Lead From the Front
So there I was...
Wheezing like I had COPD. It was a small flight of stairs, but the Lake Tahoe altitude combined with my third bout of COVID (and 2nd post-inoculation) wiped me out. Do I need to go to the ER? I was really worried that this might not only end the family vacation to Squaw Valley, but me as well. We had been cooped-up inside for a year, and so the first opportunity we had to travel we took it.
The first bout of COVID found me in San Diego at a business meeting in January of 2020. By the time I got home I was ready for a week in bed, but I recovered. Then the pandemic was official and eventually the vaccines came and we all received them. I was never as sick again as I was the first time, but I had three more mild cases despite working from home, masks, and gallons of hand sanitizer.
The Tahoe trip reminded me that despite how much I love my house, it is good to get out and be among people. I think that was the hard thing about years of WFH, video calls ring hollow, relationships wane, and the world compresses to the size of a couple desktop monitors. However, the call for RTO was not great either. I'll be honest, wearing a dress shirt, blazer and shorts is a guilty pleasure, and I always get a chuckle thinking about the people I saw who forgot to turn off the camera before standing up. But I get the economics of RTO. There are a lot of businesses that need people in buildings, whether it is for better collaboration or to keep the local businesses alive. At the end of the day each business leader has to make the call and the team can choose if it is the right environment for them. Everyone should be okay with that.
What I appreciated about almost every one of the execs I worked with is that they joined me in being the first back to the office. Leading from the front. It was an opportunity for a reset on ways of working and building culture, and that was the chair we all knew we had to fill as we guided the post-pandemic decisions that would lead to success or failure.
Then there's this guy. Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management, the human resources chief for the entire federal workforce, and the man holding the whip on the government's return-to-office mandate, the one that cut federal telework more than 75% last year. He came to the job in 2025 after sixteen years as a managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, so he's legit. Oddly, at an all-hands meeting he discussed recording one of his "Federal Friday" videos and admitted he shot it from his bedroom, and he went looking for, in his words, a plain corner with a white wall, which was not that easy to find, because he knew someone would give him grief if they could tell he was not in the office.
He required millions of people to abide by an RTO mandate but went hunting around his own house for a blank patch of drywall to maintain optics.
Ironically, he was on PTO. He has every right to make a video outside the office if he's going to sacrifice personal time to maintain a weekly communication cadence with the team. I applaud that. What I don't get is the lack of transparency and actually missing the opportunity to reinforce his commitment to the team. It was totally the wrong way to go.
A leader should not have to disguise their own behavior to keep it consistent with a mandate when there should clearly be allowable exceptions. If it were me, I would have taken the day off and given my #2 a chance to shine. And if there are no exceptions, then take the PTO and skip the deception.
Whether people belong in the office full time is a real debate with honest arguments on both sides, and I have landed in different places on it myself depending on the team and the moment. There is nothing inherently wrong with RTO. But be clear if you are going to enforce it downward and preach the rule that you don't quietly exempt yourself, because the people under you are not stupid. They can smell it on their screen. The day the workforce figures out the boss found a non-descript wall to mask his own noncompliance is the day the policy takes a hit, as well as the moral authority to enforce anything else afterwards.
The execs I came back to the office with understood the dynamics of this without anyone having to explain it. Leading from the front is not a slogan, it is a way of being. It is the thing that lets you ask hard things of people, because they have watched you ask them of yourself first. Kupor had that exact same opportunity available to him and chose an oddly different path that made the news.
So here is my question today, from a guy who still thinks a blazer and Bermuda shorts should be acceptable office attire.
If you are asking your people to do a thing and your first instinct is to frame the shot so they cannot tell whether you are doing it too, you know what you are all about, and eventually so will they. So the only real question left is, what happens to your credibility if the camera pans down?
#Leadership #Integrity #ReturnToOffice #Culture #TheEmptyChair #STIW