The “Not-To-Do” List: 25 things for leaders NOT to do

17 December 2025 Reading Time: 4 minutes

Dr Leandro Herrero:

Leaders love a list of actions. The industry is full of “Ten Things Great Leaders Do Before Breakfast.” But genuine leadership — the real, behavioural, cultural substance — depends as much on what leaders refuse to do.

This is the Not-To-Do List: a catalogue of the practices, habits and rituals that dilute authority, undermine culture, and destroy the credibility of leadership.

It’s a manifesto of bad ideas to avoid at all costs.

1. Announce change like a weather warning, prolonging the agony with vague forecasts.

Theatrics breed anxiety; prolonged ambiguity breeds cynicism. Change is not a meteorological event — it’s a behavioural shift. Say what you know, admit what you don’t, and stop treating uncertainty as an instrument of power.

2. Speak incomprehensible corporate nonsense.

Employees can smell jargon faster than fear. Words like “synergy realignment” and “transformation vectors” are cultural pollutants. If you can’t explain it plainly, you don’t understand it — and neither will anyone else.

3. Construct sentences from the sacred trinity of clichés: “unprecedented times,” “challenging environments,” and “AI disruption.”

These empty meta-phrases are the new corporate incense. Everyone nods, nobody thinks. Leaders should remove the verbal fog, not manufacture it.

4. Tell personal stories to signal virtue, vulnerability or manufactured humanity.

A story is only useful if it illuminates something real. When it becomes a performance of empathy, it’s theatre — and people know it.

5. Perform on the corporate stage like a Tony Robbins tribute act.

Charisma is not leadership. Volume is not credibility. And motivation is not behaviour change. Stop shouting and start acting.

6. Communicate too much.

Flooding the organization with endless messages is not transparency; it’s noise. People don’t need more information — they need meaning.

7. Pretend to “empower” others while hoarding control.

Empowerment is not a verb performed by leaders; it’s a state that emerges when leadership truly relinquishes power. Pretending is worse than doing nothing.

8. Think you are a natural role model that everyone looks up to daily.

Self-delusion is a leadership hazard. People watch behaviours, not titles. Most employees do not wake up thinking about you — which is liberating, if you accept it.

9. Say “we are a family.”

Unless you genuinely intend to adopt the CFO, pay the interns’ rent, and invite Procurement to Christmas dinner, don’t say this. Organizations are communities of practice, not families.

10. Use “diversity” without defining it.

A term stripped of meaning becomes a token. Diversity is not a decorative word; it’s a structural commitment with behavioural consequences.

11. Mistake talking to employees as if they were investors.

Employees don’t want quarterly-style narratives or shareholder theatrics. They want clarity, fairness, and to understand how decisions affect their reality — not the investor deck.

12. Do corporate tourism — visiting sites without truly engaging with anyone.

Loitering in factories and offices without conversation creates anti-trust. People remember when the leader walked past them like a museum piece.

13. Ask people to “behave like owners” when they own nothing.

Ownership is not metaphorical. People will act like owners when they have agency, not when they are lectured with metaphors.

14. Take Simon Sinek too seriously.

Finding a “Why” is useful. Worshipping it is a religion. Leadership is context, not catechism. [PS: for me, personally, and I suspect for many mortals, the famous ‘why’ is a retrospective ‘aha’. You do stuff and then you discover your motivations. But don’t tell Simon].

15. Adopt a leadership label — servant, transformational, inclusive — as a personal identity badge.

Self-labelling is an excellent way to avoid real behavioural scrutiny. People judge you by what you do, not the adjectives you select.

16. Fail to act as the curator of culture.

Culture doesn’t live in posters, training programmes or values walls. It lives in everyday behaviours. Leaders who abdicate this curatorial role are simply managers with nicer job titles.

17. Believe culture can be trained.

You can train skills. You cannot train culture. Culture emerges from repeated behaviours, social proof, informal networks, and peer dynamics — not classrooms.

18. Ignore the real influencers in the organization.

The formal org chart is a fiction. Influence flows through informal networks. If you don’t know who truly shapes the culture, your leadership is blindfolded.

19. Be a president instead of a resident.

“Drop the P”. Leadership is presence, not position. Stop being the distant figurehead and start being the person who participates in the everyday life of the organization.

20. Ask “What should we do?” instead of “What should we not do?”

The most effective leaders subtract before they add. Complexity grows by default; discipline grows by design. Wrong actions destroy more than right actions repair. [One of the best leaders amongst my clients used to say: “Leandro, tell me what not to do”].

21. Talk but not walk.

Talking before walking is corporate fraud. Behaviour first, communication later. So, walk first, and then talk about it.

22. Ask for more information simply to delay decisions.

Analysis paralysis murders momentum. Leaders often hide fear behind data requests. Decide — or be honest about why you can’t.

23. Make decisions that could have been made lower in the organization.

Every decision escalated unnecessarily is a message of distrust. Push authority down or watch initiative evaporate.

24. Say “The buck stops here” when everyone knows it stopped miles ago.

Leadership mythology collapses when reality is ignored. Take responsibility early, not as a late epilogue.

25. Believe that getting to 25 makes the list complete.

Leadership, like culture, doesn’t care about round numbers — only about what people actually do once the list is over.

Leadership by Subtraction

The Not-To-Do List is not cynicism; it’s clarity. Leadership is less about adding more frameworks, models, and initiatives, and more about removing the noise, the theatrics, the clichés, and the self-deception.

Great leadership is not a heroic presence — it is the disciplined absence of bad ideas.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is Chief Organizational Architect at The Chalfont Project, psychiatrist, author, and international speaker. For over 25 years, he and his team have transformed organizational cultures worldwide through his pioneering Viral Change™ methodology – where a social movement approach creates lasting change. Follow Dr Herrero on LinkedIn for his latest updates.

Written by: Editor