How to Empower People

It's integrity — and it's more practical than it sounds.

During my first tour in the Foreign Service, I experienced what an Assistant Secretary of State told me and the other junior officers called " some of the worst leaders" in the Foreign Service. I'd developed a new approach to a big annual report my consulate owed Washington, and when I presented it to embassy leadership in Mexico City, my boss's boss — put on the spot by a question she didn't understand — tried to distance herself from the idea (and me) entirely. In front of everyone. One of the leaders stepped in, the idea held up, and the room backed it. At which point she reversed again, telling the room how long she'd been "mentoring" me. I never trusted her with an idea again. I imagine that neither did anyone else who was in that room.

I knew almost innately that the number one job of a leader is to empower the people around you. And it's difficult, maybe impossible, to do that without integrity.

Integrity isn't about being perfect. It's not merely about being honest, though that's part of it — being impeccable with your word (shout out to The Four Agreements) is an important starting point. Mainly, it's about living in alignment with your core values on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis. No one's talking about perfection here. We're going to have moments of weakness. We're going to make mistakes. Part of integrity is that when we fall out of alignment, we own it — we acknowledge it and we commit to making it right.

I think we get evaluated, and evaluate ourselves, mostly by how consistent we are. How predictable we are, day to day, in living in alignment with what we say we believe truly matters. And that consistency is what creates trust and safety for the people who work for us and who follow us.

Here's why that matters in a very practical sense, not just a moral one.

For people to perform at their best, they need to feel safe. When people can relax a little, that's when they get more creative, more willing to throw out a wild idea, more willing to take a risk, more willing to give — and receive — honest feedback. Safety is a precondition for everything you actually want from the people working for you.

When a leader isn't consistent — when integrity is negotiable depending on who's watching or what's at stake — people don't stop having good ideas. They stop sharing them. They don't stop seeing problems. They stop reporting them, because somewhere along the way they learned what happens to the messenger. All of that goes underground. It becomes gossip instead of cohesion, fear instead of creativity.

Fortunately, during my second tour with the State Department, at the US Embassy in Moscow, I had a boss who was excellent at empowering his staff — he made it safe to come up with new ideas and initiatives. He was incredibly consistent as a leader. You knew what he valued — adaptability, community and teamwork, treating people with respect — not because he talked about those things but because he modeled and rewarded them. He encouraged innovation and risk taking. When you struggled or faltered, he always had your back. And the loyalty that built was real. He understood something simple: if his team looked good, he looked good. That's actually how you advance — by making the people around you feel like they can too.

When I had a new idea — making a serious effort to get dual nationals and other human rights cases out of the Soviet Union — Max didn't blink an eye. He was my biggest cheerleader. When it was time to create a new visa unit to deal directly with the various republic governments in the USSR as power began to decentralize, Max asked me to create it.

The formula for this kind of leadership is pretty straightforward. Consistent integrity creates trust, which is the basis for helping people feel safe. And safety is what lets people take the risk of bringing you their real idea, their early warning, their honest pushback — instead of the safe, sanitized version they think you want to hear. So why isn't everyone leading this way?

It's easy to get caught up in the strategic planning and putting out the daily fires and lose track of your own internal compass. When was the last time you reflected on your core values as a leader? Are they clear and evident to you and your staff? Are some more challenging for you to align with on a daily basis than others?

Integrity, in this sense, isn't just personal virtue. It's an essential precondition for effective leadership. It's the thing that actually produces the innovation, the early problem-solving, the risk-taking you say you want from your team. You don't get those by asking for them. You get them by having integrity, over time, that shows people it's safe to give them to you.

Max did that for me. He became one of my role models for my own evolving approach to leadership.

Steve Walker is a life and leadership coach, former U.S. Foreign Service Officer, and founder of Integrity and Joy LLC. He works with leaders and people in transition who want to lead and live with greater integrity, courage, and purpose. If you'd like to explore how to get clarity about your core values as a leader and create the consistency your staff needs, book a free consultation at https://calendar.app.google/CsBx5mnpX7g9PFuP9