This is episode 283 of The Manager Track podcast. Today we’re gonna talk about what is happening to leadership.

Here are the two questions. This podcast answers. One, how do you successfully transition into your first official leadership role? And two, how do you keep climbing that leadership ladder and continuously get promoted, 

although the competition and the expectations get bigger. This show withThe Manager Track podcast will provide the answers. I’m your host, Ramona Shaw. 

I’m on a mission to create workplaces where work is seen as a source of contribution, connection and personal fulfillment. And this transition starts with developing a new generation of leaders who know how to lead. So everyone wins and gross. In the show, you’ll learn how to think, communicate and act as a confident and competent leader. 

You know, you can be. 

Well, welcome to The Manager Track podcast. I am glad that you are here. If you are listening to me on the podcast app, know that there’s also a YouTube channel and a YouTube video that specifically that goes along with this episode

So if you’re, feel inclined to hop over to YouTube, find Ramona Shaw leadership as our channel, and then subscribe to the channel so that future episodes will pop up in your feet. Now in this episode, I wanna explore an idea and something that I’ve been wrestling with for quite a bit, and this is the gap between sort of the public political leadership landscape and corporate organizational leadership.

And I believe this gap is widening, and I think regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, if you wanna be a good leader to your team and in your organization, it’s important to get ahead of it and understand what is happening and what, how is the definition of a good leadership possibly changing in people’s minds, especially those who aren’t used to different kinds of.

Public political leadership and what they’re currently seeing in social media or on TV with people who have a large following in that public sphere. To make sure that they understand the difference between the organizational leadership and what that looks like and the values that we sort of wanna cultivate there versus what happens in a public social media political sphere.

Because at the core of this, again, regardless of your political beliefs, what I’m certain that we can all agree on is that we hold leaders in organizations. To high standards and somewhat different standards than we do public leadership in organizations.

Fairness matters. Meritocracy matters. Integrity matters. Leaders need a compelling vision. They need clear plans, they need to be held accountable, and they need to encourage accountability as well as transparency. And really, I thought a bit about what are these common denominators that we are all looking towards in leaders.

And I believe that looking at fairness or if you wanna be more granular, sort of the equity aspect of this meritocracy, integrity, vision, clear plans, accountability and transparency, cover a good chunk of that. Now as we’re looking at public leadership though, like in governments and politics, we do see a different reality.

Again, regardless of where you stand on that political spectrum. So this is not about making political judgements, but to explore the contrast and point out what the challenges are when we as managers and aspiring leaders starts to convolute one type of leadership with another. And so I wanna begin by quickly exploring those main topics and ideals, so to speak, that I, that I listed a moment ago.

Just, so that we can explore the difference.

So let’s start with fair treatment. This is about people being judged by equitable standards, not by favoritism or biases. So equitable standards. Somewhat attached to that is meritocracy. This is when promotions, rewards, opportunities are based on performance skills and outcomes, not on personal relationships.

Then we mentioned integrity. Integrity is the ethical behavior,

in simple ways. This is about a leader walking the talk. Then I mentioned vision. Vision is having a compelling direction.

A sense of why are we doing what we are doing? Why is this and where are we going? And is this vision bold enough, inspiring enough, you know, purposeful enough for other people to say, I’m gonna sign up. For that because I believe that my own personal vision fits into that bigger vision of the organization.

Then with that also comes having a clear plan of action because you don’t just wanna have a vision. You also wanna make sure that people are aware of the, how, the, the strategies, the priorities, the resource allocations and all that. And do do so in a transparent way when organizations have a vision but not a clear plan of action.

You’ll see departments go to all kinds of directions, but there is no alignment. And this is typically when people feel lost, they feel misdirected. They feel like we’re constantly going in cycles and spinning the wheels, but not getting anywhere. And then we have the accountability part. This is when leaders own their decisions, they are accountable for what they decide, they admit when they make mistakes, and they also create an environment among all leaders or employees of accountability. It also means to follow through on promises.

So do. Say something and then do that thing, not just in terms of the ethical behavior, but the actual plan. Unless there’s obviously a good reason and with that having a good reason. This is where transparency now plays into it. Because when we are transparent, we can be open. We have an openness about our decision criteria, why we chose A versus B.

We are open with the trade-offs. Look, there is a drawback or, a trade off or a compromise that we have to make to move forward. We are transparent with data and information so that individual teams have access to the data and can use data to make better decisions, but also so that everyone knows what they’re signed up for, what they’re part of, and they have a voice because they’re able to inform themselves with the data and then as a result of that, can have an opinion, an informed opinion. And when organizations lack transparency, not only does it erode trust.

In the leadership, but it also reduces the quality of decisions. It creates disengagement across the organization and because of the reduced decision making quality or decision quality. You’ll also see people going into different directions or having opinions because they’re missing that sort of the factual aspect.

The data that would be important for them to have. Now, when leaders in organizations embody these different traits, trust builds. Again. People are more engaged and execution starts to align.

In last week’s episode, Larry Armstrong was on and he was talking about. It not being this big gigantic container ship or cruise ship, but him leading a fleet of ships. And if they aren’t fully aligned and on the same page, then they’re gonna go into different directions If they don’t know. Where we’re heading, if they don’t know, don’t have their own compass, if they don’t have, the data, and I’m gonna expand on here, they didn’t say all that, but I’m expanding on this idea.

If they don’t have the information on the, the coordinates, the wind, other weather components or if there’s any resource constraints that are icna. If they don’t know that, then they’re not gonna be able to make sound decisions and and likely there isn’t gonna be alignment. Not even talking about the fact that if they don’t trust the ship at the front is gonna make the decisions. They’re not gonna follow someone that they don’t trust.

And we’ll see this quickly when an organization is kind of holding it together. They’re figuring it out. But the moment something fails, the moment that there is an issue, that is when these fractures that are happening throughout the organization, they will bubble to the surface, and you’ll see organizations crumble really fast and things to look bad to the outside.

In a very obvious way. And you see the structure of this, of the organization was the real problem. And the thing that happened was just a little needle that poked it and popped a balloon.

Now to bring that to light a little bit more, I wanna share two specific examples that illustrate how, you know, balloons can expand, expand, expand, and then the little poke can happen in and it pops.

Let’s look at the first example. This is WeWork and Adam Newman. WeWork’s founder Adam Newman, promised a sort of space as a service revolution. But he built it on unsustainable hypergrowth.

Really thin margins and fairly questionable governance. For example, he leased buildings that he personally owned back to the company. He borrowed against his shares

and he even trademarked the word we for WeWork to then have to purchase that trademark. Which doesn’t take a whole lot to see what kind of conflict of interest that is. Then in 2019, in their IPO prospectus, they revealed losses.

They revealed or came to light that there was some self-dealing and that this conflict of interest, was present. Investors were not happy, and they slashed the valuation from 47 billion to under 10 billion in weeks. The IPO collapsed, thousands of employees were laid off and SoftBank, their biggest investor pushed Newman out so how this all unfolded.

It’s a great example of how the lack of transparency, fairness, integrity, and accountability can implode a leader’s credibility. And with that, bring down an entire organization. Another example is Kroger, CEO, Rodney McMullen. He spent a decade expanding the chain and spearheading a 25 billion merchant with Albertsons.

But then in March, 2025, the board forced his resignation after an internal investigation found that personal. Conduct to be inconsistent with the ethics code. We don’t know exactly what that meant, but it was a moment of accountability where the leader in charge the CEO, there was not.

Living up to the standards that we expect of leaders and organizations him being ousted happened just weeks before year end earnings Were published Ultimately, you know, investors we’re shocked about the whole thing. There was litigations about the merger and it destabilized the entire leadership team

so this was a long-term operational leader and they lost their position just like that. And while we wish this would’ve come to light, you know, faster, earlier, whatnot, and it wouldn’t even have been tolerated. And I’m sure there’s people who, a lot of people who probably turned a blind eye. But at the end of it, when these things come out and come to light and are being addressed through internal investigations, through you know, reports that you have to submit to the government or the public space. Then it’s very clear that that behavior is not tolerated.

There is this feedback loop that ensures that the leaders are held to account and that it’s clear what kind of behavior we do expect in an organization. And when a leader violates those ideals because of that feedback loop we see consequences, sometimes sooner, sometimes later.

But there are. Consequences. Now, I am not naive to not know that there’s a lot happening in the corporate space that we don’t see that goes against everything I just laid out. But the people who do this, they often know that this is stuff that isn’t supposed to happen that. Needs to happen in the shadows.

We are not okay publicly. We’re not okay with it. And when we train leaders and when we cultivate brands and we wanna create sustainable businesses, I think we all can agree that there are a set of behaviors and values and traits that these leaders need to be good at and need to present.

That is why companies invest in their people, invest in their culture. Why they manage performance, why they do reference calls, and make sure that the people that they hire have a sense of integrity and do the right things.

And honor these values. So for the vast maturity of the organizations out there, that is the clear expectation and the standards, we hold those leaders to.

Now what we see in the public and the political landscape that is different. And again, I really wanna focus on the patterns here versus talking about political opinions. But many of the leadership traits that we expect in organizations are intention in politics and I thought about this a lot, but I really believe that no matter where you stand on your political orientation and what you think is the right course of action for political leaders to take, we can all agree that there are two different standards.

The standard we have for the political public leadership is different from the standard that we have for organizations. And we’ll talk a little bit later of why that is and what makes sense here and what might not make sense. But now let me go back to these leadership ideas that I mentioned earlier. We started off with fair treatment or this equitable treatment. In politics, fairness often gets diluted by favoritism, appointments, contracts, grants, oversights.

These may be skewed toward political allies, campaign donors, or other loyalists, rather than the broad merit or equitable distribution. For example, we know that in public procurement during the, COVID-19 crisis the political connected donors gained favorable contracts under fairly weak oversight.

Now, in private organizations, such behaviors would erode massive amounts of trust and potentially even lead to corporate governance investigations. Now we may say like, yeah, we hold the public to the same standards.

Yes, but we have a significantly weaker feedback loop that happens in the public leadership. So these things start to happen and we start to to see them as part of the course meritocracy is often kinda overshadowed by loyalty, political alignment,

or patronage. People rise, not necessarily because they are the most capable or qualified, but because they tow the party line and have the right connections, or because they show loyalty and because of that competence sometimes takes the seat to allegate. In private organizations, this is a proven way to have a players quit or disengage.

Now in the political arena, again, that is not that easy. Like in an organization you can say, I quit working for Facebook. I’m going to work for X. You left the organization, but you are in a very similar environment and you can probably continue to career.

, If not even capturing a salary increase in a political arena, that’s not how it works. You can’t just. Quit and go elsewhere and have a fresh start, so to speak. There is one political arena Yes.

On different levels. Are we talking, you know, county, state national and so forth, but you can ly see that a players can’t just leave because someone else was put in front of them because of loyalty or political alignment. Now let’s move on. Vision. Vision for political leaders is a really important thing. They need to be able to talk about what kind of sort of future they envision for their constituents.

What do they stand by? What do they believe? What are they working towards? What kind of environment? The challenge there is that the vision can quickly turn into slogans, campaign promises, sort of big narratives. But then when we peel the onion. We start to sense some ambiguity, some disconnect, or them suddenly changing their belief system, which then the whole vision is starting to be questioned.

So, so there, while they might have a good vision, the question really is, well, what’s the roadmap behind all these slogans? What are the trade-offs you’re willing to make? What are the timelines? What are the metrics that we know we’re moving in the right direction? How do we know that this vision is attainable?

And we’re actually ma making progress towards that. And it’s not just a slogan, right? A mask to something else. Vision in politics can be a lot more rhetorical than operational. And for corporate leaders, that would be a really dangerous territory political environments demand flexibility and compromises shifting on alliances.

But then that also means that sometimes the vision blurs over time. And this is an area that’s kind of hard to compare between the public political leadership and corporate leadership, especially in democracies where traditionally a leader cannot make a decision on their own, but needs to get buy-in from Congress, and where there’s a constitution and laws.

In private organizations, leaders typically don’t have to get approval to implement strategies or to change strategies or to adapt a vision. So yes, they’re operating in two different environments. But the thing that I wanna point out here is if an, a corporate leader would be vague about that vision.

Or the vision wouldn’t be backed up with a roadmap and, and strategies that tie into that. Then suddenly people start to question that and then worry about there being an alternate motive, 

 Okay. Now let’s talk about a plan of action or execution in politics. Going back to that side of things, priorities may change with, you know, shifts in political moods, crisis coalition pressure. A plan of action is rarely ever stable

and a campaign promise may sort of mutate over time when faced with the practical constraints and the negotiations or the limitations of, of their authority when they’re faced with us. And sometimes there is just no clear sort of sequencing and, and resource alignment or credible path to deliver. So while the intentions are there

to achieve something and then have a plan of action. The actual execution of it and the delivery of that can look fairly different. It may take a lot longer than initially anticipated however, knowing all that, what we do want to see from political leaders is a clear agenda, and a thought through plan of execution, knowing that experts have been consulted and were part of this plan. And then we still know that things may shift. Now in private organizations, the plan of action must be even more clear than the vision to ensure that everyone operates with alignment.

A lack of it would be chaotic, inefficient, and you’ve probably seen this yourself. Leads to duplicate or irrelevant work. Most of us have been in an organization where that plan of action just seems to be lacking. Now let’s look at that last component around commitment and accountability In organizations, a good leader might say, Hey, if this goes wrong, I take responsibility.

In politics that is less common because admitting mistakes at least what we see now is either considered a really bad move that gives you no payoff. There’s like no reward for taking accountability.

Instead, it’s all about ensuring that the narrative is about strength and power and success. And so many public leaders that we see now are avoiding to own failures, or they’re shifting blame to, let’s say, previous administrations or external events or people from the other side of the aisle. And in times where accountability’s weak or oversight is limited, and then consequences are. The F at best. We didn’t see that. Missteps that happen by political leaders are sort of acknowledged Halfheartedly at best and real sanctions or resignations are are rare. There isn’t a whole lot that happens when someone does actually admit a mistake.

And most cases, people just don’t do that. Now in democracies, again, the system of checks and balance isn’t the rule of law as opposed to. And force accountability. There are, let’s say, congressional hearings. There is data that’s being collected. There is a judicial system that’s to there to ensure that everything is according to the law.

But in practice because of power asymmetries and political protection and institutional weaknesses. All that can be undermined. Now in private organizations, if we were to see something like this, that would be a gigantic red flag. Let’s go to the example with Wells Fargo In 2016 it was revealed that Wells Fargo employees had opened over 2 million fake accounts.

Without customer consent to meet their somewhat, their very aggressive sales quotas, frontline and employees were fired in large numbers, but the CEO John Stump initially refused to accept responsibility for the company. Toxic incentive culture or leadership failures for that matter, that actually enabled this kind of misconduct.

Instead, what he said was, you know, there were a few bad apples at the branch level far removed from him, and he continued to praise the company’s overall sales culture. And again, when he was in front of the Senate to testify.

He repeatedly dodged direct accountability, it was like a, a bipartisan outrage over this. And the trust in the brand completely plummeted. So really, we all expected him to be up there and to take a, you know, responsibility for what happened.

Even if it was 10 levels removed from him. We needed him to be up there and to say like, you are right. I failed. I didn’t do X, Y, Z. This happened under my watch, and I’m taking accountability. Now, you know, there was a whole lot of pressure ultimately, and he resigned, but not before. Wells Fargo suffered billions in fines, regulatory sanctions, and had a long-term reputational damage.

And you know, we’re almost 10 years later, and I think most of us still remember this, and most of us may still have somewhat a negative reaction when we see Wells Fargo. This was a pretty severe case And so that is a great example that illustrates this importance of accountability in the private sector.

We also talked about transparency. So transparency often becomes selective or symbolic in politics.

Some processes are kept behind closed doors, decision rationales, funding flows, meeting records, conflict of interest, maybe obscured or with health. So the actual absence of full disclosure and openness obviously erodes trust.

Citizens need access to how decisions are made and data to monitor performance and expose wrongdoing. That’s a big part of democracy. Now, high level secrecy about decisions or concealed conflicts of interest or undisclosed financial or personal ties, right?

Those are all things that are problematic. ’cause then how is the democracy supposed to function now? All these things are things we are starting to accept tolerate or maybe even yeah somewhat welcome in the political landscape.

But again, the point of this episode was to call out the discrepancy and recognize like what we consider leadership is not one of the same. They’re two, two distinct sets of standards that we are. Seemed to pursue and seemed to consider to be good leadership. I listened to this young kid, I wanna say he’s maybe 16 or so.

And he has a fairly large following on social media, and he was talking about the different political parties and the kind of language he used to describe one party over the other. Really struck me as odd, and I thought this young man is exposed to this kind of environment, that kind of rhetoric and language and behavior.

That to me, that makes me wonder, is this what he thinks is normal and is this what he thinks is what you need to do in order to be empowered or in order to be seen perceived as a leader? Because everything else would be weak and would be demonstrating weakness and not being a leader.

And I think especially with younger people, , that is a really dangerous thought. ’cause if that starts to bleed over from, not only for the political environment, but if also that starts to bleed over into interpersonal behaviors in our society as well as in our organizations.

Then while not imminent, this is going to be sort of a bit of a reckoning of what we consider good behavior in organizations and what is it that we actually tolerate from our employers or from the, the companies that we.

We buy from and what kind of accountability do we want to implement to ensure that the leaders, those people that we need to trust and we need to follow, do varying degrees. What kind of checks and balances are in place, and how do we keep this up?

Now, I wanted to share all this and, and sort of spark some food for thought, and be really curious to hear your opinion on this. So please do reach out, send us an email at contact@archova.org. We’ll drop the, the link in the show notes. What I think is most important at this time, if all this kind of resonated with you, is for managers or leaders and organizations to be really explicit with their vision, their values, and the standards that they expect from everyone in the organization, but particularly from their leaders.

What does integrity look like here? What are the values we’re gonna abide by or live by? What matters to us? How do we ensure that this, let’s say, is a meritocracy? To talk about the importance of this in a performance cycle and to make sure that people have that sense of transparency, that they understand how, and based on what you make those decisions. . I think that’s sort of short term, the most important aspect of this. And then long term, this might be a bit of a philosophical question around, yeah.

How is leadership evolving over time? We see this across different generations and how leaders need to adapt because the expectations on our leaders are changing. But then also, how is it changing when other domains of our lives, such as the public and political en environment, is giving us different signals and different set of standards than what we believe to be true on the corporate side or, you know, in other areas of our, of our lives as well.

Again, I’d love to hear from you and what your thoughts are. That’s it for today. Thanks so much. I’ll see you next week on another episode of The Manager Track podcast. 

If you enjoy this episode, then check out two other awesome resources to help you become a leader. People love to work with. This includes a free master class on how to successfully lead as a new manager. Check it at archova.org/masterclass. 

The second resource is my best-selling book, the confident and competent new manager, how to quickly rise to success in your first leadership role. Check it out at archova.org//books or head on over to Amazon and grab your copy there. 

You can find all those links. In the show notes down below.