to a 200+ person global operation today — I’ve had to figure out what actually works. Not what sounds good in a leadership offsite. What holds weight when your team is angry, your backlog is on fire, and the company just made a decision you can’t fully defend.
These are the five principles I operate by. They’re not clever. They’re not new. But I’ve watched enough leaders ignore them to know they’re rare in practice.
1. Don’t lie to your people
You can’t always tell your team everything. That’s the reality of leadership — there are things that are confidential, premature, or not yours to share. But there’s a hard line between withholding information and outright lying, and too many leaders cross it because it’s easier.
I was tested on this one hard. The company I was at undertook a significant cost-reduction effort that resulted in a large portion of the team being let go. The official messaging used strategic language — framing it as a structural improvement, a realignment. The people on the receiving end knew better. They could see what it was. And the gap between what they were being told and what they were experiencing was making everything worse.
I couldn’t change the decision. But I could choose how I showed up. I read my directors in early and gave them the real picture, because I needed them in the boat with me. We had to stack hands if we were going to get through this without losing the people who remained. When the company-wide announcement landed poorly — vague language, corporate euphemisms, no real answers — my team was furious. So I had a more honest conversation. I explained how the business worked, where things stood, and why the decision was made. I didn’t spin it. I didn’t pretend it was good news.
It didn’t solve the problem. People were still hurt. But multiple people came to me afterward and thanked me for telling the truth. Not because the truth made them feel better — because it finally made sense. And that matters more than people realize. When things don’t make sense, people fill the gap with worst-case assumptions. Honesty is how you stop that spiral.
The rule is simple: you don’t have to tell them everything, but never lie. Your credibility is the only asset that compounds over time, and one lie burns it down.
2. Have a high say/do ratio
Integrity isn’t a character trait you either have or don’t. It’s a ratio. How often does what you say match what you do?
I’ve worked under leaders who talked about transparency in all-hands meetings and then made decisions behind closed doors. Leaders who said “people are our greatest asset” while cutting development budgets. Leaders who promised follow-up and never followed up. Every gap between words and actions erodes trust — not in a dramatic, visible way, but slowly, like a leak you don’t notice until the ceiling caves in.
When I took over a large support org, I spent my first month collecting feedback from every person on the team. Hundreds of issues, complaints, ideas. I built a punch list and we started working through it — visibly, in monthly town halls, showing what we’d tackled and what was next. That part worked. People could see the list getting shorter. They could see their input turning into action. My say/do ratio on the things I controlled was high, and the team responded to it.
But there was one category I couldn’t move: system improvements. Year after year, the C-suite deprioritized tooling and infrastructure investments for support. Other initiatives always won the bandwidth of the business ops teams. I made the business case repeatedly. I offered workarounds to reduce the ask. The answer was still no. And I could see what it did to my teams — the slow realization that they didn’t matter enough to invest in. That their problems would always be at the bottom of someone else’s priority list.
That’s what a broken say/do ratio looks like at the organizational level. Leadership says “support is critical” in every all-hands meeting. But when it’s time to allocate resources, support gets the leftovers. The gap between those words and those actions doesn’t go unnoticed. It just goes unsaid — until people stop caring, or leave.
The fix starts with you. Say fewer things. Mean the things you say. And when you can’t deliver on something you committed to, go back and explain why. People can handle a changed plan. What they can’t handle is silence where a promise used to be. And if you’re in a position where the organization above you consistently breaks its commitments to your team, at minimum be honest about it. Don’t pretend it’s fine. Your people already know it isn’t.
3. Stop assuming people are dumb
This is the one that frustrates me the most, because I see leaders do it constantly and they don’t even realize it.
It shows up in small ways. Making decisions without consulting the people closest to the work. Withholding context because you don’t think they’d understand the business side. Oversimplifying a problem when you explain it, then wondering why the solution comes back wrong. Redoing someone’s work instead of coaching them through it.
Every one of those behaviors sends the same message: I don’t think you’re capable of handling the full picture. And people feel it. They might not call it out, but it shows up in disengagement, in learned helplessness, in teams that stop thinking for themselves because they’ve been trained not to bother.
When I took over a global support organization, I inherited an org chart that was a disaster. The team had been given a vague directive to “build an enterprise support organization.” Nobody could explain to me what that actually meant. Someone in leadership had read it somewhere, thought it sounded right, and threw it at the team assuming they’d figure it out. That’s what assuming people are dumb looks like from the top — not malicious, just lazy. You skip the hard work of defining the objective and dump it on people without context.
So I pulled my leaders together and laid out the org chart problem. I had ideas. I had instincts about how to restructure. But instead of dictating the answer, I laid out my thinking and asked them to push back. They asked for a few days to work through it. They came back with a different structure — not what I would have drawn up, but it wasn’t wrong. It was a legitimate alternative that accounted for things I hadn’t considered.
I went with their version. Partly because the compromise was worth it. Partly because I figured I needed to give them something early so I didn’t come across as the new guy who already had all the answers. What I didn’t anticipate was how much that single act meant to the team. They had never been given that kind of latitude or respect before. It became a defining moment in our working relationship — not because I made some grand gesture, but because I treated them like people who were capable of solving a problem I’d brought to the table.
I’ve managed teams of 200+ people across the U.S., India, and the Philippines. The single fastest way to get better output from any team, in any location, is to treat them like intelligent adults. Share the context. Explain the constraint. Tell them what good looks like and why it matters. Then get out of the way.
You’ll be surprised how often the person closest to the problem already knows the answer. They were just never asked.
4. Show the path, don’t just point
“Do this because I said so” worked when I was 17 and stocking shelves. It doesn’t work when you’re leading experienced professionals through an organizational transformation.
People don’t resist direction. They resist meaningless direction. If someone doesn’t understand how their work connects to the goals of the organization, they’ll do it — but they’ll do it mechanically, without judgment, without initiative, and without the kind of discretionary effort that separates good teams from great ones.
When I took over a global support organization, the first thing I had to do was show every team — from Tier 1 agents to senior engineers — how their daily work connected to customer retention, revenue protection, and the company’s ability to grow. Not in an abstract “we’re all in this together” way. In a specific, traceable way: this metric matters because of this business outcome, and here’s how your work moves that number.
That’s not micromanagement. It’s context. And context is the difference between a team that follows instructions and a team that solves problems.
The best leaders I’ve worked with didn’t just assign work — they connected it. They showed you the map, marked where you were, and made it clear why your stretch of road mattered. The worst ones just handed you a task and expected gratitude.
5. Know your people as people
Your team members have lives. They have goals that extend beyond your department’s OKRs. They have aspirations, fears, family situations, career ambitions that may or may not include staying on your team forever. And if you don’t take the time to know those things, you’re managing headcount, not leading people.
When I took over a global support organization, the employee Net Promoter Score was negative eleven. Not low — negative. The company had gone through a string of acquisitions and the support org was really a dozen separate teams stitched together with no unified leadership. Managers didn’t talk to each other. They’d certainly never spoken to anyone at the VP level. Directors were adrift, focused inward on their own silos. Nobody felt connected to anything larger than their immediate team.
In my first 30 days, I had roughly 250 one-on-one meetings. Thirty minutes with every peer and direct report. Fifteen to thirty minutes with every person in the support organization — all 200 of them. I set up a standing weekly sync with my leadership team. I set up biweekly meetings with all managers. These were shocks to the system. People weren’t used to being asked what they thought. They weren’t used to having a say.
I documented every piece of feedback and built a punch list. Then we started knocking things off it — visibly, consistently, with updates. We stood up a monthly all-support meeting where we shared metrics, talked about what we were changing, and showed progress. Not a rah-rah session. A working session where people could see that their input turned into action.
Within a year, the eNPS went from -11 to over 50. Attrition dropped to under 3%. That didn’t happen because of a new tool or a restructured org chart. It happened because people finally felt heard, known, and connected to something that was moving forward.
I’ve had team members who wanted to move into product management, people dealing with family health crises, people who were bored but didn’t know how to say it. I only learned those things because I asked, and then listened, and then actually did something with what I heard. Sometimes that meant creating a stretch assignment. Sometimes it meant adjusting their workload for a quarter. Sometimes it meant helping them leave my team for a better opportunity — which, yes, is also leadership.
This isn’t soft. It’s operational. When people feel known, they stay. When they stay, you don’t lose institutional knowledge. When you don’t lose institutional knowledge, your team actually improves instead of constantly resetting. It’s not because of ping-pong tables or pizza parties. It’s because people knew I gave a damn about them as humans.
And when the hard times come — the layoffs, the restructures, the impossible quarters — those are the people who stay in the boat with you. Not because they have to. Because they choose to.
The lesson I’m still learning
I’ll add a sixth thing, even though it’s not a pillar. It’s more of a scar.
For most of my career, I believed that doing a good job was enough. Put your head down, deliver results, take care of your people, and the rest would follow. I’m a naturally introverted person with a nose-to-the-grindstone mentality, and that belief felt safe because it meant I could stay in my lane and let the work speak for itself.
It doesn’t. The world runs on relationships and politics. Not the toxic, backstabbing kind — but the kind where people need to know who you are, what you stand for, and what you’ve accomplished, because they’re making decisions about your career in rooms you’re not in. I’ve watched less capable leaders advance because they understood this instinctively, while I was still heads-down trying to earn it on merit alone.
Learning to build relationships deliberately, to advocate for myself, to show up in spaces that don’t come naturally — that’s been one of the hardest adjustments of my career. I’m still working on it. And I think a lot of operators are in the same boat: great at the work, uncomfortable with the game around it.
I don’t have a clean answer for this one. But I think it’s worth saying out loud, because nobody tells you this when you’re coming up. They tell you to work hard and be honest and take care of your team. They don’t tell you that all of that can be true and still not be enough if nobody outside your team knows it.
The through-line
None of these five principles are revolutionary. You’ve probably heard versions of all of them. The problem isn’t awareness — it’s practice. I’ve watched leaders nod along to every one of these ideas in a workshop and then go back to lying about layoffs, ignoring their team’s input, and treating people like interchangeable parts.
Leadership isn’t a philosophy. It’s a pattern of behavior, repeated daily, under pressure, when it’s inconvenient. These five things aren’t what I believe about leadership. They’re what I do. And on the days I fail at them, I notice — because my team does too.
— Bruno