• If you’ve ordered the most expensive meal at the table, don’t be the one to suggest that you split the check evenly.

• If you borrow a car, return it clean and fill the gas.

• You should repay a debt/loan before someone has to ask.

A few readers replied that there are just as many, if not more, unspoken rules at work. Violating these rules often has consequences that can be career limiting, even if you are never explicitly reprimanded. And anecdotally, I have heard from several leaders whose younger employees and newer leaders may not be familiar with these important best practices that aren’t found in an employee handbook.

I shared many of these rules with my daughter before her first internship, and I’ve shared several of them with new leaders I’ve mentored over the years as well. These are good to reinforce at all stages of your professional journey.

Don’t reply all unless every single person needs the message

So many people use reply all when the context of the email makes it clear that it’s not the appropriate or requested thing to do. This always makes people question your emotional intelligence and can be something people joke about for years.

Praise in public, correct in private

This is a vital rule for feedback, whether you are correcting a peer, a direct-report or certainly a manager. Don’t call someone out in front of others; pull them aside privately and politely share your feedback. But if you’re praising someone for a job well done, be sure to highlight it in front of their team, department or, if appropriate, the entire company.

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Jason Fried, CEO of the tech company 37signals and a New York Times bestselling author on work and productivity, urges his team to schedule as few meetings as possible. In a conversation we had on The Elevate Podcast, Jason explained why:

“A good night’s sleep is when you wake up and say ‘wow, I slept through the night, that’s awesome.’ That’s what a good workday should look like...I wasn’t distracted all day. I had an eight-hour day to myself to focus on work.”

Ideally, we would dedicate as much uninterrupted time as possible to our top priorities, as very few people’s job performance is judged by the number of meetings they attend. And yet, so many leaders, especially new ones, find their calendars are so clogged up with meetings that they have barely an hour a day to spend on strategic thinking or creating materials related to the work or new initiatives.

Practically you’ll never be able to get rid of all your meetings, or even all the unnecessary ones. But even if you eliminate one or two meetings per week and shorten or change the frequency of others, you can easily claw back 30 percent of your time, which is meaningful.

Here are several tactics that when implemented help you to do this.

No Agenda, No Attenda

Once I was invited to a pitch where the sales rep clearly lacked a concrete plan. After a few minutes of awkward intros, the rep rambled for nearly 20 minutes, without actually telling me what the tool did, providing a demo, or even explaining pricing.

As our 30 minutes ended, the rep said we could simply have a second call to go over those details. I felt my time had been wasted and declined to book a follow-up.

Every meeting should have a clear purpose and a basic outline of topics. At minimum, the organizer should be able to add a bullet point agenda to the meeting invite.

If no one is willing to step up and provide a simple agenda for the meeting, the meeting should not happen. This should be a blanket policy for your team or organization so that no one feels like a jerk for saying “I see there’s no agenda for this meeting. Can we cancel?”

The Two Pizza Rule

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The reality is performance and behavior are much more situational than permanent. To that point, I once saw a child psychologist claim that a parent should never tell their kid they are smart or not smart. Instead, they should tell them when they do something smart, and when they do something that is not smart. If a child believes they are inherently smart, they may think they can do no wrong or crumble the first time they get a bad grade.

The same is true for professional performance: an A Player is not a permanent title, but a situational one. Jim Collins talked about A Players being the right person on the team in the right seat. I think that was missing one dimension: the right time.

This is my definition:

An A Player = The Right Person + The Right Seat + The Right Time

It is this last dimension that often matters most: the person’s fit for what the role demands at a specific point in a company’s life cycle. A person can grow into being an A Player in the right role, and they can fall out of it in the wrong role. A person can also be exactly what the company needs today, but not quite right tomorrow as the business’ needs evolve. If you understand this as a leader, and help your team understand it as well, it makes performance decisions easier and less personal.

Let’s dig into each part of the formula.

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We had two account generalists who worked as contractors, filling a variety of roles on our account teams. This was perfect when we were a scrappy operation with a couple dozen employees.

But as our company grew, we created more structured roles on our account teams and we needed people to evolve into one of those new roles with more specific accountability. However, the contractors really wanted to keep doing what they were doing. Our business needed something they weren’t interested in providing.

Part of me still wishes we had made it work. A great analogy for the reason it didn’t work comes from the world of baseball: Utility Players versus All-Stars.

In baseball, a Utility Player is a generalist athlete who can play several different defensive positions on the field at a solid level. They’re not a star, but their ability to slot into several different positions as needed makes them an asset to any team.

They are quite different from all All-Stars: the players who typically play one position extremely well with an elite skill, such as hitting, pitching, or fielding. Despite their narrow skillset, their excellence in that area makes them invaluable, and they get the awards and big contracts.

Businesses also have Utility Players and All-Stars, whether in finance, sales, marketing, or delivery. And the values of these players to the business can change over time.

Small Organizations Need Utility Players

Early on at Acceleration Partners, we had a lot of generalists. Our small, nimble team required versatility, so we rewarded people who supported multiple functions in one role.

For example, we didn’t have a sales or marketing leader, or even separate sales and marketing teams; the lines were blurred. The same was true for operations, where we had a few versatile people covering finance, operations and technology.

These generalists were lifesavers in those early years. Their versatility enabled us to grow the business without needing to invest in building out specialized departments early on. This allowed us to fund our own growth through cashflow for over a decade.

We rewarded these Utility Players with praise and promotions, and they delivered what we needed. The system worked great. At least for a while.

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The CEO had begun to observe how many fairly routine customer service requests had turned into long strings of back-and-forth e-mails. Her direction in response was simple but rare in business today: next time, pick up the phone and simply call the customer. Often times, a 10-minute phone call would get to the root much faster and resolve the issue; no follow-ups required.

Electronic communication can be easier at times, and there is no shortage of ways to communicate these days. But overdependence on those text-based channels is a problem for leaders and employees under 40, and it erodes our ability to build relationships and get things done. Sometimes, picking up the phone is simply the better choice, especially when it comes to solving a problem.

It’s simpler

Everyone’s tried to solve a problem in an exchange that goes nowhere. The sequence usually goes something like this:

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There are many gifted, intelligent people who make little progress toward what matters to them. On the flip side, there are many people who may not seem as talented at face value but build the life they want by keeping their focus on what matters most to them.

People who hit their most important goals consistently do three things.

They Don’t Follow Others’ Definition of Success

If you struggle to follow through on your goals, you might be setting the wrong ones.

Anything worth doing requires time, hard work, and pushing through setbacks. It’s difficult to maintain that level of passion and persistence unless the objective draws on real intrinsic motivation. In other cases, you may manage to keep climbing until you reach your summit, only to discover you don’t like the view.

To ensure you can keep up the necessary effort and have that exertion feel worth it, pick goals that are longer term in nature and are aligned to your core values. It’s easier to maintain persistence toward a goal if it’s something that matters to you so much that you are willing to sacrifice for it, rather than simply being a traditional marker of success such as a better title, a bigger house, or a flashy car.

You shouldn’t set a single long-term, annual or even quarterly goal until you get clarity on your vision and values. There are a few ways to do this:

• Find your core values: Life will seem clearer when you know your core values. Remember that my course only takes an hour and you can use the code compass for $25 off.

• Write a personal vision statement: Write a narrative of your ideal life five years in the future. Use the present tense and be specific and vivid (for example, “It is April 29, 2031. My family and I live in a small town outside of Denver, CO, which provides easy access to hiking and skiing”). This exercise puts specific language around what you want, helping you identify goals that build toward that vision.

• Try vision boarding: This is a similar exercise that takes less writing. A vision board helps you capture the things that you want to make part of your life in the long term, and it’s fun to do as a family. Instructions are in this Friday Forward.

Getting clarity makes it much easier to set meaningful goals. Start by thinking five years out and then, once each value-aligned goal is set, consider what needs to be done each year to get to those multi-year objectives.

They Measure Themselves Consistently

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The root of this problem was culture, not science.

VW’s CEO at the time, Martin Winterkorn, fostered an authoritarian culture where failure was forbidden. He promised customers and investors a new diesel engine that was both highly efficient and low emitting; however, the engineers building the engine quickly realized they could hit fuel efficiency targets or emissions standards, but not both. Fearing Winterkorn’s reaction, the scientists hid the inconvenient truth from executives.

The engineers instead redirected their talent toward creating a defeat device that faked lower emissions readings during testing, so they could meet the fuel efficiency objectives, which would be visible to customers. When this systemic deception and cover-up came to light, VW ultimately spent $30 billion to buy back all the faulty vehicles and faced billions in fines and serious brand damage. They surely would’ve been better off just admitting the problem during production.

Most leaders don’t want to hear about problems all day. When I was CEO, we had a mantra of “Bring Solutions” to encourage solving problems before escalating them. But many cultures take this principle too far, purposefully or inadvertently leaving employees petrified to bring bad news to management. As VW learned, that leads to cover-ups and severe consequences for employees, leaders, and whole organizations.

Whether you lead a team of two or 200, you need your people to tell you bad news. When people feel unsafe, it’s often for one of two reasons:

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Given my successful career as an Amazon Vice President, starting the Prime Video project and leading teams of over 800 people, it may surprise you to know that earlier in my career, I was fired twice for my angry, critical interactions with peer leaders.

First, I was let go because I took a peer’s skepticism about our schedule as disloyalty that undermined our team, leading to public debates that hurt the team far more. Next, I lost my job for rebuking the VP of Sales for promising a client things our product didn’t really do. I didn’t understand that the VP was trying to win a contract we needed to stay afloat, and we would simply have to figure out how to fulfill them later.

After losing two jobs back-to-back, I looked at the common element (me) and realized that I needed to learn to get my point across in a way that built trust rather than creating hard feelings.

So, I began developing a system to become personally warm and friendly while remaining professionally firm and clear. This blend allowed me to recover from two job losses and rise to become a VP at Amazon. What I learned can help you too.

Finding The Right Balance

Most people struggle to discuss difficult topics. They either avoid addressing problems in order to keep the peace, or they deliver feedback harshly, creating defensiveness, doing damage, and burying any possible solution under hard feelings.

Both of these poor approaches are emotionally driven. Most humans have a strong drive to avoid conflict, which is rooted in our tribal instincts. Long ago, conflict could result in exile from the tribe or injury from a fight. We hold that same fear of conflict to this day, even though the risks are different. When we give a manager bad news, disagree with a colleague, or deliver performance feedback to a report, we worry that the person will take it poorly and hold a grudge. This makes us resistant to starting the conversation.

As a result, our brains automatically seek ways to reduce our discomfort, often by avoiding the topic altogether or watering it down so much that the message is lost. When people avoid a difficult topic, they are really avoiding the risk of confrontation that comes with discussing it.

However, many people confront the fear of confrontation by tapping into their anger–something I did to precipitate my two firings. Anger makes us feel righteous and justified, pushing us through the fear of confrontation. This is a powerful defense mechanism, as most people prefer being angry to being afraid. But anger is, ironically, just another form of avoidance: it’s our way of getting out of having an honest, sober conversation about a real problem.

When I got fired, it was because I was quick to use anger and self-righteousness to express my opinions. I displayed my belief that I knew better when I spoke my mind, and my colleagues found me abrasive and unpleasant. When the time came for layoffs, they took the chance to get rid of me.

“Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” – Yoda

Personally Warm, Professionally Firm

Over the course of my leadership growth, I learned to treat every person I interact with as a human being with feelings who is trying their best, no matter how urgently I need something or how frustrated I am by a mistake. No one wakes up in the morning and says to themselves, “Today I want to be difficult, obstruct progress, and fail miserably at my job.” Almost everyone is trying to do good work and succeed.

When I empathize with the other person as a human being, that naturally comes through in my body language and tone of voice. As a result, ~90% of my communication with them changes from cold, mechanical, or even angry, to warm and friendly.

However, seeing someone else as a human being with feelings does not prevent you from being professionally firm and clear. In fact, it makes it far easier. When ~90% of your communication—your tone and body language—is friendly, it is possible for the other ~10%, your words, to be very direct and still be well received.

As a coach, my business today, I often say that people pay me to tell them what they need to change about themselves. This is a shorthand for a larger truth, which is that they are paying me to identify gaps in their performance, help them see them, and support them as they adapt.

In this work, I make a point of being enthusiastically “on my client’s side.” They know I am there to help them and that I am pulling for them to succeed, in work and in life. As a result, because they know I have their best interests at heart, I can tell them some very direct truths.

This has led to me telling clients that they are too nice, and that as leaders they are not delivering the messages their colleagues need to hear. I have also told clients that they are in denial about problems, that they are workaholics, and many other sensitive things. In every case, rather than being upset or firing me as a coach, they thank me, because they can sense that I am trying to help them.

From Fear and Anger to Empathy

I wrote earlier that two emotions create the challenge of delivering difficult messages:

1. Fear, which leads to avoidance

2. Anger, which leads to confrontation

Now you see the third path: empathy, resulting in a trusting conversation.

Your ability to lead this way begins with you setting aside your own fear or anger long enough to find the empathy you have for the other person. Fear and anger are selfish emotions—they reflect that we are afraid of confrontation or angry about problems. Empathy is different; it is concern for the other person.

Learning to be personally warm and professionally firm will change your life. When someone comes at you in anger, you can understand what is happening and respond with empathy rather than anger of your own. When you need to deliver a difficult message to anyone, you can first empathize with them and then calmly speak your truth with the goal of helping them. Once your true goal becomes helping others see and understand what they do not, tough conversations will become much easier.

To learn how to say hard things politely under pressure and confidently command high-stakes rooms, check out Ethan’s course on Executive Presence which starts April 18th and currently has a 15% discount, which you can get here.

Follow Ethan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanevansvp/

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The post described a high performer who hit all her performance metrics, but still got dinged on her annual evaluation. The employee’s peer feedback critiqued her habit of pushing back and challenging ideas. Colleagues viewed these challenges as disruptive and harmful to team chemistry.

However, this employee’s critiques were often proven right after the fact. She questioned a pricing model that was eventually changed by the company, and she wondered why simple contract changes needed 11 approvals. These are thoughtful, logical challenges to ineffective policies, but because the employee rocked the boat, her teammates labeled her as non-collaborative, sticking her with a subpar overall rating.

While performance evaluations can provide valuable data, they should be taken with a grain of salt and evaluated with full context. Many evaluators, especially middle managers, reserve top marks for people who treat processes as gospel, never take risks, and don’t challenge directions. They value great soldiers, not necessarily great performers, and they have concerns about employees who point out issues, challenge group consensus or push for bold bets.

Behavior follows incentives, and rewarding compliance hollows out a company over time. Negative feedback leads to dissenting voices getting managed out. The result is often a homogenous team that plays it safe and oversees a well-managed company decline.

Leaders need teams that don’t just have execution, but also offer vision and strategy. They also need people who tell colleagues and leaders what they need to hear, not just what they want to hear. Thriving cultures balance compliance with challenge, fostering an environment where the best ideas win out and the team is unafraid to change direction when necessary.

This balance is hard to strike. It helps to know when challenging is counterproductive and when it’s healthy so you can police the former and reward the latter.

When Challenging Is Unacceptable

You don’t want a team of employees who never question directions and rarely push back in group discussions. But there are three examples where challenges cannot be tolerated:

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This happened recently. It was a company’s email announcement of their new mission, vision and values, written by their Executive Chairman. His excitement jumped off the screen.

I scrolled down to the new values. There were seven: Professionalism, Accountability, Reliability, Teamwork, Nimbleness, Ethics, Relationship-focused.

A few things struck me immediately.

• Accountability and Reliability are kind of the same thing.

• Same with Teamwork and Relationship-focused.

• Ethics and Nimbleness were especially vague.

In other words, these were classic one-word company values. They looked good in the email and I’m sure they looked even better on the company wall. But I couldn’t imagine them guiding behavior in the company or impacting the culture in any meaningful way.

When I forwarded the email to my GM, Mick, to add to our “don’t do this” examples, he pointed out the values formed an acronym, PARTNER:

• Professionalism

• Accountability

• Reliability

• Teamwork

• Nimbleness

• Ethics

• Relationship-focused

For better and for worse, I usually can’t help myself when I see something that could be made better. So, I emailed the Executive Chairman with some unsolicited feedback, noting that while I understood the reasoning behind the values, there were a few reasons I thought they’d be ineffective.

We want to share a version of that feedback below. This is not the note, but the reasoning, which applies to so many ineffective company core values.

No leader sets out to create BS company values. But the fact is most of their employees roll their eyes when they see a list of values like the one above rolled out with great fanfare. They’ve probably worked at companies where core values were vague wall art that didn’t reflect the culture or leadership’s behaviors, and they just don’t buy what’s being sold.

Your core values don’t have to make your employees cringe. Here are some rules to follow to make them actually matter.

One Word Values Don’t Work

A core value needs to describe a specific, actionable principle that dictates how people behave in their daily work. A single word is typically too vague to guide that type of action.

We’ll borrow an example from the PARTNER acronym: professionalism.

Professionalism looks great on the wall, but it means different things to different people. One employee thinks it means wearing a suit to client meetings. Another thinks it means never raising disagreements in front of the team. A third thinks it means hitting every deadline, no exceptions. None of these are bad things, but the meaning of a core value shouldn’t be subject to this degree of interpretation. Everyone at the company should know if they’re following it, or if their colleagues are.

Instead, the leader should articulate the company’s unique definition of professionalism and make that definition the value. For example, the value could be Never Miss A Deadline, which has an unambiguous meaning that drives behavior. There’s no room for interpretation, and violations are crystal clear.

Acronyms Are Cute & Hollow

Leaders love to create one-word values that form an acronym. This is catchy branding that provides a mnemonic device people can use to remember the values.

But there are two flaws:

• In most cases, people remember the acronym, but not the actual underlying values. We worked with an organization that used the acronym ICARE to comprise their values, and while several of the employees knew that acronym, hardly any knew the words within it.

• You inevitably include words that don’t fit in order to build the acronym. I would bet the company that created PARTNER would acknowledge not all seven of those values are vital. But PARTNER has seven letters, so seven values are listed. The result is a list that’s too long to remember and includes more values than are necessary or real.

Your values won’t work if people can’t remember them. And acronyms help people remember the wrong thing.

Core Values Must Be Behavioral

Whenever a company tells us their core values, here are the first questions we ask: how do they dictate behavior at the company? How do they fit into your core processes? Core values should be phrased to clearly dictate behavior, allowing you to reward people who display the values, and making it easy to hold people accountable when they violate them.

Company values should be easy to reference in conversation so employees can use them to shoutout, or call out, their peers. For example, one of Acceleration Partners’ core values is Own It, and our team members constantly say things like “this is not Owning It” or “you really Owned It here.”

What Values Should Be

Having discussed a few things values should not be, let’s talk about what they should be.

• Stakeholder Driven: When we work with companies to create or update their core values, the first step is to interview people throughout the organization, not just the leadership team. We work to understand how employees across the org chart experience the culture and learn what current values are resonating and what ring hollow. And when that interview data gets incorporated into the new values, employees see their own words in the final product and are more likely to buy in.

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But as the business grows, there is pressure to change team structure, moving work to centralized specialists. For example, instead of having account managers handle data reports, a centralized data analytics team does reporting for your full client base.

This decision rests on two seemingly logical assumptions:

• A centralized team of analysts will provide better data reports, leading to greater client satisfaction.

• Removing this responsibility from account managers frees up time to service more clients, creating greater scale and efficiency.

Often, the hypothetical math works like this: an account team with a $1 million portfolio spends about 20 percent of their hours creating reports, according to your utilization tracking. Your head of client services suggests that hiring a $100K data manager to handle reporting allows the account team to take on 20 percent more business, or roughly $200K in incremental revenue.

In theory, you’re adding $100K in cost to generate $200K in revenue. Sounds like a no brainer, right?

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You can probably picture someone who has it, but you’d have a harder time defining it. And you’re probably even less sure how to build it for yourself.

Ethan Evans, retired Amazon VP and creator of the hit Substack Level Up With Ethan Evans, is an expert in building executive presence. A self-described geek with an engineering background, Ethan ascended the ranks in one of the world’s most intense corporate cultures, ultimately leading a global team of over 800 people. Today, Level Up, one of the top business Substacks, that shares information to help people get promoted.

Ethan shared his insights from that journey with The Elevate Club, our leadership-focused membership group. Below are five clips from Ethan’s talk that are digestible and valuable for anyone looking to build credibility as a leader and earn a step up.

1. Ethan’s Definition of Executive Prescence

As Ethan explains in the clip below, executive presence is not about how you view yourself, but about how others perceive you. You can evaluate this perception with a few questions:

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That got me thinking about one of the biggest mistakes that many leaders and companies repeat over time.

At some point, every leader hires a new employee who struggles out of the gate. In some cases, they may have received inadequate training, or the expectations for the hire were mismatched. However, in the vast majority of cases, the hire simply does not have the capacity you thought they had when you hired them, or they are not learning quickly enough to keep up with the team.

This issue become especially glaring if you hire in cohorts, or for the same role on a recurring basis, where onboarding and training are consistent. When a group of employees all are held to the same standard and one person is a clear outlier not meeting those expectations, the signal is hard to ignore.

When this happens, you really have two choices: admit that you made a mistake and move on, or give the slow starter time, and training, to improve.

Most leaders approach this emotionally. The natural impulse is to cut a slow starter some slack and give them time to improve, even if the data from past experiences tells you that poor starters almost never work out. Honestly, I’ve done this myself as well.

Instead of making the tough decision early, so both parties can move onto something that’s a better fit, you invest resources to get the slow starter’s performance up to the baseline of what you expected it to be when you hired them.

Of course, this is not a risk-free choice. Working against you is fact that your team will be hesitant to trust the struggling employee’s work. As a result, the employee often loses confidence, becomes more anxious, and makes additional mistakes as a result. This creates a vicious downward spiral in many cases.

Eventually, after months of trying, you recognize you need to let them go. A bad situation has been made worse: you’ve wasted time that could have been spent finding a replacement, your team is frustrated, and the departing employee wasted energy trying to get better at their current job rather than finding a new one.

There’s a hard lesson every leader needs to learn about coaching underperformers, and a rubric you can use to know when to cut your losses and move on from a slow starter.

What You Should Never Do

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In one case, a YPO Forum we facilitated a core values exercise for did a deeper follow-up exercise tied to the Big Three areas of life: partner, career, and community. Each person rated each area based on how aligned they were to their recently identified values. Most importantly, they wrote why they assigned each rating.

The forum reported that the exercise led to “the deepest conversation our group has had in 10 years.” By digging into why they felt they were aligned or out of alignment in areas that had often been discussed previously, they reached a new depth of sharing and vulnerability.

Doing this work as a group or a team deepens trust and strengthens relationships. It provides a clear vocabulary team members can use to explain what matters most to them and to share key details of their lives. This creates better understanding, communication and collaboration.

With that said, the exercise detailed below requires a foundation of psychological safety that’s been built over time. It’s a great fit for forums that are designed for vulnerable and confidential content like this (for example, YPO, EO, Chief and Vistage) and for longstanding leadership teams that already know each other well and are looking to reach an even deeper level.

If you are interested, here is how it works.

Start By Finding Values (As A Group)

You can’t have alignment without clarity, so the first step is to get clear on your core values. We have a detailed guide for forums and teams that will help each person do this, with the group’s help. Group members reflect on the Six Core Value Questions, brainstorming responses and grouping together similar themes. Then, once each person has clarity on those themes, the full group meets to discuss them, validate them, and develop a core values phrase (not just one word) that fits each theme.

The full guide is linked below, as is our AI Core Values Coach tool (version 3.0), which has helped many people get breakthroughs in this process. It has improved dramatically in the past month.

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What I’ve found in my conversations with other leaders is many people are feeling adrift and exhausted. They are navigating one challenge after another—tariffs, politics, AI, employee issues—and wondering if or when all the work will pay off.

In challenging times, people come to leaders seeking support. The leaders themselves don’t always have the same support system. It can be lonely, and the stress can be overwhelming.

As I wrote about for the first time in January, I’ve reached the precipice of irreversible burnout before.

• TBL: How I Knew I Was Burned Out and Headed For Disaster

And from that experience, this is what can help you if you’re in a similar place.

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Public speaking is many people’s greatest fear, but it’s also one of the most important ways to influence and inspire people. Almost all leaders are called to speak, whether to clients, colleagues, boards, investors, or teams. Communication is leadership. And the same disciplines that sharpen your message on a stage strengthen your impact in every team meeting, presentation or talk.

Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned from 200 speeches.

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While I was CEO of Acceleration Partners, we had a defined strategy to ensure our Glassdoor rating reflected our work to build a thriving, people-first culture. It worked: we had the privilege of being named a Best Place to Work on Glassdoor during my tenure, and I placed on their list of Top Small and Medium Business CEO list two years in a row.

For a long time, I shared our Glassdoor playbook privately with company leaders who asked me about it. This is the first time I am outlining it publicly.

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What she wanted more than anything at that moment was to visit her grandmother with her young child. The grandmother lived in another country and was unable to travel, so she had never met her great-grandchild.

One of my most treasured moments as CEO was when I invited this employee on stage at our all-company summit and announced that we had arranged and paid for her to visit her grandmother with her toddler. Later that year, our company Slack was pinged with photos of our employee, her daughter and her grandmother, a happy ending that prompted many kind comments from our team.

That single experience did more for our culture than any bonus, party, or perk ever could. It reminded everyone that we cared about our team members as whole people, not just employees.

This is the power of The Dream Program, my favorite culture initiative we implemented during my time as CEO at Acceleration Partners. The Dream Program was pioneered by John Ratliff at Appletree Answers and inspired by Matthew Kelly’s fictional book The Dream Manager. The concept is simple but profound: employees are invited to share a personal or professional dream, and company leaders choose a handful to fulfill.

Over the years, we introduced people to key professional mentors, gave them training to complete a marathon or triathlon, helped them track down a long lost relative, and even helped them join the board of a charity organization for a disease their child had. The wishes vary greatly, but the result of granting them is always the same: a surge of gratitude, connection, and pride that ripples through the entire organization.

Over the years, I’ve seen countless cultural initiatives in my own business and other leaders’ companies. Few have the enduring impact or return on investment of the Dream Program.

If you’re serious about building a culture that truly puts people first, a Dream Program is a great place to start. And it’s surprisingly easy and inexpensive to launch one.

Over the years, so many leaders have asked for the details of our program so that they can start their own. For the first time, I put together a detailed guide that walks you through how to set up a program like this for your team or company. The Dream Guide is available in our new Resource Vault, which contains links to all the different practices and systems I have shared over the years. While some are reserved for Friday Forward Premium subscribers, several resources are available for everyone.

Get The Dream Guide

The Better Leader (TBL) is a bi-weekly newsletter that delivers a strategic playbook for leaders, drawn from my 20 years of leadership experience and insights from top CEOs and leaders I’ve worked with. Each edition is concise and tactical, providing frameworks you can implement immediately to elevate your leadership and your team. TBL is available exclusively to Friday Forward premium subscribers.

It’s a question I’ve gotten a lot over the years, which made me reflect on what’s shaped my relationship building approach and how I might codify it.

My networking philosophy has been shaped most by two books: Keith Ferrazzi’s Never Eat Alone and Dale Carnegie’s classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. Both taught me that true networking is about creating value for others, not collecting business cards or cashing in favors.

Here are the principles that have guided me for years.

1. Give First
We all know that former colleague who reaches out after ten years to grab lunch. 99% of the time, they are looking for a job. That’s not networking.

You have to invest in your network before you need it. Share useful resources, make valuable mutual introductions or just check in without an agenda. People can tell instantly when someone shows up only to take.

Personally, I haven’t looked for a job in over twenty years. Not surprisingly, I am not really enthusiastic about playing unpaid recruiter for people who appear out of nowhere because they need a job. However, if someone who has worked to maintain a relationship with me reaches out, I’m much more inclined to help.

2. Don’t Use Your Network as Currency
A few years ago, a childhood friend I had lost contact with reached out to ask for my help in finding an internship for their family friend. I politely declined, but when he persisted, I became curious about his motivation. Eventually, I discovered the job hunter’s father had helped him find his first job many years ago, and he was trying to return the favor.

In other words, my friend owed someone a favor, and he wanted my help to fulfill his obligation. As you can imagine, I had very little interest in dedicating time and energy to an entry level job search for someone I didn’t know, at the behest of someone I hadn’t talked to in 20 years.

Don’t use your network to pay off your debts.

3. Use the Double Opt-In

If a friend needs a real estate attorney and you know one, that’s an easy win-win intro.

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This is the book’s introduction, which sets up the parable and the core values concept.

We all aspire to…

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