Building Leadership Capital
How Genuine Care Leads to a Committed Team
It’s Friday at noon, and a client just dropped a pressing need on your lap. You’re running a small consultancy where client relationships are everything.
The request is critical to a Monday meeting, and they would appreciate your guidance as soon as possible.
As the CEO of the consultancy, you understand the strategic significance of the ask after working with this client for five years.
They don’t often make these last-minute, end-of-week requests, so when they do, you know it’s essential. You realize it’s going to require weekend work.
You genuinely care about the client and know the importance of showing up for them, but given your oversight level, this isn’t a solo effort.
You realize you must ask your team for weekend work, including a Saturday meeting—an apparent expenditure of leadership capital.
What makes the difference in whether your team equally cares about the client and your request for support outside regular business hours?
What creates an immediate response without hesitance, reflecting the need for urgency and potential sacrifice of personal or family time?
How do you ensure you have leadership capital available to spend?
The answer lies in how much you’ve demonstrated to your team that you genuinely care about them.
What Is Leadership Capital?
Consider our influence on the people around us as a bank account. Leadership capital represents the funds available.
As we engage with others, we make deposits or withdrawals, indicating whether we are earning or expending leadership capital.
This applies to any relationship: up and down the reporting structure, peer-to-peer, and even those outside our organization. It also applies to our personal lives with family, friends, or other relationships.
Every interaction we have makes an impact on the bottom line.
How Is Leadership Capital Earned?
Leadership capital is earned by cultivating trust, respect, and loyalty among team members. The goal is to create an environment where people feel seen, heard, and supported, encouraging them to contribute their best to the organization. A deposit is made every time we do something intentional to help our team.
Deposits in leadership capital occur when there is an opportunity to share resources, ask questions about and care for someone’s well-being, give credit where credit is due, or dedicate time and energy to supporting others.
It’s about how we show up daily—if we care for our team, they will take care of us.
Examples:
Acting with integrity—leading by example and consistently making decisions that align with personal and organizational values and principles.
Being transparent—sharing relevant information openly to ensure everyone understands and comprehends the strategy and “why.”
Recognizing team effort—publicly and privately acknowledging individual and team accomplishments, affirming and spurring action and motivation.
Providing support—sitting alongside the team when they face personal or professional challenges, showing that we care beyond work outcomes.
Communicating effectively—maintaining clear, consistent communication to ensure the team feels heard and understands direction and expectations.
Empowering the team—delegating responsibilities and showing trust in the team by giving ownership to lead and accomplish the task(s).
Investing in development—caring about growth and development and then reinforcing with the action to provide opportunities for training or mentoring.
Admitting mistakes—communicating, accepting, and learning from mistakes to model honesty and accountability.
Shaping the culture—constructing a space where the team can thrive by being themselves, embracing strengths, and acknowledging blindspots.
Prioritizing life—reinforcing work-life harmony by encouraging the team to choose themselves or family, especially during significant life milestones.
How Is Leadership Capital Expended?
Leadership capital is expended when we do the opposite of everything described above. It’s self-evident within a team where people feel their input is not valued, their ideas are dismissed, and they do not believe that leadership cares about them as humans. We withdrawal leadership capital whenever our behaviors are misaligned with personal or organizational values.
Withdrawals in leadership capital occur when we put our interests above our team’s, behave in a way that serves our ego, avoid responsibility, or demonstrate a lack of care for the team. However, it’s not only negligent actions.
We also expend leadership capital when we ask the team to go above and beyond, like in the upfront example, or we delegate tasks without the empowered ownership to accompany them. Even when this is necessary, it is still an expenditure to be mindful of, which is why it’s so critical to ensure we’re filling the account more often than draining it.
Examples (focused on negligent actions):
Lacking integrity—behaving in a way that is misaligned with personal or organizational values and principles; what is said does not reflect actions.
Withholding information—keeping the team in the dark yet expecting them to execute and make decisions without sufficient information.
Taking all of the credit—taking all the credit as a leader and not recognizing where the real value is created within the team.
Lacking empathy—being indifferent or inconsiderate to the team’s personal and professional challenges, making them feel unseen and unsupported.
Communicating inconsistently—sporadically communicating without clarity, creating a sense of unnecessary uncertainty and mistrust.
Micromanaging—delegating tasks and breathing over the shoulder of the team instead of coaching and providing guidance with appropriate oversight.
Neglecting development—ignoring the team's potential by avoiding conversations about learning, growth, and development.
Lacking responsibility—avoiding accountability by covering up mistakes and not following through on commitments.
Allowing a toxic culture—creating an environment where cancerous behaviors exist or allowing them to persist without corrective action.
Ignoring the personal side—viewing the team as cogs in the wheel of a business and neglecting genuine care about whole human development.
Principles of Managing Leadership Capital
Awareness, mindfulness, and intentionality are essential to managing leadership capital. As with any bank account, we can lose sight of the constant deposits and withdrawals if we don’t have systems and guardrails.
The difference is that this isn’t something we can automate and has a more subjective ledger as we navigate relationships, perceptions, and human needs. We must be consistent in our decisions, actions, and behaviors, realign to our values and principles when we get off-center, and repeatedly “check the balance.”
The goal is for building leadership capital to become a subconscious competence—a skill that becomes a part of who we are—but it must first be a conscious competence. Be intentional and allow it to become a natural part of daily and weekly interactions.
Here are some principles to follow:
Assume you have less than you think—like a real bank account, small withdrawals add up over time and often catch us by surprise when we operate reactively. Leadership capital is the same way; we should always assume we have less than we think and act accordingly to show up daily.
Be intentional about acquiring more—we should capitalize on opportunities to replenish the account. We must practice self-care AND relationship-care. Embrace energy-giving practices so that we can put others or the team first when we have a full cup to pour from. Where can we contribute our energy to help others be successful so the collective team can be successful? Where can we support our partners, kids, friends, or family?
Spend it wisely, but spend it—leadership capital is hard to earn, so be mindful of how it is spent. Ensure scenarios where the team is asked to go above and beyond are the exception instead of the rule. That way, when we ask, we’ve made more than enough deposits, and the team will be willing and able to show up. Capital also does us no good sitting in a regular bank account. It’s meant to be deployed and put to work, but do so with care.
Your team comes through. When asked for support over the weekend, they are more than willing to provide it.
But it’s not simply because you asked—it’s because when you ask, they know you genuinely need it and that you’re always mindful of their time and well-being.
It’s because of all the times they’ve needed to leave work early to make their kid’s ball game, and you, without hesitance, say, “That’s where you should be.”
All the times you’ve made a mistake, immediately took ownership and communicated transparently how you would do it differently next time.
You’ve always asked, “No, seriously, how are you?” and listened intently.
The most critical aspect of leadership capital to reinforce is showing up for the team with daily thoughtfulness, demonstrating that you genuinely care.
Don’t assume they know—vocalize it; reinforce it with action.
This week, I challenge you to choose three interactions in which you will focus on building leadership capital with those around you.
Watch what happens in return if you do this consistently.
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I also offer leadership coaching. My focus is helping people lead with who they are, aligning decisions, actions, and behaviors with values and principles. If you are interested, you can schedule a free consultation here.
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Really like the point, "The goal is for building leadership capital to become a subconscious competence—a skill that becomes a part of who we are.." Spot on!
I believe you are right - this is a great summary!