Every leader has values they talk about and values they actually hold. The gap between them is where most leadership writing lives. I’m not going to pretend this list is complete or that I live up to it perfectly — nobody does. But these are the five I come back to when I’m deciding how to lead, how to work, and how to spend my time.
Empowerment
Empowerment is one of the words I’m most tempted to cut from my vocabulary, because it’s been sanded down to nothing by corporate overuse. But I keep using it, because the underlying idea is the hardest thing in leadership: actually giving people the authority to decide, and then not grabbing it back the first time they decide differently than you would have. The teams I’m proudest of were the ones where my biggest contribution was getting out of the way. The instinct to intervene is almost always wrong.
Accountability
Accountability is the value I hold myself to most strictly, and the one I’m most disappointed by when I see it missing. It’s not about blame. It’s about ownership — the willingness to say “this was mine” when something breaks, before anyone asks. In a leadership role that means owning the outcome even when the execution wasn’t yours, and owning the execution even when the outcome was someone else’s idea.
The leaders I’ve trusted most in my career were the ones who never flinched from either direction. The ones I’ve trusted least spent their energy explaining why the failure happened above or below them, but never at their own desk. I’d rather work for someone who owns the wrong call than someone who never made one.
Family
Family is what keeps the rest of this in perspective. I’ve been in enough rooms where ambition curdled into self-importance to know that the people who stayed grounded were the ones who came home to someone who didn’t care about their title. I’m not going to write about my family here — that’s their privacy, not my content. But they’re the reason I can still tell the difference between a problem that actually matters and one that only feels like it does.
Learning
I’ve never met a great leader who wasn’t still learning something. Not in the certificate-on-LinkedIn sense — I mean actually picking up new skills, reading outside their field, changing their mind about things they used to be sure of. The moment you decide you’ve figured it out is the moment you stop being useful to the people you lead.
I try to read things that disagree with me. I try to work through problems I’m bad at. And I try to notice when I’m defending a position because I said it last week, rather than because it’s still true. Most of what makes this hard is ego, not time.
Growth
Growth is easy to confuse with promotion. Most of the growth I’ve actually valued in myself had nothing to do with my title — it was figuring out how to listen better, how to disagree without being combative, how to ask the question that unlocks the room instead of the one that makes me look smart.
The job doesn’t get easier with seniority. It gets harder in different ways. What changes is your capacity to hold more ambiguity without losing your bearing. That’s what I try to build in myself, and in the people I work with.
These five aren’t a hierarchy. They’re not a framework. They’re the answers I’ve arrived at after more than two decades of leading international sales and marketing teams in the technology industry, and they’re the ones I’d want a new leader to steal from me if they were useful. If we’re going to disagree on anything, let it be on the details of how to live these out — not on whether they matter.