Leadership Horizons

Your Leadership Questions Answered

• Lois Burton • Episode 40

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Real leadership lives in the grey areas—where you don’t have perfect information, emotions run high, and the playbook doesn’t fit. We take audience questions head-on, from how to own mistakes without losing authority to navigating toxic cultures, selective vulnerability, and the sting of a boss who seems to be cutting you off at the knees.

We start by dismantling the myth of the flawless leader. You’ll hear a simple framework for admitting errors with speed and integrity, turning a bad call into a credibility boost. 

Then we get practical about personal boundaries: how much to share when health, caregiving, or divorce affects your bandwidth, and how to protect privacy while increasing trust through clear context and smart “circles of disclosure.”

If you’ve inherited a team with tight friendships and loose accountability, this is your roadmap. We cover a 90‑day listening plan, how to define expectations and consequences that stick, and how to empower culture carriers without creating a new inner circle. 

We also tackle political realities: diagnosing whether a boss’s behavior is incompetence or intent, opening a direct alignment conversation, documenting patterns, and choosing between escalation, insulation, or exit—while safeguarding your reputation and options.

Finally, we shift to crisis leadership. Learn how to communicate with resilient realism, create small wins that restore agency, and protect team energy by cutting noise. We share the cadence of updates that prevents rumor spirals, plus the modeling that keeps burnout at bay. 

Across every scenario, the constants are fairness, consistency, clarity, and courage—the habits that build psychological safety and performance when the ground keeps moving.

If this conversation helps, share it with a leader who needs it, subscribe for more practical leadership tools, and leave a quick review to help others find the show. Got a tough leadership question you want us to tackle next? 

Send it our way—we read every one.

Leadership Horizons - Helping You Lead Beyond Boundaries

SPEAKER_00:

Hello and welcome to a very special episode of Leadership Horizons. I'm Lois Burton and today I'm doing something different. I'm answering real questions from leaders like you who are navigating complex challenges in their organizations. This is also our 40th episode. So I'm really delighted to be doing this today to celebrate our 40th episode by answering some of your questions. So I've received some brilliant questions, and some of them are on similar themes, and all of them are about real situations that you're grappling with, from owning mistakes and building trust to leading through toxic cultures and dealing with undermining bosses. These are the real messy situations that don't come with easy answers from leadership textbooks. So let's dive in. I'm going to tackle several of these today. If I don't get to your question, then I'm going to be doing another one of these question and answers in the new year. So I'll be letting you know about that. And any question I don't get to today that I've already received will get priority in that next episode. So let's get going. And I want to be really practical about this. So our first question. This is such an important question because it gets at something fundamental. The myth, and it is a myth, of the infallible leader. Let me be absolutely clear. Making mistakes doesn't diminish your leadership. How you handle those mistakes defines it. I did do an episode on the power of making mistakes, but I want to just dig a little bit deeper on this one. In my 25 years of coaching, I've worked with some of the most respected leaders across every sector. And here's what I've learned the leaders who maintain the highest trust are not the ones who never make mistakes. They're the ones who own them quickly, transparently, and without deflection. And it's scary. In the previous episode, I also told you about a big mistake that I made when I was in the early stages of my career. And that it was very scary to own up to that. And I completely understand that. But actually, this is the key, no matter how scary it feels. So here's my um thoughts on this. First of all, acknowledge it fast. Don't wait for somebody else to point it out. The moment you realize you've made an error, bring it to light yourself because this demonstrates self-awareness and courage. Secondly, own it completely. No qualifications, no but this is why, no spreading blame. Just I made this decision, it was wrong, here's the impact. People can handle mistakes. What erodes trust is defensiveness and excuse making. Thirdly, explain what you're learning. This turns the mistake into a learning moment, not just for you but for your team. Here's what I missed, here's what I should have considered, here's what I'm changing going forward. And finally, make it right. Not every mistake can be fully corrected, but demonstrate your commitment to repairing any damage and preventing recurrence. I coached a CEO who made a strategic error that cost the company significantly. She called an all-hands meeting, laid it out clearly, apologized without hedging, and shared her plan for addressing it. Her team's respect for her actually increased because she modeled the vulnerability and accountability she'd been asking of them. Remember, your team doesn't need you to be perfect. They need you to be real, accountable, and demonstrating learning. That's the foundation of sustainable trust. I hope that was helpful. Our second question: when a leader has a health or personal issue, like an ongoing divorce, a progressive health condition, caring responsibilities, to what extent should they disclose this to their team? This question really touched me and it speaks to something that I see all the time: leaders who feel they have to be superhuman and that showing any struggle will undermine their authority. But the thing is, your team already knows when something's off. They just don't know what or why. The question asks about creating supportive structures for team members to disclose challenges. But where's that support for leaders? This is a gap in most organisations, and it is an area that can cause real harm. So here's my guidance. Strategic disclosure is not weakness, it's wisdom. But it is important to say you don't owe your team every detail of your personal life. This is actually a discussion we were having a couple of weeks ago in my Leading with Resilience cohort. So when something's affecting your availability, your energy, or your decision making, selective disclosure actually strengthens trust, but the emphasis is on selective. And so the framework I use with leaders is this: share context, not burden. Your team needs to understand why you might be less available or why you need their patience. They don't need to carry the emotional weight of your situation. So we're going to be talking about vulnerability, and I mentioned this in the previous question. So modeling being willing to be vulnerable, to be human, is actually really helpful in teams. But you can't give your team the emotional weight of your situation. And I think that's the dilemma that a number of leaders struggle with. So I'll just give you an example. So you might say something like, I'm dealing with a family health situation that will require me to be away some Fridays. Sarah will be covering during those times, and I'll remain reachable for urgent matters. That's enough. It explains the change, maintains boundaries, and shows you're managing the situation. The questioner actually mentioned having a smaller strategic leadership team where deeper confidence is possible. And that's brilliant. And if you have that, and if you've had the opportunity and the time to build that deeper confidence and psychological safety, then people can disclose more in those arenas. You need different circles of disclosure. And your immediate leadership team might need more context than your wider team. Your own coach or mentor needs even more. But you are still entitled to set the boundaries because sometimes if you're feeling fragile emotionally, you might not be quite sure that you can set context without giving over the emotional weight. And you might feel that your team could wobble if they felt you weren't managing the situation. So vulnerability, yes, absolutely. It's important that leaders show that they're vulnerable and that they're human. But as I said before, the the key is selective disclosure, different circles of disclosure, levels of psychological safety, including your own. This is what governs this. But don't shy away from it, is what I'm saying. You can set the context without giving the emotional weight. And what is also crucial, modeling this appropriate disclosure does create more psychological safety for your entire team and your entire organization. When you show that leaders can be human and still be effective, you give permission for everyone to bring their whole selves to work. One managing director, our coach, was going through a divorce and didn't in the early stages want to share this and was trying to keep it completely away from his team. His team actually thought he was angry with them. When he did feel ready to finally disclose, not the details, just the situation, the relief in the room was palpable. And they rallied around him, and his leadership strengthened because they could see his humanity. So moving on to our third question. I had two questions on this. One was a simple how do you create trust in a toxic culture? The other one was more specific, and it talked about how you take on a new leadership role in an area with toxic team dynamics, intense personal friendships, and lack of accountability. Especially when you haven't been the one to appoint your direct reports who are unknowingly part of the problem. So I'm going to address that second one first of all, because it's very specific, and then I'll come back to the earlier one. So I see this scenario constantly when a leader is walking into a situation where the culture's already established, the alliances are already formed, and you're expected to transform it. The good news is it's absolutely possible. The challenging news is it requires patience, strategy, and courage. First, you've got to understand what you're really dealing with. Toxic cultures usually have three common elements: unclear expectations, inconsistent consequences, and a lack of psychological safety. I'm going to come back to some of the others that might be present as well, but those are three of the most common. So the personal friendships that the questioner mentioned aren't the problem. It's the fact that the friendships are superseding professional accountability. It's really difficult actually to maintain that boundary. And if people have kind of grown up and been promoted within the same team, they're going to have built friendships as well as professional relationships. But as you become more senior, you really have to recognize that there's a boundary here. You have to be able to create professional accountability, even with people that you might have been friends with for a while. So here's the new leaders roadmap. Start by listening deeply. In your first 90 days, don't try and change anything. Your job is to understand the system before you change it. Meet one-on-one with every team member. Ask them what's working, what isn't. What would you change if you could? What do you need from me as a leader? You're not just gathering information, you're establishing yourself as somebody who genuinely cares about their perspective. This is the foundation of trust in a toxic environment. Secondly, establish crystal clear expectations and consequences. Toxic cultures thrive in ambiguity. You need to define what success looks like, how decisions get made, what behaviours are acceptable and what aren't. And then, and this is vital, you need to follow through consistently every single time. I worked with a leader in exactly this situation. She inherited a team where personal relationships meant people covered for each other's poor performance. She didn't come in and fire everyone. Instead, she created a clear performance framework, communicated it transparently, and then held everyone, including the popular, well-liked underperformers to the same standard. Yes, there was resistance. Yes, some people left. But within a year, the culture had shifted because people knew exactly where they stood and what was expected. She found this very challenging at times, but she held on to her own values and her own understanding of what good looked like. And even though she wobbled from time to time, she trusted her own judgment. So when she did get the resistance, when she did get the pushback, she was able to go back and hold on to those values. And the culture did shift. A third part of this is find and empower your champions. In every toxic culture, there are people who've been frustrated by the lack of accountability. Identify them early and give them visible support. They become your culture carriers. Just be a little bit aware that you're not replicating behavior that people think you're there to eradicate. So, in other words, you can't allow your culture carriers to become your personal favourites. You have to hold them accountable too. So that's just a little kind of cautionary note. And finally, be prepared for the dip. When you start changing a toxic culture, it often gets worse before it gets better. The people who benefited from the old system will resist. And so your job is to hold steady, stay consistent, and keep communicating the vision. Creating trust in a toxic culture isn't about being liked, it's about being fair, consistent and clear. Do that relentlessly and trust will follow. The second one, which is just about creating trust in a toxic culture, sometimes, you know, the three that I've mentioned are not the um are not the ways that the toxic culture shows up. But I'm going to come back to that countering a toxic culture is always about being fair, consistent, and clear. You also need to understand where you have influence. The person who asked this particular question um didn't tell me what role she particularly held in that organization. And sometimes if you're a little bit further down and the toxic culture is being um created from above, that can be even more challenging. So, as I say, what you can do is be fair, consistent, and clear. And then you need to look at how you can influence those others who you might need to influence in order to change this around. I'm going to be doing an episode on influencing specifically in the new year. So please look out for that. Um, but I hope this has been helpful so far. Our fourth question: how do you deal with a boss who deliberately undermines you with your team? This is really painful. Um, and I want to be really direct with you about this. If you've got a boss who is deliberately, not accidentally, but deliberately undermining you, you're not in a leadership challenge, you're in a political minefield. First, you need to be absolutely certain about the deliberately part. Is this intentional undermining or is it poor leadership skills? Incompetence can look a lot like malice sometimes. I have coach leaders who were convinced they were being sabotaged when actually their boss just had terrible communication habits. So start with a direct conversation. And this again can take a good bit of courage, but remember that it is important that you find out exactly what's going on so you can make a clear decision. So schedule some private time with your boss, and you might say something like, I've noticed several situations where decisions I've made have been reversed or questioned in front of my team. Can we talk about how we can better align our approaches? So you're not accusing them, you're asking whether you can do something together. And that gives them the opportunity to explain or adjust. If this is incompetence and not malice, then doing something like this can often completely change the situation because the person that you're speaking to feels that you're on their side as well. And so you're both on the same side and you're doing it together, so that can really help. But if it doesn't work, if the undermining continues, you need to document everything: dates, specifics, impacts. Not because you're necessarily going to use it, but because you need to be clear-eyed about what's happening. Then you have three choices. You can go to your HR department or your boss's boss, if they have one, if there's a genuine pattern of harmful behavior. You can find ways to work around the situation by building strong relationships elsewhere in the organization, or you can leave. I know that lost one sounds defeatist, but you know what? Life is too short to work for someone who actively wants you to fail. Sometimes the brave choice isn't to stay and fight, it's to recognise a toxic situation and move to somewhere where you can actually lead effectively. One caveat, while you're in this situation, focus on what you can control. Build exceptional relationships with your team, deliver outstanding results, document your successes, and make yourself invaluable to the broader organization. I've coached someone over the last couple of years and she took this strategy. And actually the person who was being deliberately undermining has now been sidelined. So she protected herself and created options. Is she in a perfect situation? No, because there are still some other toxic people around. But she was she was brave enough and clear-eyed enough to see what she could do and focus on that, which enabled her to change the situation for the better. But ultimately, if you've tried direct conversation, if you've sought support and the undermining continues, that's not a situation you can coach your way out of. That's a situation you need to exit with your dignity and your CV intact. Now, you might not be in a position to do that until you find something else. So you might just need to be very proactive about looking for another alternative role. And if you one of the things I do say to people, try not to just jump from, jump to. So I would say if you're looking for something um new, then be sure that you ask some questions that can test out that you're not out of the frying pan and into the fire. Question five, how do you lead through uncertainty or crisis? And how do you keep your team motivated during times of disruption? These questions are so timely because we're living in an era of constant uncertainty. Someone commented using the words wild uncertainty, and that really resonated with me. The leaders who thrive now are the ones who've learned to lead effectively when they don't have all the answers. Here's the paradox of crisis leadership. Your team needs to be both honest and hopeful. They need you to acknowledge the reality of the situation while also painting a credible path forward. This isn't about false optimism, what we sometimes call toxic positivity, that kind of polyannerish view of the world. It's about resilient realism. In uncertain times, your job as a leader shifts. You're no longer primarily a direction giver, you also become a meaning maker and a stabilizing force. Let me give you a practical framework that I use with leaders I work with. Firstly, communicate frequently and transparently. When people don't have information, they create stories, usually catastrophic ones. Even if your updates, we still don't know, but here's what we're doing to find out. That's better than silence. Vacuums are terrible during times of uncertainty, so make sure you don't have them. I would recommend daily check-ins during acute crisis, even if they're brief. Lots of people did this during the pandemic, but sometimes they let it slip when the crisis is not quite as tangible. Secondly, focus on what you can control. You can't control the crash, the regulatory change, or the organizational restructure, but you can control how your team responds to it. Create small wins, celebrate progress, give people agency in their immediate environment. Thirdly, protect your team energy. Your team's energy, sorry. Crisis burns through psychological resources at an alarming rate. Be intentional about not creating additional unnecessary stress. Think about what we can simplify, which meetings can we cancel, what can we stop doing so that people can focus on what truly matters at the moment. And fourthly, this links back to our burnout episode. Model sustainable behavior. This can be challenging in a crisis, but if you're working eighty two hour weeks and skipping meals, you're not demonstrating commitment, you're demonstrating panic, and you're demonstrating that that's the appropriate response. Your team takes their cues from you. I coached the leader through a major organizational crisis where she didn't know if her entire division would exist in six months. She couldn't promise job security, but she could promise transparency, respect, and support. She held weekly open forums where people could ask anything. She fought for her team's interests. And when the worst happened and some roles were eliminated, her team knew she'd done everything possible. That's crisis leadership, not having all the answers, but being fully present with your team through the uncertainty. These questions that you've sent me, thank you, thank you again. Um they're all different on the surface, but they share something fundamental. They're all asking, how do I lead with integrity and values when the situation is complex, ambiguous, or downright impossible? And here's what I want you to take away. There's no perfect response. What matters is that you're asking the questions, that you're reflecting on your leadership, that you're committed to showing up as your best self, even when it's hard. The way we led yesterday is not going to lead us into tomorrow. Tomorrow's leadership requires us to be vulnerable enough to admit mistakes, human enough to share our struggles, courageous enough to challenge toxic situations, and resilient enough to lead through uncertainty. That's leadership the world needs right now. And you're building on it, one difficult situation at a time. Thank you for these brilliant questions again. And if you've got leadership challenges you'd like me to address in future episodes, as I say, I'm going to be doing one in the new year, I will give you the date very soon. Please send them to me at loisburtononline.com. I promise you I read every one. So until next time, keep pushing your leadership horizons forward. And remember, asking the hard questions is already leadership. Thank you again.