Rusty Atkinson:
The best time to learn to decide or commit to the kind of leader you're going to be is before you start leading the first humans. But if you didn't, okay, next best time is right now.
Kristiana Corona:
Ever feel like everyone else has leadership figured out and you're just making it up as you go? I've been there. I spent two decades leading design and technology teams at Fortune 500 companies, and for years, I looked like I had everything pulled together on the outside.
But on the inside, I felt burned out, overwhelmed, and unworthy of the title leader. Then, a surprise encounter with executive coaching changed my life and dramatically improved my leadership style and my results. Now, I help others make that same shift in their leadership. This podcast is where we do the work, building the mindset, the coaching skills, and the confidence to lead with clarity and authenticity and to finally feel worthy to lead from the inside out.
Hello, and welcome back to the Worthy to Lead podcast. I'm your host, Kristana Corona. Do you believe that you have to give up who you are to make it in the C-suite? That somewhere between your first manager role and the boardroom, that you're going to have to trade your integrity for influence to get stronger, tougher, colder, more ruthless, stop caring about the people on the front lines?
A lot of leaders assume that's just the cost of admission because we've seen that behavior up close: the leaders who start out caring about their people, but with every promotion, they become a little more self-important. Or that colleague who gets thrown under the bus when something goes wrong because their boss doesn't want to take accountability.
Or maybe the executive who surrounded themselves with yes people who are too afraid to tell them the truth anymore. My guest today spent 25 years climbing the corporate ladder, taking on several top executive roles in technology, including the CIO role. He was ambitious too, just like so many others, but he refused to operate in a way that compromised his integrity.
Having high standards for himself cost him rooms that he was never invited into, but it also gave him a reputation that became his competitive edge and brought lasting results. Rusty Atkinson is a technology executive and the author of The Integrity Edge: Unlocking the Hidden Power of Ethical Leadership.
He's a former CIO and currently serves as the SVP of Technology for Clearway Health. In this conversation, we get into what it really takes to have integrity at the top, the mindset and the behaviors, and how to keep it from crumbling when the stakes are high. We get into specific stumbling blocks and the strategies for how you can overcome them to build the muscle and the resilience each day to show up as the human-centered leader that you're meant to be, no matter how high you go. Take this episode as your permission slip to show up with integrity at every level. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Rusty. Let's dive in.
I am so pleased to welcome Rusty Atkinson to the Worthy to Lead. So glad to have you here.
Rusty Atkinson:
Excellent. I'm happy to be here. This should be fun.
Kristiana Corona:
Rusty and I met, uh, recently on LinkedIn, actually, and as we were having some conversations, we realized there's a lot of commonalities between the type of leadership that Rusty really embodies and that he teaches and what we're trying to do here with Worthy to Lead.
And so I thought it would be really interesting for us to have a conversation together and to explore a little bit deeper what does it actually look like to lead with integrity. And, uh, we're going to dive into Rusty's book in just a moment here, but one of the topics that we had covered when we talked and did a post together on LinkedIn was this idea of how do we innovate effectively.
And when we innovate, a lot of us have this assumption that holding high standards is going to slow you down. It's really going to become a barrier to you innovating and doing things and moving quickly, right? However, there are so many ways in which that is not true from an ethics and from an integrity standpoint.
And so one of the things that Rusty really talks about is that integrity-driven leadership actually fuels innovation. So I was wondering if we could just start out there and have you dive a little bit more into how that works.
Rusty Atkinson:
Yeah, I mean, just think back in, on your, your career about a time when you kind of pushed the envelope.
You know, when you did something you'd never done before. Taking risks like that, that's scary. That's scary. You know, the safe place to be is tomorrow to do what I did today, and the next day to do it again, like rinse and repeat. But innovation's not about rinse and repeating; it's about something new, and any time you have something new, some percentage of the time you're gonna fall flat. The thing about leading with integrity, leading in a place that's founded on trust, is that it tends to create safety.
It tends to create an environment where I know if I fall, Rusty's got my back. Like, so when you create that safe space, you get the best. You get people taking chances, risks that they wouldn't otherwise take. Not like the Wild West, you know, taking unreasonable risks, but innovation is taking a risk. I believe that if you build an environment, if you make safety and trust a mandate by your leadership actions, then you'll have people who take risks.
And if you have people who take risks, you have people who hit home runs sometimes. Sometimes they strike out, but sometimes they hit home runs, and I think it's worth it. I think there's lots of other reasons it's worth it to create a safe, trusting environment, but one of them is that that's where innovation happens.
Kristiana Corona:
Being in UX and design in tech companies, we always say creativity happens when people feel like their thinking is unconstrained, right? Like, they can think bigger, they can have bolder ideas. The leader can really set the tone for whether or not people feel like they can even explore creativity. So many people start from that constrained thinking of how it works today and what people think is acceptable, and you don't even realize how many amazing ideas you're cutting off until someone tells you, "It's okay.
Take those constraints off. Think bigger. Think differently." And like you said, the leader sets the tone for: is that okay, or is that a risk that's gonna get you in trouble?
Rusty Atkinson:
They set the tone by their actions. I don't set the tone by wordsmithing my values and putting them up on a laminate, putting them on the wall so everybody can see what I wrote down my values to be.
That doesn't matter. What matters is what Sally cares about is when Bob fell flat last month, what happened to Bob? Did he get supported, or did he get ridiculed? Did he get fingers pointed at him and maybe get fired, or did he learn some lessons and let's figure out how to do it better next time and take another at bat?
Kristiana Corona:
So today, I really wanna dive into the book that you wrote last year called The Integrity Edge for anyone who hasn't seen it. It's a really powerful group of lessons, I think, for people who wanna start making this more practical. So many of us, when we think about leading with integrity, it's sort of this nebulous, vague idea of, you know, maybe a set of standards or a set of values, but how do you actually take that and turn it into behaviors that you're going to exhibit every single day?
And so the premise of the book, which relates a lot to how you create a safe environment for innovation and for people to thrive, you call it the sustainable competitive advantage the leader gains when they consistently choose to lead with character, prioritize trust and service even when it's hard, and how it's, you know, continuously making that choice over and over to prioritize people over your own ego and trust over fear and long-term impact over short-term wins, which I thought was really a nice way to position this.
And I'm curious, what was it that made you feel like you needed to write this book?
Rusty Atkinson:
It was probably twenty-five years of watching leaders at the highest levels treat their people... When that leader was first a manager of people, my guess is she or he was close. They were front line, so they were close to their people, and they probably cared for their people more than as they moved up the hierarchy.
The further they got away from the front line, the less they seemed to care about the people, and the more they seemed to care about themselves and about their own inputs. You know? What I was noticing is, as you got closer to the C-suite, to the boardroom, you cared less and less about the people doing the work.
I've seen several examples of front-hand, firsthand rather, what I saw of a leader who just had no qualms about throwing folks under the bus. I thought this a long, long time ago, at the very beginning of my career, that it didn't have to be like that. You know, I came from a place of ambition. Like, I was an ambitious guy.
I had things I wanted to do in my career. I must be able to do that and not be a dirtbag at the end of the day. Like that-- I didn't want to end up being the CE jerk, right? That I didn't like when I was a frontline manager. I didn't want to be that person, and I so much didn't want to be that person that I was willing not to become a C-level if it meant that kind of compromise.
But what I found along the way is when you're treating the folks right, when you're doing the right thing, when you're being more about the people working, the work that they're having to do, when you're focused more about enabling that, there's this advantage that happens. It's the trust that I talked about.
It's the fact that they're willing to take risks. There's a loyalty that comes from it. There's a collaboration, there's honesty, there's valuable feedback. These things that a self-serving leader who has created fear in the organization, they're not never gonna tell that person the unvarnished truth, disagree with the rules that, or the policies, procedures that person just set.
You'll never get the truth from that situation. So long answer short, I knew there was a better way. Through my career, I had proven there was a better way to grow your career, be successful, be in the C-suite of a public company, and not be a jerk to the people on front line, not have to compromise your character and integrity just to climb the ladder.
So all of that is why I wrote the book. Yeah.
Kristiana Corona:
I think so many people feel the same way that you did before, where it's like, well, if I choose that path, that inherently means I have to give up part of who I am. It means I have to give up my integrity. I can't be as close to the people anymore. I can't care and invest as much in them.
I have to become detached. I have to become tough. I think it's really nice to see how many examples you share in the book, but also in your own life, of that, that isn't true.
Rusty Atkinson:
A couple very senior leaders, but most of them in the early and middle management, and I've had several of them tell me, "I have decided it's no longer worth it.
I have seen what it takes to be in the in crowd, and I'm not willing to do it." And so those people had changed their ambitions, and they made the decision that middle management's fine. I'm not willing to compromise or make the compromises required to get to the senior level. And it would be disingenuous to not admit that there are some organizations which you must compromise to get to the top rung. I just decided I wasn't going to work in those organizations, because there are a bunch, plenty of organizations who truly value their people in more than just words on a piece of paper on the wall
Kristiana Corona:
What seems really compelling here too is that I think the same argument is used at every level of leadership, from the person who's an individual contributor and looks at becoming a manager, or the person who's a manager and becomes, you know, is looking at the next level, the senior manager, the director, the senior director.
Every level, people make that same argument. Well, I see what is happening around, uh, around me and the leaders around me, and I don't want to have to live like that, or I don't want to have to act like that. And what I love about the strategies that you share in the book is that, as you say, it kind of almost becomes this flywheel effect, right?
You start making the decision about how you want to lead, and then you start activating those behaviors. And pretty soon, they start to just become the way you operate, and people expect that from you, and then it just, you know, accumulates over time. It becomes easier. As you practice doing it earlier in your career, the earlier you can start, the more reps you have, the more practice you have, and the easier it becomes to embody that when it does get to really, really high-stakes situations.
Rusty Atkinson:
Don't want to make a claim that it, it's easy, but it is easier. You know, the first time you stand up and, uh, disagree with power on the grounds of integrity or character, woohoo, that's a rough one. But after you do it and you build that muscle memory and grow a reputation, your reputation got to the room before you did.
I am positive, despite not having evidence, that I have not been invited to rooms because they knew that I wouldn't play along. Does that limit you? It limits you, but it limits you in a good way. I use Enron in my example, as an example in my book. You're going down an Enron path, and everybody in the upper echelon, let's say, of this Enron clone knows that they're being fraudulent and breaking the law.
I don't wanna be asked by that group to be in the C-suite. My guess is I wouldn't be asked. Saying no is a valuable thing to be able to do, and when somebody says no on your behalf, oh, that's pretty nice, too.
Kristiana Corona:
Let's dive into the six common stumbling blocks when we're leading with integrity, 'cause there are so many interesting points here, and I wanna just take just some of the highlights so people know what to expect from the book.
Um, so the six common stumbling blocks are lack of trust, pride, fear, ambition, disconnect, and toxic culture. Let's dive into lack of trust. So that's a really interesting one. Um, you say that it's not possible to lead with integrity if your baseline assumption is to always be skeptical of people and make them earn your trust before you will trust them.
You talk about needing to give trust first, that it's the foundation of everything else. So I'm curious, why does that feel so important to you?
Rusty Atkinson:
I can't ask somebody to do something I'm not willing to model. There's a certain burden in leadership, but there is a cost. There is a responsibility, a mantle, if you will, of being a leader.
It's a responsibility to be the first one, right? Especially the bad stuff. If I'm asking you, you, you're a new director on my team, and I'm asking you to trust me, shame on me if I, in the same conversation, say, "And hopefully someday you'll earn my trust." It's backwards. It doesn't set a foundation where any real trust can be reciprocated.
I have to default to trust. I have to ask the questions, make sure I vet it, make sure I have the relationship understood, and that I, you know where you're coming from. And then once I've done that, once I've said, "I choose you," then I have to start with trust. And you put yourself in a vulnerable position because some people are going to unearn your trust, so they're going to prove themselves incapable of fulfilling their responsibility in that trust relationship.
But if you haven't first trusted, you have no grounds on which to ask to be trusted. And if there's not a bidirectional trust relationship between the leader and the team, the subordinates, it's a fractured relationship. You can fake it for a period, but it-- you can't fake it forever, and those cracks in that fake trust they'll show, and when they do, all the stuff starts falling down around it.
If you don't use trust in a leader-subordinate or leader-follower relationship, then you need to use something else to get the person to follow you. If you're not following me because I'm in a position and you trust me, then you're following me because I'm in a position and you fear what I might do otherwise, or I've coerced you, or I'm bribing you with promises of a raise or...
All the options if I don't have trust are not great options.
Kristiana Corona:
You talk a lot about how people, when they don't immediately get that trust or have that trust established, they feel like, "I'm losing control." And so then they resort to control tactics and feeling like, "Oh, well, that didn't work, so I'm gonna be authoritarian, and I'm gonna get the job done and force everyone to do this because I have the authority to do it."
But what you're saying is, especially for those leaders who maybe have been hurt in the past, they've had a bad interaction with peers, or they've had a bad interaction with leaders, you know, and they are maybe a little more guarded in their thinking and in how they relate to people, and they aren't the one to extend it first.
But you said there are ways for them to safely start opening up a little bit more, to start changing that. And so I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about some of the behaviors, like if, you know, giving trust is not your natural inclination and, um, how you operate all the time, uh, what are some of the small ways that you can start building more of that into your leadership style?
Rusty Atkinson:
I mean, you're gonna have to start small. There's no easy button here. Probably the reciprocal is the best, uh, option. And the way you build trust is, "Kristiana, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do that for you by such and such date." And then I execute the task by such and such date, and I say, "Kristiana, I did it. I completed that task we asked about."
And even getting to the point where you use that commit, do, tell, that commit, do, tell in small little pieces. "I'm gonna have that report out by the end of Friday." Deliver the report, "Hey, uh, Kristiana, I just submitted that report." Right? That, uh, I made a commitment. I follow commitment. Check it out, I just followed the commitment.
Repeating that over and over again builds trust. You're not even gonna notice. At some point, you're gonna get to the point where you just know I delivered the report on Friday because that's when I delivered the report on Friday. That's trust at a tactical level. And so the reciprocal of that is the same.
If I want to trust you, then I'm going to give you an opportunity, like regular frequency of opportunities, to make a commitment, keep the commitment, and be confirmed that you kept the commitment. And what would that look like if I'm having a hard time trusting you? "Kristiana, can you get that report to me by Friday?"
"Yes, Rusty, I can get you your black Friday." "Okay, great. End of day Friday, I either have it or I check up on you." Right? I mean, that's how that works. Not, "Wednesday, are we still on track for Friday? Thursday, are we still on track for Friday? Friday morning, are we still on track for end of day?" If you're building the trust, I want you to trust me, and I want to trust you, and so until I'm given evidence that I can't, let's start with something small, and let's stack them on top of each other.
Before you know it, I expect you to do what you said you'd do. That's trust.
Kristiana Corona:
I love how it's honestly the thing that we don't connect the dots on oftentimes if we fail to follow through on our commitments. We don't really think about how that impacts the trust of, well, when they said that they were gonna stand up for me in that room, did they do it?
When they said that they would advocate for me for that next promotion, did they do it? You know, the... You think about the conversations that are, are higher stakes or that matter a lot, but the trust that's built along the way is the small things, the daily things. Did you show up when you said you were gonna show up?
And you talk a lot about all the ways that those small commitments add up.
Rusty Atkinson:
How outrageous would it be for me to say, "You can trust me that I am your champion when you're not in the room," when you can't trust that I'm gonna get my feedback to you by the time I said I would, or that I'm gonna show up for your 9:00 meeting that you have every Tuesday at 9:00 in the morning, and I'm never on time for it, I'm never there.
How do I do that in the inconsequential small stuff, but I want you to trust me that I'm your champion when you're not in the room? That's incongruent
Kristiana Corona:
Well said. Um, all right, let's shift gears to the second one, which is pride. I found this one really interesting because the higher you climb, the more you start to just hear praise all the time.
And you don't actually hear the criticism. So you can start to get this false sense of your own excellence, your own importance, and you start to lose touch with the people that are in the reality of the situation and the pain points that they're experiencing. When that gets out of balance to say, "What happens in my career or what happens to me or how I'm perceived is more important than about what the team needs," that's where things start to really crumble.
I'm curious if you can just talk about, first of all, where you notice this the most, and what are some of the ways people can start resolving some of those pride moments?
Rusty Atkinson:
Uh, my advice would be when you decide that you want to grow your career without compromise, in that same conversation with yourself, you need to commit to being humble.
You need to commit to not being a prideful person. Have pride in the team and the outcome, not particularly reading and believing your own press. This thing happens. It's an- another flywheel situation, right? When I start believing that, uh, I'm the best, I'm the peak, I'm the boss because naturally I'm the boss because look how great I am.
When you have that mindset, you will find reasons to not hear the naysayers, the dissenting point of view, right? And then you won't have them around you. When you start believing your own press and how great you are, the dissenting points of view or the other side of the story will go away, right? And then you start, find yourself surrounded by yes people, right?
"Oh, how great you are, Christian. I can't believe how great you are. Oh, what will we do without you, Rusty?" You know, that kind of thing. And long, long, long before you get to that point, you have stopped getting feedback from the people on the front line who see the truth. Part of the integrity edge is being able to be trusted enough to hear that feedback.
And what I know is the individual contributor, especially a person who is more than one level removed from you, is more likely to tell the truth to a humble leader than a prideful leader. 'Cause a prideful leader is going to be certain that they're in the right, and the humble leader is going to entertain the possibility that they do not own all the right.
If you don't address the pride/humility issue early, that's one that gets harder and harder and harder as you go. We're all still human, and we all still like to be told we did a good job, and that doesn't stop once you have a C on your title. You still like to know that you're doing a good job, and you need that feedback, the positive feedback too.
It's just when that's all you'll, you'll receive. You can't be that person and grow your career with integrity and without compromise. You can't.
Kristiana Corona:
All right, let's talk about fear. I think this one is really poignant because there are so many people who are operating from a place of fear, and when we do those fear-based behaviors within leadership, it becomes about self-preservation over ethical decision-making.
And you talk about how courage is, you know, doing the right thing despite feeling the fear. So it's not that the fear goes away; it's that you learn how to do it anyway while feeling the fear. And a lot of us imagine that in those really critical moments where, you know, we're faced with an ethical dilemma, we're just gonna do the right thing, and then sometimes we don't because we haven't sufficiently prepared.
You have a model in there that I thought was really interesting called the Courage Model, where you look at sort of these three different motivators for how you can prepare yourself in advance before a situation happens so that when it does, you can show up confidently, and you know what your perspective and what your, your principles are in that situation, and you can act in alignment with that.
It's very helpful to prepare our mind in advance for situations we might encounter. I mean, similar to how you prepare for an emergency. Um, if you have a tornado coming, if you have a fire, uh, if you have, you know, a, a drill in school, the kids know what to do. Everyone knows how to handle it. You go into action, you do the thing that needs to be done, and you don't sit there spinning, thinking, "Oh, what should I do?
Do I take the path that I planned for or not?" And so I love the idea of having a similar model for how do, how do you show up with courage? What does that even look like?
Rusty Atkinson:
The whole principle behind this is the worst time to prepare to respond to fear is in the moment of fear. That is the w- that is the worst possible time to prepare for it.
Uh, because what I know with certainty is that you won't be prepared. There has to be like, um, an anchor for courage if you're gonna combat fear. Courage is the antidote to fear. Uh, so how do you anchor your courage? And I think there are, likely are more categories, but I think three bubble up for me. The first one, super common, that faith or purpose is how you, you have the courage.
I use the example of my granddaughter; actually, she's a dancer. At the time I wrote the book, she had only been doing it a handful of years, and I saw her petrified before a dance. I mean, absolutely bawling like only a 13-year-old girl can bawl, petrified of doing this dance, a dance that she was prepared for.
It wasn't like she wasn't surprised she had to dance. It's that the level of competition was staggering to her, and there were so many competitors, and she was certain, certain she was gonna make a fool of herself. And then she had to go backstage, and me and Nana, we had, we couldn't go back there with her, so we had to go out in the...
And I didn't know what was gonna happen, and I talked to her afterward. I get emotional when I talk about my grandkids and my kids. I'll try to keep it straight. But she said, "You know, I, I knew my dance and the music that associated with the dance was going to speak to people, other people like me who were struggling with some of the things she was struggling with, and I knew it could be a message.
It, like it could help somebody." And so even though she was petrified to go out on stage, her conviction to her faith and the purpose of her dance was sufficient to get her on stage, and she crushed it. I mean, she absolutely crushed it. Maybe it's the purpose of, you know, me as a father and me as a grandfather.
That is a giant piece of my life, and I would do lots of things in fear to protect that. The second area is around service and duty. This is why firemen and firewomen can run into a burning building when everybody else is running out. You know, this is why a soldier can go knowing that they're going to be shot at and be there because it's, it's service to their soldier on their left and on their right.
It's their duty to save the people who are in the room. These are the foundations of great courage to combat certain fear, because I don't believe for a second the firefighter's not afraid as they're running into the fire, into the building, the burning building. Absolutely, they're afraid. Well, then how could they possibly do it?
Because they set a foundation on their duty That gave them the courage to do it. And the last one is the one, love and compassion. In my story, I talk about a woman confronting a bear with her child, and how can a human confront a bear on its hind legs growling at you? It's not possible to do that unless you have some foundation of courage that allows you to stand in the face of that fear.
So in the book, I walk through some exercises that you can go by and try to identify those foundations for courage. This one is probably where I first dug deepest into a period of introspection to see what's truly important to you. Not the thing you say is important to you in a cocktail party or with a new network contact at a conference.
No, no. I'm talking about the true things that are important to you when you get honest with yourself, when it's quiet and dark, and you're really seeking to know your own self. It's that time, digging into that time, when you set that foundation, it becomes the courage that you combat the fear with.
Kristiana Corona:
And you mentioned the reflection questions, and I, I really like how you've positioned, like, important moments of reflection throughout the book that ground you again in the things that you do value, that you do believe, that you do care about.
You know, the more you are able to articulate those things and understand where they come from and why they matter, the more you can ground yourself in how you want to act and how that actually shows up in the world. There's so many rich pages of reflection questions. It's sort of a nice read, and then you can take it and then go do an activity with your team, uh, or go do an activity with yourself or, you know, your, your friend or your family.
I think there's just a lot of nice opportunities to take this and continue to engage.
Rusty Atkinson:
Kristiana, what I'm sure of is if you choose this path, uh, the path of growing your career in leadership without compromise, if you have a superficial understanding of your reasons, you will have a superficial courage, and that superficial courage may be sufficient to bypass the fear of talking to your team in a public setting.
It's unlikely that superficial understanding will have, be a foundation of courage sufficient to disagreeing with the CEO of a company when she or he says or does something that's unethical. To have deep courage, you need to have a deep understanding for the base of that, that bases that courage, and that doesn't come without time with yourself.
If you don't spend time understanding those things, okay, but then you won't have the benefit of the courage that results in understanding those things.
Kristiana Corona:
It's not a pull-it-out just when you need it. It's a cumulative, like you said before, about the small actions over time. Uh, learning to sit with and make decisions in that knowing, uh, over time is what builds the courage in the big moments.
So this kind of leads into a similar story as we get into point four, which is ambition. So you talk about ambition being how do you climb the ladder without losing your soul? And you have already indicated that it's possible to do that. Um, but once you start benefiting from unethical compromises, the compromises you might make, a little thing here, a little white lie there, it becomes much harder to stop yourself in the future from making those compromises again.
And you talk about when you know a decision is based in unchecked ambition, and unchecked ambition is truly focused on the short-term gain at the expense of the people or at the expense of the long-term benefit. And you talk about a story that I thought was really compelling with Mohammed Anwar's book, Love as a Business Strategy, where he was building a successful business.
He was focused on all the things that he thought were the right metrics for success that he should focus on. And yet, as things were growing, eventually his culture started to crumble, and he started to notice people weren't speaking up. It was becoming sort of this fear-based culture where people didn't want to fail; they didn't want to say the wrong thing, and then it led to drying up his innovation pipeline.
He had this realization. He had this realization that the way he had been operating was not in alignment with what it should have been. What did he do to turn that around, and how did that completely change his definition of success?
Rusty Atkinson:
He had his epiphany at a Houston Cougars college football game.
He's an alum, and hearing that they were capable of producing what they produced, winning beyond their talent, had any rights of expectations, right? Because of the team, because they cared for each other, because they loved one another, the players and the coaches and the whole team. Um, and it, it, and it was at a time when he was really-- that Mohammed was really struggling, um, with Soft Light And it was...
I picture a ping light bulb going off in his head thinking, "I got this whole thing wrong. It's not about me. It's about these relationships, about the people." And it was a- an epiphany for him that he was enemy number one of the culture that he actually wanted in Softway. And he gets raw in that book about the things he had to change, 'cause he was the enemy number one.
And so he, like I said, he got raw with it. He got serious and honest, and, um, his team didn't believe him 'cause he had taught them for so long that he was, you know, gonna shout at opposition, and, um, do as I say, not as I do, and all the terrible things that bad leaders do. Uh, that was his MO. And when he first said he was convicted to change his way, folks didn't believe him.
His actions bought a team that believed that he was gonna fly off the handle, that he was in control, and it was a fear-based environment.
Kristiana Corona:
The premise of that change was that he started to track success metrics around his team and how his team was thriving, right? And how he was showing up with them, and how he was encouraging and listening to them.
It wasn't, "Here's what the board wants. Here's how our P&L has to end for this quarter or else, or the stock market, or..." I mean, it's a wildly different way of measuring success, and I'm sure that was pretty dramatic for everyone involved, so, um, but yet it was successful.
Rusty Atkinson:
It was successful. I mean, it's reimagined their business, too. I mean, now they're teaching other people how to lead change in organizations with love. Like I said, it turned around their technology, uh, consulting business, but it grew their business in ways they would, they wouldn't have, they wouldn't have guessed.
Kristiana Corona:
It's a remarkable story.
Rusty Atkinson:
Yeah. Ambition is not inherently bad. In fact, I would argue, if you plan on growing a career, period, whether it's in leadership or any other discipline, without ambition, you'll lack the motivation to get through the hard bits. So motivation is a critical ingredient in success, so I'm not talking bad about ambition. Ambition becomes the most important thing when the outcome, you know, the ends justify the means.
When you begin believing that it doesn't matter how I get there as long as I get there- that's when ambition is unchecked, and it's a problem. And you said something earlier that I'll echo here. Once you start using unchecked ambition or the actions of unchecked ambition as a tool in your toolbox, it gets tough to step away from that tool.
You know, when you're okay with the end-of-the-year layoff so we can squeeze a couple more points out of the bottom line, when you're okay with fudging your capabilities on a sales order so you can close the sale, when you're okay with bribing somebody so you can get an outcome you're looking for, it can work.
And if you let it work and put that tool in your toolkit, the next time things get tough, you'll pull that tool back out again. This is how you check ambition. I am an ambitious guy, and I won't compromise to satisfy my ambition. If you can believe that, if you can believe that and act on that, that's how you keep ambition in check.
Be ambitious, and don't compromise to satisfy your ambition.
Kristiana Corona:
I like that nuance because I imagine there's a lot of people here who pride themselves on being ambitious, and it has been part of their MO for their entire career. I work really hard. I strive to be the best. I strive to be excellent. Uh, you know, high achievers, right?
And you're not saying they have to give up being high achievers. It's exactly the opposite of that. It's being a high achiever at another level, in a way of expectation of standards for yourself. Okay. Number five, disconnection. You call this kind of the silent killer of great leaders, um, and that when people get too disconnected, uh, it eventually becomes a disaster for them.
Oftentimes, how this shows up is when you are getting to higher and higher levels, you're at a much larger scale, you get more disconnected from what's happening on the ground. You only spend time with a tight, smaller circle of people. Uh, the voices you hear are different, the messages you hear are different, and what happens is you become completely disconnected from what reality actually is on the ground or with your customer.
And so, um, I thought this one was really interesting because people sometimes believe that that, again, is necessary when you go up higher, that, well, of course, I'm going to become m- more disconnected. That's just part of the game. That's part of scaling. It is what it is.
Rusty Atkinson:
As you grow in your scope and of responsibility, there's no chance that a CIO who's responsible for an organization of eleven hundred, twelve hundred, twenty thousand can have the same one-on-one relationship as they had when they had 12 people on their team.
Yeah, I mean, it's just maths. You, you can't. But you don't have to fully get disconnected. You don't have to fully lose the relationship. You have to be clever, you have to be willing, and you have to prioritize it, but you can keep a connection with, uh, every level of the organization if you, if you want to do it.
If you'll do it, you'll protect yourself from some of these other stumbling blocks too. Getting that feedback, that honest feedback, preparing that environment where, uh, they know that the, how does the boss know my name? Well, the boss didn't actually know your name, but now they do because they're talking to you in a one-on-one or a small group kind of fashion to hear what your thoughts are.
And it's difficult because in those situations, you're always going to be the boss, right? Let's say you're C- CIO. You'll never go into a meeting with individual contributors on your team and not be the CIO. And as much as you want to just have a candid, frank conversation, it's hard to because the CIO is sitting in your chair, right?
And so you've got to do this, um, routinely so that folks believe that you mean what you say when you say I'm creating a safe space 'cause I've got to know the contrarian opinion. I've got to know what it's like for the folks who are working in a place that I don't work anymore, and that it won't happen on the first conversation.
It probably won't happen on the second. But through repeated exposure, the CIO in the room with you gets smaller and smaller, and Rusty's just talking to you at this point.
Kristiana Corona:
It's interesting 'cause, uh, working at Amazon, I saw a lot of different techniques and a lot of, uh, tactics for folks that, you know, had thousands of people on their teams.
And there were, you know, varying levels of success. But some of the leaders that I really respected and I thought were most connected, um, absolutely knew our names. They were accessible. They were open and vulnerable, and they were sharing in, in large group conversations. They would talk about what they...
You know, mistakes they had made. They would talk about what they've learned. They would solicit feedback, and they would respond, and they would say things, you know, like, "This is what I heard in the last round of feedback. Here are some of the things I'm committing to, to, to try. Um, I want to check in again in the future and see if those things are working to solve this problem."
Um, there's just so many lovely ways that you can continue to scale that connection and that impact, uh, over time, even though it doesn't look like a weekly one-on-one, which you were talking about in the book.
Rusty Atkinson:
Something I've done myself and still do to this day is you have 2,000 people on your team, you can't talk to 2,000 people in a week.
You can't talk to 2,000 people in a quarter, but you can talk to 2,000 people eventually, right? And so if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen if you don't prioritize it. That, that's one of the keys here is this leading with integrity only happens when you're intentional. If you're not intentional, you'll compromise.
That's all there is to it. It's either compromise or intentionality. But being intentional in this space looks like getting a roster of your 2,000 people, and I don't know your instant messenger, your direct messenger is at your place, but pull it up. Do three or four conversations at the same time.
"Hey, this is Rusty. How you doing?" Um, after the initial shock wears off, and they ask themselves, "Is fishing via Slack a thing?" And they ask that, then eventually they'll respond back to you. And, and if you, if you'll allow yourself to be real with them, ask them questions, and not have ulterior motive, your desire is simply to know what they're thinking about.
What's on your mind? Once you have established why are you here, I might be in trouble, 'cause that's the very first thought, then I truly, all I'm caring about during this conversation is what's on your mind. And literally let it go wherever it goes. And then tomorrow, in a dedicated time that you intentionally put on your calendar, grab the next five or six.
Takes a long time to get to 2,000, but it's a whole lot faster than if you didn't start.
Kristiana Corona:
And it's nice because it's kind of forming just a small daily discipline of taking action where you can see the cumulative benefit over time. I feel like a lot of the things that you talk about in the book are really small actions, but they're small actions that matter.
Rusty Atkinson:
It truly doesn't matter how long it takes. Your organization might be massive. It may take over a year, but you will get through it. You will get through all 2,000, and you'll be shocked at the feedback you get along the way, the value of that feedback. And then the beautiful thing happens. Two months after you talk to Sally, you get a Slack from Sally out of the blue, and it's you know, I've talked to my boss about this.
She knows what's going on. I just wanted to let you know. I was thinking X, Y, Z." That's gold. That kind of feedback is gold. You can't buy that. You can only earn it.
Kristiana Corona:
Yeah. You also talk about having the most important question, the thing that you wanna make sure you are asking people, whether it's in a Slack message or a one-on-one or group settings, um, what is something obvious that I'm missing?
Rusty Atkinson:
I stole that. I, I attribute it to the author who wrote that, but I think it's just a brilliant question. What's the thing that I don't know? Tell me the most important thing that I don't know. Uh, and you'd be shocked what you hear. Be ready. And I beg you, when you ask these questions, when you're trying to solicit feedback, accept the feedback.
Don't fall into the trap of arguing the feedback. You asked for the feedback; accept the feedback. It doesn't mean you got to alter your strategy or your, you know, your procedure, your policies based on one piece of feedback, but accept it. Don't try to defend yourself, and you will get more feedback in the future.
But as soon as you shut it down by telling them how wrong they are and all the reasons that they don't understand, you have turned off feedback on that person and anybody that person talks to.
Kristiana Corona:
100%. Yeah. The other thing you talked about was, um, specifically soliciting or getting someone to be a meeting plant and ask the tough question or challenge you on something, and then that allows you to role model what it looks like to allow challenge to happen or debate to happen in a way that's helpful so that other people can feel, uh, like it's safe to do that.
Rusty Atkinson:
It can't be theater; it can't be fake, 'cause there's nothing that will cost you trust like being, uh, inauthentic or lying, which that's what it would end up being. So when you make this plant, invite them, tell them why you're asking them to do it, let them know you want their disagreement, but let them choose what they disagree with.
Don't manufacture the disagreement. I started doing this when I was at Intel, McAfee. I had knew from experience for a couple of topics I was a subject matter expert, and so the directors reporting to me, the managers reporting to me were less likely to challenge me in an area where I had expertise, and yet I wasn't confident on my decisions, so I needed some challenge, right?
And so Mike was the guy that I did this with. I did it out of the blue one day. "Hey, Mike, I'm gonna talk about something I haven't talked to y'all about it before. At some point, find something to disagree with. I need the folks talking, and I need you to be the one to kind of this tip of the spear." And since then I've used it over and over again.
If you model, uh, receiving constructive feedback and receiving it well, you stop having to have the plant. Like where I am right now at Clearway, I do not need to name a plant. I guarantee you all four of my directors are gonna say something if they have something to say. It's a very engaging style of conversation, and candidly, that's hard sometimes.
It can be exhausting when you know the folks who trust you, and you trust the most are predisposed to pick at disagreements, but the value of that, the quality of the outcomes because of that are so much better than if you surround yourself with yes people. So much better
Kristiana Corona:
Absolutely. Hearing someone have a live debate like that in, in the room, I mean, it can be shocking at first.
You can think, like, "Wow, that person's gonna get in big trouble later." And then you start to realize, no, this is actually the culture of this team or of this company. It's okay for me to do that. It's okay for me to speak up if I'm, if I'm not on board with something, and that is so freeing. You know, just being in a team like that, so.
Um, great. Okay, so last stumbling block in the book is number six, which is toxic culture. And culture can be fine, but turn toxic very quickly. Um, you call that out, uh, where you say, "Culture is like a tree, and it takes years to grow, but it can be, you know, in a short time it can be cut down." Um, and it's based on leaders accepting or allowing or promoting toxic behavior from within their team.
So if there's an influential person or an influential leader in their team and they accept that that person is being toxic, it doesn't even have to be yourself. If you allow that behavior on your team, it can quickly change the entire team, where everyone then goes into self-protection mode overnight, and y- y- your team is nothing like it used to be.
And you have a really compelling story that you share about your own experience with this, so I was wondering if you can share that story.
Rusty Atkinson:
I was at a place where I was on a senior team who... I mean, it was a great group. It was the kind of group that when the boss was in the room would disagree with each other. That's super valuable.
When the environment is safe enough and the trust is high enough that Kristiana can tell me, "Rusty, I, I think you missed it here on this and this and this. I think you got this wrong, and you should consider this other thing," and Kristiana and Rusty's boss is in the room with them, and Rusty doesn't explode and blow up, that is a rare thing.
That's what we had, and, uh, acquisitions happen, a new boss came in, and the time it took to dismantle that was shockingly fast, and it was because you saw a different reaction from the leader. The leader, um, modeled different behaviors, showed that things were other things were important rather than that trust and that collaboration.
And the players, other than the leader, the players didn't change, but we had to, um, show up differently because the boss was different. And in no time that amazing team culture got dismantled in a quarter. It was that fast. Leaders have influence, and you influence either positively or negatively. But if you have influence, and a leader with the title and the authority does have influence, you will influence.
And if you are focusing on fast over right, if you're focusing on now versus long term, um, if you're focusing on outcome versus the path, then there are certain things that are gonna happen in an organization. And I, as a leader, have to act within sort of the structure given to me by that leader. And if the leader says, "I don't care about the people, I care about this metric," then I have a couple of choices.
I can either change that culture, or I can c-- I can convince the new boss that people matter more than the metric. That's a place of risk. The new boss can say, "Well, if you see it that way, you're out of here." That's true. So I can either challenge the system, I can accept the new paradigm and do what I have to do with my actions to fit, meaning stop treating the people well, focus on the metric.
I'm not willing to do that. That is compromise, and you won't leave your career with integrity with compromise like that. And then the third option, candidly the option I chose, is don't be part of that organization anymore. If you can't change it, and you won't accept it, you have to leave it. And that's really the only three options you have with toxic culture.
Kristiana Corona:
So you've experienced both situations where, you know, it changed so dramatically that you had to make the choice that, "I can't be a part of this anymore." But you've also been a part of situations where you could influence, and you were able to become a champion for the culture. And so for people who are maybe in a situation where they feel like, you know, "It's not where I want it to be, but I feel like I could at least make some moves", what are some of the things that you would encourage them to do?
Rusty Atkinson:
Don't make a grandstand. The first action you take to correct the culture shouldn't be standing up with a pointed question in an all-hands meeting. I mean, let's start a little grassroots. Start with your team. You know, um, just because my boss at that company was starting to act contrary to, you know, uplifting culture didn't mean my team needed to see that.
You've been given authority and responsibility for a number of folks on your team, and to some degree you can dictate what's an acceptable team behavior in that group. There's gonna be some bleed-in. The organization as a whole, if the whole organization is toxic, it's gonna bleed into your team, and it's gonna make your job harder.
But you can start with your team. You know, be clear about what does positive culture look like? What are the behaviors you want to champion, and what are the be- behaviors that you see as unacceptable? Be clear. I mean, d- don't leave it to guess. Don't ask somebody to read your mind. Be clear about what you'll do and what you'll want to.
And then model it to the extent of your authority. Find like-minded folks. Somebody in a different organization. I'm in technology; somebody in finance, I happen to know that she sees things in a similar way. Share your thoughts and your actions and your approach with that person, and then bring in a third, and bring in a fourth, and bring in a fifth.
I think the risk is pretty low of bringing those people in, because if it doesn't pan out then I'm not gonna be here anyway, so I'm willing to give it a shot. And I talk in the book about not being irresponsible. Know that if you're going to stand up against toxic culture, it could end fast for you So be aware that you probably still need to pay the bills and eat in the following days, and so know what your risk tolerance is.
But then take action. And if you're not changing the culture, that means you're just stewing in it, and it will change you over time. It will. It's a stumbling block that you cannot avoid in the long term. You either have to change it or you have to leave it.
Kristiana Corona:
I appreciate you going through all of the different points and kind of giving us a little bit of a sneak peek into what they can find in the book.
So maybe as we wrap up here today, if you could just give people one piece of advice around how to live their leadership life with more integrity, uh, what would you, what would you want them to take away from today?
Rusty Atkinson:
There are going to be hard times. There are going to be hard days in this ethical journey, uh, that you're on.
So I'd say decide early that you're not going to compromise. There's an old proverb, um, that the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, and the second-best time to plant a tree is today, and that's what I would say. The best time to learn to decide or commit to the kind of leader you're going to be is before you start leading the first humans.
Um, but if you didn't, okay, the next best time is right now. I go through an exercise of five whys at the end of the book. Why is it important to you that you want to be an ethical leader? The idea here is to find the root cause that you be an ethical leader. Well, because it's the right thing to do. Oh, that's shallow.
Let's get a little deeper. But why is it important to you to do the right thing? And then just keep digging, digging, digging, digging until you get to the root of why are you willing to go against the tide, right? Go upstream a lot of times, to not use the easy button. 'Cause you're going to get tested, and if you'll take the time early, it'll pay off in spades.
It will be well worth the investment early on. Uh, and don't wait till tomorrow to start doing that. It doesn't get easier. The more responsibility, the more power, the more authority you're given, the more compensation you're given, the more people in your charge, these are not things that make avoiding compromise easier.
Each one of those things I mentioned make avoiding compromise much more difficult. So decide before it works. Decide as early as you can. That's what I would say. If it's going to be important to you, don't wait. Start now.
Kristiana Corona:
Well, I would encourage everyone to go grab a copy of this book. Um, it's a quick read.
It's fantastic. There are lots of great stories, uh, lots of great reflection moments. I really enjoyed it. And for anyone that wants to follow along with you and just see a little bit more from you, I know you're already working on another book. Where should they go to follow you?
Rusty Atkinson:
LinkedIn, that's really it for me, uh, LinkedIn. I still am ambitious, and I want to finish three books in five years, and they're not going to write themselves. Uh, so, uh, a bit of a hiatus, but I still, uh, I'm out there all the time. I see my DMs every single day.
Kristiana Corona:
Yeah, and I am proof of that, that LinkedIn is indeed where you find Rusty. So, thank you so much for taking the time. This was a real pleasure to talk to you and to hear more about your perspectives on, uh, leading with integrity.
Rusty Atkinson:
I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Great conversation.
Kristiana Corona:
I hope you enjoyed that episode with Rusty Atkinson, and that you are going to go pick up a copy of his book, The Integrity Edge. It's a really quick read.
It only took me a couple of days to get through it, and there were some really nice reflection exercises inside that I'm going to go back to, and I'm actually going to do them for myself during some of my heads-down time, and then also take some of those questions and use them with my team. So, very helpful.
I would encourage you to share this episode with any leaders in your life who value integrity, who value human-centered leadership, and just want a little bit of additional encouragement and maybe some techniques that they haven't thought of before. I hope that you enjoyed this episode, and if you want to hear more like it and never miss an episode, you can subscribe at WorthyToLead.co/subscribe.
Until next time, keep showing up, keep doing the work that matters, and keep leading like you're worthy to lead, because you are. Bye for now.
