And yet accountability is one of the most avoided leadership responsibilities we encounter in our work.

The reason why is understandable. Leaders want to be liked and fear damaging relationships. They hope issues will resolve on their own. They worry that holding someone to a standard will feel harsh or personal. These concerns come from a good place. But avoidance has a cost that most leaders underestimate until it is too late.

When accountability is inconsistent, high performers carry more than their share and eventually resent it. Standards become unclear, and employees fill the gap with their own interpretations of what is acceptable. Trust erodes as people watch different rules apply to different people. And the leader, who was trying to protect morale, ends up undermining it. Avoiding accountability does not feel supportive to the team. It feels inconsistent.

Here is the reframe that changes everything: holding someone accountable is an act of respect. It communicates that you believe they can meet the standard. It signals that their contribution matters enough to take seriously. It tells the team that effort and results are real here, not just a stated value. Accountability done well is not harsh. It is clear, timely, and focused on improvement rather than blame.

We see this most clearly when leaders finally address a performance issue they have been avoiding. Almost without exception, the rest of the team notices. And what they feel is not fear. It is relief. Because they have been watching the standard slip, carrying the extra weight, and waiting to see whether their leader would do anything about it. When accountability shows up consistently, belonging and culture strengthen because the habits match the values. The system works.

How to practice accountability as a leadership habit.

Set clear expectations upfront. Accountability starts before the conversation. If people do not know what success looks like, holding them to it feels arbitrary. Be specific about outcomes, timelines, and standards so there are no surprises on either side.

Address issues early. The longer a performance gap goes unaddressed, the harder the conversation becomes and the more damage accumulates. Early feedback is easier to receive and easier to deliver. It also signals that you are paying attention.

Apply standards consistently. Nothing erodes trust faster than selective accountability. When the same behavior produces different consequences depending on who is involved, people learn that fairness is conditional. Consistent standards applied to everyone protect both culture and belonging.

Focus on improvement, not blame. Accountability conversations are most effective when they are forward-looking. Name the gap, explain the impact, and ask what the person will do differently. The goal is change, not punishment. When you dwell on the past, blame sets in.

Follow through. A conversation without follow-through is not accountability. It is documentation. You need to check back in. Recognize improvement when it happens. Address it again if it doesn’t. Follow-through is what makes accountability real rather than superficial.

Culture, belonging, and accountability are not three separate initiatives. They are one system, sustained by the same daily leadership behaviors: clarity, consistency, and follow-through. In the final blog of this series, we bring all three together and look at what it means to lead in a way that allows people and performance to thrive.

This is the third blog in a four-part series on how culture, belonging, and accountability work together as one leadership system. Next week we will have a summary blog that ties all three together to see the full picture of how culture, belonging, and accountability all rise and fall together. To read the prior blogs by clicking here.

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Isolation is a decision quality problem. And it is one of the least discussed risks in senior leadership.

When leaders become isolated, either by circumstance or by choice, the information they receive gets filtered. People tell them what they think they want to hear. Problems get managed before they reach the top. Dissent softens into silence. And the leader, operating on a version of reality that has been carefully curated by everyone around them, makes decisions based on incomplete and often distorted information. They are not making bad decisions because they are bad leaders. They are making bad decisions because they have lost access to the truth.

The pattern accelerates as authority increases. The more power a leader holds, the more people filter what they share. A junior employee will challenge a peer. They will rarely challenge a CEO. A direct report will raise a concern in private. They will rarely contradict a senior leader in a meeting. The feedback loops that help leaders course-correct quietly disappear, and the leader, who appears confident and in control, is actually operating with less honest input than almost anyone else in the organization.

In Leadership Is Tough, Mary Kelly and I write about what we call the trust gap that leaders don’t see coming. As leaders rise, trust becomes harder to read. People edit their feedback. They soften disagreement. They wait for direction rather than offering perspective. Leaders interpret this as alignment. It is almost always caution.

The cost shows up in decisions that miss what everyone else already knew, strategies that ignore ground-level reality, and cultures where problems surface only after they have become crises. By then, the damage is done.

How to make better decisions by breaking out of isolation.

Create structured truth-telling. Build explicit mechanisms for honest input. Regular one-on-ones where candor is expected and rewarded. Anonymous feedback channels that surface what people will not say directly. External advisors who have no incentive to manage the relationship.

Reward the messenger. Leaders who visibly appreciate difficult feedback, who thank people for raising concerns rather than minimizing them, gradually rebuild the candor that isolation destroys. It takes time, but the signal matters immediately.

Test your assumptions before you act. Before making a significant decision, actively seek out the perspective most likely to challenge your thinking. Not to be talked out of the decision, but to stress-test it against a reality you may not be seeing clearly.

Get out of the building. Some of the most valuable information available to senior leaders exists on the front line of their organizations. Walk the floor. Visit locations. Talk to customers. The further a leader gets from the work, the more distorted their picture of it becomes.

Isolated leaders do not fail because they stop caring. They fail because they stop hearing the truth. And by the time that becomes visible, the decisions that could have gone differently are already behind them.

The post How Isolated Leaders Make Worse Decisions appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

In most cases, the reason is not compensation. It is not career advancement. It is accountability, or more precisely, the absence of it.

High performers are acutely sensitive to fairness. They notice when standards are applied selectively. They see when a colleague underperforms without consequence. They watch when a leader looks the other way because the conversation is uncomfortable or the relationship is too close. And they draw a quiet conclusion: this is not an organization that values what I value. So they leave for one that does.

This is one of the most consistent and most costly patterns I see in my work with leadership teams. The leaders who tolerate poor performance or poor behavior from one person in order to avoid conflict end up losing the people they most need to keep. The very act of protecting one person at the expense of the standard drives away everyone who was holding themselves to it.

In Leadership Is Tough, Mary Kelly and I identify this as the high performer accountability trap. Leaders rationalize the exception. They tell themselves the person delivers results, or the timing is not right, or it will resolve itself. Meanwhile, the team is watching. And what they are learning is that results excuse behavior, that tenure excuses underperformance, and that the leader does not have the courage to hold the line when it matters.

The fix requires leaders to be honest about what tolerance is actually costing them.

How to hold the line without losing your best people.

Name the standard clearly for everyone. High performers do not leave environments with high standards. They leave environments with inconsistent ones. Be explicit about what the role requires and apply that standard across the board, regardless of relationship, tenure, or short term results.

Address behavioral issues separately from performance. A leader who delivers results but treats people poorly is not a high performer. They are a partial performer whose full cost is being carried by everyone around them. Separate the two conversations and hold the line on both.

Act before the damage spreads. The longer poor behavior or underperformance is tolerated, the more your strongest people absorb the cost. Early accountability is always less disruptive than the eventual departure of the people who were watching and waiting for you to act.

Have the conversation you have been avoiding. Most leaders know exactly who they are not holding accountable and why. The relationship feels too important, the timing never seems right, or the outcome feels uncertain. None of those reasons disappear with time. They just get more expensive.

Your high performers are not asking for a perfect environment. They are asking for a fair one. When leaders hold the line consistently, the people who most deserve to stay do.

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Belonging explains that gap.

We hear a version of the same story regularly. A leader tells us they included an employee in meetings, asked for their input, and gave them opportunities to contribute. They cannot understand why the employee still does not feel like they belong. What the leader is describing is inclusion. What the employee is describing is their experience. Those two things are not always the same.

Belonging is not about being invited into the room. It is about how people experience themselves once they are there. Employees feel a sense of belonging when they believe their presence matters, their voice is respected, their contributions are recognized, and their manager genuinely cares about their success. Belonging is not announced. It is experienced, one interaction at a time.

Most belonging issues do not come from overt exclusion. They come from subtle, repeated leadership habits. Those can be: input is requested but never acted on, the same voices consistently dominate meetings while others go unheard, and recognition feels generic or unevenly distributed. Decision rights are unclear, leaving people uncertain about where they fit. Over time, employees adapt to these patterns by speaking less, contributing less, and disengaging quietly. Belonging erodes not from what leaders say, but from what employees experience repeatedly.

This is why belonging is an operational issue, not a cultural program. It shows up in how work gets done. Employees experience belonging when expectations are clear, feedback is honest and timely, disagreement is safe, effort is noticed, and purpose is reinforced. These are leadership behaviors, not personality traits. And because they are behaviors, they can be developed, practiced, and improved.

Belonging also varies widely across teams within the same organization, because it is shaped locally by the manager. A leader can build or erode belonging in their team regardless of what the broader organization is doing around them.

How to build belonging through daily leadership behavior.

Welcome input and act on it. Asking for opinions and then ignoring them sends a clear message that input is superficial. When you cannot act on a suggestion, it is important to explain why. People need to know their voice was heard, not just solicited.

Create shared experiences and goals. Belonging deepens when people work toward something together. Intentionally create opportunities for collaboration, shared wins, and team-level accountability rather than allowing people to operate in silos.

Distribute recognition consistently and specifically. Generic praise does not go over well with most employees. Specific recognition that names what someone did and why it mattered signals that the leader is paying attention. Uneven recognition, where the same people are consistently acknowledged, quietly tells others they are invisible.

Make disagreement safe. Teams where people are afraid to push back are not cohesive. They are cautious. Create space for different perspectives and respond to challenge with curiosity rather than defensiveness. Ask employees to tell you more about what they are thinking to explore the idea. Especially when they are not sure how it will work. Automatically shutting people down tells them you weren’t serious about their suggestions.

Follow through consistently. Trust is built through predictability. When leaders do what they say they will do, employees feel secure. When they don’t, people learn to protect themselves rather than invest. To tap into employee engagement and innovation, leaders need to be predictable.

For a deeper look at the distinction between inclusion and belonging and what drives each one, see our earlier piece Belonging vs. Inclusion: What’s the Difference and Why It Matters. [link]

Belonging increases commitment. But commitment alone does not sustain performance. Even connected teams will struggle if standards are unclear or unevenly enforced. The next piece to this puzzle is accountability. In the next blog of this series, we look at accountability and why it is not harsh or punitive, but one of the most respectful things a leader can do.

This is the second blog in our four-part series on culture, belonging, and accountability. Next up: Accountability Is Not Harsh. It’s Respect. To read the first blog on Culture, click here

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This is the first in a three-part series on how culture, belonging, and accountability work together as one system. It starts here, with the foundation: culture is not an abstract problem to solve. It is the result of leadership habits practiced over time.

We recently worked with a leadership team convinced their culture had deteriorated. They described it as employees feeling disconnected, the team being strained, and overall things being inconsistent. The leaders pointed to hybrid work, heavy workloads, and external pressures as the cause. When we looked closer, a different pattern emerged. Expectations were stated, but were not followed; feedback was not being given, and it seemed decisions were made at the executive level without being communicated down. As usual, top performers were carrying more than their share. So what happened? The organization’s values had not changed. The leadership habits had. And the culture followed.

Culture is not what is written on a wall. It is what employees experience in meetings, emails, and everyday decisions. It shows up in how managers respond to mistakes, how priorities are communicated, how conflict is handled, and how consistently standards are enforced. Over time, these moments teach employees what truly matters. If missed deadlines are tolerated, accountability becomes optional. If difficult conversations are avoided, problems quietly compound. If leaders praise busyness over results, teams learn to look productive rather than be productive.

This is why culture varies so widely across teams within the same organization. Executives may set direction, and HR may build systems, but managers shape the lived experience. Employees rarely describe culture in terms of strategy. They describe it in terms of their manager.

Most cultural erosion does not come from dramatic failures. It comes from small, repeated habits: avoiding feedback to preserve relationships, being unclear about priorities, making quiet exceptions, and over-relying on the same high performers. These behaviors are rarely intentional. Most stem from pressure or a desire to be liked. But their impact compounds over time.

How to strengthen culture through leadership habits.

Get explicit about expectations. Vague expectations create vague results. Be specific about what good performance looks like and how it will be measured. Clarity at the front end reduces confusion and conflict at the back end. We see this most when employees can tell us what the goals are, but not how to get there or how they contribute to them.

Address issues early. Most leaders wait too long, hoping problems will resolve on their own. As we are fond of saying, hope is not a strategy. Small problems that go unaddressed become tolerated norms. Early conversations feel supportive. Late ones feel punitive. Be timely with positive and constructive feedback to reinforce what you want repeated.

Stay consistent rather than perfect. Culture is built through repeated behavior, not grand gestures. Leaders who follow through consistently, even on small things, build credibility over time. Inconsistency, even when well-intentioned, erodes it.

Reward the behaviors you want repeated. Recognition teaches teams what matters. If you recognize effort and results equally, or reward the wrong things under pressure, you are shaping culture whether you intend to or not. Greater effort must result in greater recognition. Otherwise, you are fueling mediocracy and demotivating your top performers.

Explain decisions, even unpopular ones. Employees can handle difficult news better than they can handle silence. When leaders share the reasoning behind decisions, trust holds even when the outcome disappoints.

Culture does not improve because leaders care more. It improves when leadership habits change. In the next blog in this series, we look at belonging, and why even strong cultures can leave employees feeling disconnected when the daily experience of leadership doesn’t match the stated values.

This is the first blog in our four-part series on culture, belonging, and accountability. Next up: Why Your Team’s Sense of Belonging Starts With You.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

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I see this pattern regularly in my work with CEOs and executive teams. A leader who talks about accountability in every all-hands meeting but quietly tolerates underperformance from a peer or a direct report they do not want to confront. A CEO who sets high expectations for the organization but makes exceptions for the people closest to them. An executive team that holds managers accountable for results but never discusses accountability at their own level. The standard they enforce downward is real. The standard they hold themselves to is different. And their organizations know it.

The cost is significant and compounds quickly. When employees see that accountability is selective, they draw an immediate conclusion: the rules apply to some people and not others. High performers, who hold themselves to high standards and expect the same from the environment around them, begin to disengage. Trust in leadership erodes. And the culture of accountability the organization has been trying to build quietly collapses from the top down.

In Leadership Is Tough, Mary Kelly and I write that accountability operates at four levels: self-accountability, direct report accountability, peer accountability, and organizational accountability. Most leaders focus almost entirely on the second level. They hold their direct reports accountable while skipping the first level entirely. But self-accountability is the foundation. Leaders who do not hold themselves to the same standard they expect from others have already undermined everything that follows.

The fix is not complicated, but it requires honesty that many leaders find uncomfortable.

How to build accountability that starts at the top.

Model it publicly. When you miss a commitment, own it directly and visibly. When a decision you made produced a poor outcome, say so. Leaders who acknowledge their own gaps give everyone around them permission to do the same. That is how accountability becomes cultural rather than directional.

Apply the same standard to peers. Accountability among senior leaders is where most executive teams fall apart. When a peer is not delivering, address it directly rather than working around it. Silence at the peer level teaches the entire organization that accountability only flows downward.

Make your commitments visible. One of the most effective things an executive team can do is name their commitments publicly and report on them regularly. Visibility creates natural accountability without requiring a separate conversation every time something slips.

Separate relationship from standard. The leaders most at risk of accountability failure are the ones who conflate loyalty with performance. You can value someone deeply and still hold them to the standard the role requires. In fact, doing so is one of the clearest signals of genuine respect.

Accountability that starts at the top does not just improve performance. It rebuilds the trust that selective accountability quietly destroys. Your organization is watching what you hold yourself to before it decides how seriously to take what you ask of them.

The post The Accountability Problem That Starts at the Top appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

Managing up is not about politics, telling your boss what they want to hear or making yourself visible for the sake of it. It is about proactive communication, solution-minded thinking, and the kind of strategic support that makes the person above you more effective at their job. When your boss succeeds, you succeed. That is not blind loyalty. It is a practical understanding of how organizations actually work.

The most common managing up failure we see in our coaching work is leaders who are invisible to their boss until something goes wrong. They handle their responsibilities, hit their goals, and assume their leader knows what they need and how things are going. That pattern erodes trust, limits resources, and puts the leader in a reactive position when they could have been in a collaborative one.

Here are some tips on how to manage up more effectively.

Communicate proactively, not reactively. Don’t wait for your boss to ask how things are going. Keep them informed about progress, challenges, and anything that might affect their priorities. A brief regular update, whether written or verbal, signals that you are on top of your responsibilities and reduces the need for your boss to check in on you.

Bring solutions, not just problems. When you surface a challenge, come prepared with at least one option for addressing it. You don’t need to have the perfect answer. You need to demonstrate that you have thought it through. That habit positions you as a problem solver rather than a problem reporter.

Understand what your boss actually needs. Ask directly if there is anything they need your support with. Most leaders have things that keep them up at night. When you consistently find ways to contribute that go beyond their formal responsibilities and build the kind of relationship that creates real organizational influence.

Disagree with courage and align with discipline. If you believe a direction is wrong, say so clearly and respectfully. Share your reasoning. Ask questions that invite reconsideration. And when the decision is made, commit to it fully. A leader who argues privately and undermines publicly destroys trust in both directions. Strategic support means bringing your honest perspective and then getting behind it regardless of the outcome.

Managing up is a skill, and like every leadership skill, it requires intention and practice. The leaders who do it well don’t just make their boss’s job easier. They build the organizational relationships that provide their teams with the resources, visibility, and support they need to succeed. Your job is to make your boss successful. Everything else follows from that.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

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That is not a criticism. It is a structural problem. Leaders are pulled constantly toward what is urgent, what is visible, and what feels productive. Meetings get scheduled. Requests come in. Fires need to be put out. And somewhere in the middle of all of that activity, the work that actually matters, the strategic decisions, the leadership development, the conversations that would move the organization forward, get deferred until there is more time. There is never enough time.

The calendar does not lie. How a leader actually spends their time is the most honest reflection of what they value, regardless of what they say their priorities are. A leader who claims people development is a priority but has not had a meaningful development conversation for three months is not prioritizing it. A leader who says strategy is critical but spends eighty percent of their week in operational meetings is not leading strategically. The gap between stated priorities and actual time investment is where organizational momentum quietly dies.

The cost is real and compounding. Leaders who stay trapped in low-value work become bottlenecks. Decisions stack up waiting for their approval. Teams stop developing because the leader never creates space to develop them. And the leader, exhausted from constant activity, mistakes busyness for effectiveness. The organization moves slower, not faster, because the person at the top is doing work that others should own.

In Leadership Is Tough, Mary Kelly and I write that time is the one resource leaders cannot create. Every other resource, money, talent, and technology, can be acquired or replaced. Time cannot. Leaders who treat it as infinite eventually discover, at significant cost, that it was never theirs to waste.

How to take back control of your time and lead more effectively.

Do a time audit before you do anything else. Track your time in fifteen-minute increments for one week. Record everything. At the end of the week, total the hours spent on your highest priority work versus everything else. Most leaders are genuinely surprised by what the data reveals. You cannot fix a problem you have not honestly measured.

Triage every task. Every item on your plate falls into one of five categories: decide, do, delegate, develop, or delete. Most leaders spend too much time in the first two and not enough in the last three. If someone else can do it, develop them to do it. If it adds no real value, stop doing it entirely.

Protect your peak energy hours. Not all hours are equal. Identify when your thinking is sharpest and protect that time for your highest value work. Scheduling strategic decisions and complex conversations during your lowest energy hours is not efficiency. It is self-sabotage.

Stop rewarding busyness. If you send emails at eleven at night and expect responses, you are signaling that constant availability is the standard. That signal cascades through your organization, burning people out. Model the boundaries you want your leaders to maintain.

Your time is a mirror. It reflects what you actually believe matters, not what you say matters. If you do not like what you see when you look at how you spent your week, the problem is not your schedule. It is your decision about what goes on it.

The post Why the Way You Spend Your Time Is Lying to You appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

When we dug into what was happening, the pattern was clear. He never said good morning. He never said thank you. He issued directives and moved on. He treated the people who supported him as invisible unless he needed something. His explanation was simple: “I’m busy. I don’t have time for small talk.”

What he failed to understand is that those are not small moments. They are defining ones.

Leadership is not performed in boardrooms and all-hands meetings. It shows up in hallways, parking lots, and coffee lines. It shows up in how you respond to an email from someone three levels below you, how you treat a vendor who has no leverage over you, and how you speak to the person who cleans your office. Those moments feel inconsequential. To everyone watching them, they are anything but.

People are always watching their leaders, and not just for the big decisions. They are watching to see who you are when there is nothing to gain from being decent. When the audience is small. When no one important is in the room. What they observe in those moments tells them more about your character than any speech you will ever give. And what they learn shapes how they behave, what they’re willing to do for the organization, and how much of themselves they’re willing to bring to work.

The executive I described eventually lost two of his strongest managers. Not for more money. Not for a better title. Because they watched how people were treated and decided they didn’t want to work in that environment. Culture is not what leaders say it is. It is what leaders model, especially when they think no one is paying attention.

In Leadership Is Tough, Mary Kelly and I write about courtesy not as a nicety but as a strategic discipline. Leaders who are consistent in how they treat people, regardless of title or proximity to power, build environments where people feel safe contributing, speaking up, and taking ownership. Leaders who are courteous upward and dismissive downward build something else entirely. They build cultures in which people protect themselves, manage impressions, and do the bare minimum to stay out of trouble.

The math on this is straightforward. People remember how you made them feel long after they’ve forgotten what you accomplished. A leader can have an outstanding track record and still leave behind an organization that quietly exhales when they walk out the door. That is not a legacy worth building toward.

The leaders I most respect are the ones who are the same person in every room. They greet people by name. They listen when someone speaks to them. They say “please” and “thank you” not because someone is watching, but because that is who they are. That consistency, practiced daily across every interaction regardless of audience, is what earns the kind of trust that no performance review can manufacture.

You are always on stage as a leader. The question is not whether people are watching. They are. The question is whether what they’re seeing is the leader you intend to be.

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Typically, when we look at our engagement survey data by management level, there is a slope. The senior leaders have the highest, most favorable views of the company, and those views decline with each level until you get to employees. This is what we expect to see. And, we want the senior leaders to have the most favorable view; they are the ones leading the organization. But sometimes, we see a dip in middle management. The middle level having the least favorable view of the organization. When this happens, we have a problem, because it won’t take long for the employees to follow suit.

The strength of any organization is only as deep as the layer below its best leaders. If that layer isn’t being developed, the C-suite isn’t just carrying more than they should. They are one unexpected departure away from finding out exactly how much they were holding up.

It is usually a result of the middle level either not getting the information they need or not being developed to grow in their position. Either way, it breeds disengagement.

The result is predictable. Everything flows upward. Decisions that should be made three levels down end up on the VP’s desk because that’s how the VP maintains control. Projects stall waiting for approvals that only one person can give. The team beneath them stops growing because they are never given the opportunity to think through problems on their own. And the C-suite, which should be focused on strategy and direction, gets pulled back into operational conversations they have no business being in.

Here are some tips for strengthening the middle layer’s ability to execute.

Assess your second tier honestly. Not by title or tenure, but by capability. Can your VPs and directors lead without constant C-suite involvement? Are they developing the people beneath them, or are they the bottleneck? The answers to those questions tell you more about your organizational health than any engagement survey.

Make development a performance expectation. A VP who delivers results but develops no one is only doing half the job. Build the expectation that leaders at every level are responsible for growing their teams’ capabilities, and hold them accountable for it the same way you hold them accountable for their operational goals.

Give the second tier real authority. Leaders who are never trusted with meaningful decisions never develop the judgment to make them. Delegate authority, not just tasks, and resist the instinct to pull decisions back up when the outcome feels uncertain. That uncertainty is where development lives.

Have the honest conversation about succession. Most second-tier leaders who aren’t developing successors haven’t been asked to do so directly. Make the expectation explicit. The cost goes deeper than inefficiency. When a VP hoards decisions and knowledge, they are also quietly eliminating their organization’s ability to function without them. In most cases, this isn’t malicious. It comes from fear. A leader who hasn’t developed anyone beneath them often believes, consciously or not, that being irreplaceable is the same as being valuable. What they are actually doing is creating a single point of failure that puts the entire organization at risk.

Develop your leaders now, before discovering that the layer beneath you was never prepared to lead, and it’s too late. The most expensive leadership transitions are the ones organizations didn’t see coming.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

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