Good leaders don't do that? There is a difference between legitimately confidential information, and keeping your cards close to your chest to protect yourself. If you have confidential information, you can explain the reason it's confidential and everyone can move past.

I've worked with two teams where layoffs had to happen. The people weren't happy, but they were at least satisfied that the results were fair and honest. They appreciated my transparency, and worked to train up other members of the group to prepare for their own departure.

If you spend your time building trust and relationships when times are good, and weed out the toxic personalities during those times, then it's better (not easy or good at all) when times are tough. Allowing even the slightest amount of toxicity is completely unacceptable.

If your boss hides information or is intentionally vague to provide an out for themselves, they shouldn't be in a leadership role. They shouldn't be employed at the company.

Being a boss means that 99.999% of your actual job is communicating clearly and openly.

I have yet to see fully transparent leadership who can immediately tell us that this information is confidential and unfortunately they can't share it.

In my humble experience ranging from startups to Big Tech, they are vague with words they use, inspirational in nature, but tries to hide the systematic issues.

For example: I believe our team is now stronger than ever before. How should I interpret it? You were B-player, and hired bunch of C-players, you have just laid off them or did you get rid of bunch of corporate empire builders and now we are indeed in a better position with less bureaucracy?

It's about telling the truth while being an actual human.

When I had to lay people off the first time, we had very clear criteria for the layoffs and published them. Anyone who was obviously trying to game the system was immediately dismissed.

Afterwards, I had an all hands meeting to let people know that what we were going through sucks, but that we're in a safer position financially because of it. I then explained all of the financials to keep people from panicking that we were actually broke when we weren't; we had just lost a huge contract to a company that went out of business.

Bad leaders use vapid feel good phrases from Maxwell and Sinek and others like them. Bad leaders use leadership books as a guide to interacting with their employees instead of using the concepts to modify their existing, real personalities. They think those things are a script instead of a series of metaphor.

I agree with everything that you say here, but I think it is important to differentiate "good leaders" (which you have described) with "successful leaders" whose motives are often far more self-serving.

There are "good, successful leaders" but in my experience they are few and far between, and often the "successful" aspect is forced to plateau by the "good" part.