The Risk of Leading by Example

There are two versions of “you” running your organization:

The one you’ve created in your mind which is composed of your beliefs about yourself, typically including attributes like rational, principled, disciplined, and fair; and
The one living in the minds of your team.

But the latter is based entirely on your team’s observations of your actions, not what you think or believe. This “observed” version of you sets their expectations and is the one they model.

This is the mechanism by which organizational standards form. You’re always leading by example, one way or another, and there’s no “off” switch. The only variables are what kind of example you set and whether you’re setting it on purpose.

The distance between the leader you believe yourself to be and the leader you are in the eyes of others is something I call the “Behavioral Integrity Gap.” This gap forms because your intent and your impact are two different things. Most leaders only pay attention to the first, and that’s the problem which, if unaddressed, can become very costly over time.

So let’s talk about each one.

What You Say vs. What You Do

The first place where the Behavioral Integrity Gap appears is also the most visible: your team calibrates to what you actually do and practice, not to what you claim.

The commitments you make in a meeting are either kept or not. Your stated values and priorities either hold up when they’re inconvenient, or collapse under pressure. These are the basic mechanisms that teach your team what’s real and what’s performative. And when there’s a mismatch, they don’t index on your intentions. Rather, they default to how they’ve seen you behave. This is why leading by example is so powerful and, for many, a double-edged sword: it’s always happening, and always happening automatically.

Your intent and your impact are two different things.

I coached a CEO years ago who wanted his team to operate more strategically. “We can’t keep chasing the issue of the day,” he would say. Yet he didn’t practice what he preached. In fact, he was often the biggest source of disruption in the company. A customer complaint or a competitor’s announcement would become an instant top priority, literally overnight. Executives were forced to drop planned work to respond, only to have the next “even more urgent” priority replace it a week or two later. His team learned to stop planning altogether and, instead, start waiting for the next fire. He, meanwhile, kept complaining about weak execution while personally making disciplined execution impossible.

When he became more self-aware through our work together, we arrived at a simple solution: he stopped turning every concern into an organizational priority. New ideas and emerging issues went into a “parking lot” for deliberate review unless they cleared a predefined bar for immediate action. The executive team was able to protect their agreed-upon priorities, execution became more consistent, and genuine emergencies became easier to recognize.

The irony wasn’t lost on the CEO: His team was only able to stop chasing “the issue of the day” when he stopped doing it himself. He finally became the disciplined leader he’d demanded everyone else become.

What You Say vs. What You Tolerate

Although your actions are the most obvious place you’re likely to find a Behavioral Integrity Gap, they’re not what’s most insidious.

Your team doesn’t only calibrate themselves to what they see you do. They also calibrate to what you’re not doing. In other words, what they see you tolerate.

This dimension of the Behavioral Integrity Gap is stealthy because it stems entirely from inaction, not from action. You don’t have to say or do anything for a problematic standard to take hold here. Instead, all you have to do is fail to act when your standards aren’t met. Tolerance of anything is never neutral; whatever you allow to persist without comment or action becomes an acceptable standard for everyone watching.

They calibrate to what you’re not doing.

I’ve seen this manifest in a variety of places, including tolerating a chronic underperformer, a toxic manager, a client who is abusive to your team, a high-performing cultural misfit, a persistent quality problem, and a longstanding staffer who is in the wrong role – just to name a few.

None of these issues have anything to do with your intentions and what you say about them. It doesn’t matter how clearly you’ve articulated your expectations; if situations like these remain unaddressed, your team (and by extension, your organization) will see them as culturally acceptable and they will persist.

By the time you finally take a step back and have the perspective to see this, you’ll be shocked to discover even more skeletons in the closet and exactly how far your firm’s standards have fallen.

The Standard You’re Actually Setting

“Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.” — Attributed to Albert Schweitzer

The standards and expectations underpinning your organization’s operation have nothing to do with your intentions. They are established solely by what you do and by what you tolerate. When you fail to meet your own expectations in either area, rest assured your team will as well.

And, until you close that gap, nothing will change.

You don’t need a new program, initiative, or company-wide memo to solve this problem. The solution is focused, deliberate action. Pick one standard you’ve been failing to uphold – either something you’re not doing OR something you’re tolerating – and hold yourself to it starting today, not next week, and certainly not next month.

These small, visible corrections will rebuild your credibility and reset your team’s standards more rapidly and effectively than any speech about “renewed commitment to our values” ever will.

Because as a leader, you don’t set the standard when you speak. You set it when you act… and when you don’t.

If this article challenged you to think differently about your role, share it with someone else, and subscribe for additional insights on becoming a more effective leader.

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