Welcome back!
As a leader, the culture starts with you. Leaders set the tone. It is your job to maintain standards. A team is only as strong as its weakest leader. If you are a leader of other leaders, you’ll be responsible for the impact they have on their teams and the organization. There is nothing more important in your relationship with your other leaders than holding them accountable for being healthy, mature, functional human beings. If they are not, they will damage the team, violate organizational values, and drag down the mission. In the worst case scenarios, they will mire your organization in controversy and scandal. Ultimately, they may cause the organization to go under because of negative press or massive public backlash.
None of the worst scandals in recent memory happened in a flash. They grew over time, with little misdeeds being justified and ignored. That didn’t help the offenders. It emboldened them. They took more chances and made even worse choices, feeling more and more entitled as they went unchallenged. Until finally one day, they crossed the line and there was no turning back. When their day of reckoning came, they took down a lot of people with them. If you are aware of violations at your workplace, it is absolutely imperative that you take action to put a stop to them before they spiral out of control. Don’t think it can’t happen to you, or that you know the offender better than that. Not using the full power of your intellect to think through the situation is an invitation to be exploited by the very people you think you are protecting. Any friendship or other tie you may have with someone who is poisoning the system is not worth the risk of you bearing the consequences of their misdeeds. Is your family’s well-being really worth covering up for someone who doesn’t actually have any loyalty to you? The stakes are far too high to blindly trust or be too weak to correct the situation.
Until next time, I’ll be praying for you to seriously consider whether or not the misdeeds you are hearing about just might be true, and if so, that you have the strength to deal with them.