Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
101 Leadership Landmines: Section Eight: Ethical & Integrity Mistakes

101 Leadership Landmines: Section Eight: Ethical & Integrity Mistakes

Cotton, Todd

Paperback

Series: 101 Leadership Landmines: Complete, Book 8

Business GeneralManagement

ISBN13: 9798258058447
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 19 2026
Pages: 292
Weight: 0.87
Height: 0.61 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Section Eight: Ethical & Integrity Mistakes
Integrity is the one leadership quality that cannot be partially held. You cannot be mostly honest. You cannot maintain your ethics on the days when it is easy and suspend them on the days when it is costly. The moment your team sees you make an exception for yourself, or for a favored colleague, or under pressure from someone with more authority, they recalibrate everything they thought they knew about you.

Trust, once broken this way, is extraordinarily difficult to rebuild. Not impossible. But the road back is long and uncertain, and many leaders never find it.

The ten mistakes in this chapter are not all dramatic. Some are the quiet erosions that happen gradually, the cherry-picked data point that makes a quarterly number look better than it is, the decision to stay silent when a colleague crosses a line because calling it out would be awkward, the slow drift from a stated value to a convenient exception. These are the failures nobody writes about because they happen in private, in conference rooms, in email threads, in the small choices made when no one important is watching.

Except someone is always watching. Your team is always watching. And they are drawing conclusions about who you actually are based on what you actually do, not on what you say about yourself, not on the leadership philosophy you shared at the last offsite, but on the moment-to-moment reality of how you behave when something important is at stake.

Ethical leadership is not a policy. It is a practice. It is a daily commitment to being the same person in private that you present yourself to be in public.

That is harder than it sounds. It is also the only kind of leadership worth building.

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