The best leadership advice, after all helps slow the game, so that you can better anticipate, understand, and label the nuanced dynamics of different situations in the moment and then guide them to better outcomes.

You write reviews when you are a consumer. If you stay at a hotel and you had a good or bad experience, then you can go to Tripadvisor and write a review. If you buy a product and you don't like it, you write a review on Amazon. But if you're an employee, you don't write a review of the company, just like you don't write a review of being an American. You are a citizen of this country. You can be critical of it, but your responsibilities as a citizen are not discharged by writing a review.

That's completely the wrong paradigm. You don't consume your citizenship. You are a citizen. And what a citizen says is, "I want to belong to this collectivity because I believe in its principles. I want it to succeed, and therefore I have a duty.

Citizenship has certain duties, and one of those duties is that this organization continues to thrive.

All employees, particularly leaders, must decide whether they are going to own their share of responsibility for building the culture in effect, are they drivers or riders?

Companies often don't stick around because the culture tolerates behaviors that make those employees feel unwelcome. Delivering on your promises of building a culture that values diversity and leadership will help you recruit and retain the best talent and avoid the cynicism that can creep into companies that don't back up their words with actions.

The company, by its own admission, is not where it wants to be in terms of diversity. It has published its goals on its website: to have women make up half its workforce by 2023 (up from 33 percent as of early 2020), and to have underrepresented populations make up 30 percent of its US workforce (up from 21 percent in early 2020).

It also uses employee survey data to construct a “belonging and diversity index" and breaks out the results by gender and underrepresented populations. Its goal is to score 100 percent on that index globally, with the same score across the board for different groups. In the meantime, it has already built a leadership team that is far more diverse than most, and includes Black, Asian, and East Indian executives. When we wrote this, it had more women on the team (six) than white men (four). That is not something you see every day.

(This is about Twilio)

At its best, a strong culture can help with recruitment and retention, creating a kind of special club that people want to join and protect once they're part of it. Done right, culture will engage something deeper within employees’ sense of themselves, ideally in ways that are aligned with business goals.

a leader's job is to provide the counterweight of a relentless drive to simplify complexity, and to develop a jargon-free plan for winning that everyone understands, remembers, and knows how to contribute to its success.

Owen's insight was echoed by Christopher Nassetta, the CEO of the plan shoul Hilton Worldwide. “You have to be careful as a leader, particularly of a aployees, ie big organization," he said. “You can find yourself communicating the same thing so many times that you get tired of hearing it. And so you might alter how you say it, or shorthand it, because you have literally said it so many times that you think nobody else on earth could want to hear this. But you can't stop. In my case, there are 420,000 people who need to hear it, and I can't say it enough. So what might sound one mundane and like old news to me isn't for a lot of other people. That is an important lesson I learned as I worked in bigger organizations.

Now you need to live a key principle of leadership: there is no such thing as overcommunication.

After the three or four big goals have been articulated, then it's equally important to be clear on the challenges that the company is facing.