@thesotiris 21 October 2025 more from that month

The Most Overlooked Leadership Quality: How to inspire loyalty and reverence as a leader

A scroll down the toxic, fake positivity of LinkedIn will make you think that everyone’s an expert on leadership, as they presume to condescendingly announce to us with every passing minute “what true leadership is” or “what are the 7 characteristics of great leaders” or other vapid nonsense like that. For all their supposed “insight”, these charlatan “success gurus” miss the most important leadership quality of them all: accountability for those under their wing. Everyone pretends to be a leader until they have to assume responsibility for the failures of those under their failed leadership. **Military unaccountability**

One of the few useful things I learned in the insane asylum of **military** was ironically taught to me by textbook officers who didn’t apply what they preached; they just regurgitated points they were too dumb or lazy to assimilate. The lesson was **leadership’s absolute self-accountability**. As an officer, I was held 100% responsible by my commanding officers for what those under my command, even if I never chose or trained those under my command. Fair enough; that was to force me to be more proactive, more diligent, more engaging as a leader. The irony was that those who expected absolute accountability from me were quick to point fingers (to their subordinates, no less) whenever there a mistake was made. This is a common theme: the lower on the chain of command a leader is, the more accountability is being demanded of him. The higher they climb the ladder, the less accountable they become because **they confuse leadership with management… being a leader and being a boss**. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-military-is-gay **Leader vs. boss** Here’s the problem: If you are just a boss, nobody will be loyal to you. No one will feel inspired by you. No one will admire you. No one will go the extra mile. No one will feel obliged to you to stick by you when things get difficult to you, and definitely no one will charge any trenches for you. **There are no cowardly soldiers; there are only uninspiring, pathetic, and** ****closeted-gay officers****. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-military-is-gay-2 ***They say that with great power comes great responsibility. It’s the opposite: with great responsibility comes great power.*** The reason those in leadership positions enjoy the privilege of “commanding” others is not because they are better than their team members; it’s because they are held accountable for the team members. This is what team members must understand: they must take instructions from the person who is responsible for their actions and performance. This is why you choose to voluntarily comply with the instructions of your supervisor at work or your amateur sports team leader. You understand that, when your team head is responsible for you, then they get the final say in what you do within the framework of the team. Understandably. For example, I’ve found myself in positions where my immediate supervisors weren’t necessarily more skilled than I was. Yet I accepted that the supervisor had the last word because they were to be held accountable for whatever I delivered. This is the humility of the team member. When you find yourself in a position of power/responsibility, you must understand that you are not glorified; you are humbled. Power doesn’t mean you are greater and that you are to be worshipped; it means you are to be blamed for everything under your wing, including every single thing those under your supervision do, even if it’s not directly your fault. Everything they do is always your responsibility. This is the humility of the team leader. Being held accountable, even when you’re not truly to blame, opens your mind to possibilities to predict issues and devise ways to prevent them. A good leader is humble. Putting yourself on a pedestal only blinds you to your obligations. You cut yourself off from the team, and you truly embarrass yourself when you blame your team members for their mistakes, as if it wasn’t in your power to predict and prevent those mistakes, being the team leader and all. You enjoy privileges as a leader, which are precisely there to give you power, thus control, over potential missteps by your team members. If you deny this useful humility, you end up being a bad leader, not to mention a bad person. Here’s how you earn humility: First off, don’t call them your subordinates, followers, or inferiors. This alone makes you deluded into thinking you are better (you’re not). And if you imagine yourself to be better, you will lack the humility required to hold yourself accountable. Second, understand that, when you hold yourself accountable for your team members, even for things that are not under your direct control, then you find ways to better manage and lead your team. For example: Your employee was rude with one of the customers. This is 100% your responsibility for not training your staff correctly and for not setting clear guidelines on how to deal with difficult customers. You are also responsible for a stressful work environment that built up tension, which led to your employee lashing out on the customer. If your employee is a loose cannon, then you are responsible because you hired him in the first place; you now must find ways to either prevent future outburst, or simply kick him out of the team. Whenever your employees make any mistake, you are responsible as a leader. Sure, you can’t helicopter-micromanage every single employee, breathing down their necks and doing their work for them. But any mistake they make is yours too because you are the team leader: you are responsible for their training, their well-being, and therefore, their performance. Even if you do everything possible and they still make a mistake, you are accountable to your customers and your supervisors. You can’t hide behind blaming your own team members, no less. A leader who blames the people under his influence is confessing his inability to lead. He does so with every excuse, with every fault he attributes to his people. Imagine, having so much power over people, and then blaming them, instead of yourself, when they fail. As someone in a leadership/responsibility position (whether you’re a man or a woman), you are responsible to foresee your people’s mistakes before they make them. If they make them, it means you were unable to predict issues. It’s fine if you don’t — no one is perfect. But you must understand the usefulness of holding yourself accountable for the mistakes of your people, even if those mishaps that are logically impossible for you to predict or control by you. Doing so open your eyes to all kinds of possibilities to improve your performance as a leader. I’m not talking about micromanaging them. I’m describing your ability to **shield your team members from the backlash of their mistakes; this is your primary role as a leader. It’s why rational and capable people choose to be under your leadership**. Why else would they? **The boss fallacy** **People in positions of responsibility fail because they conflate their roles with positions of power or “authority”**. A boss (the opposite of a leader) is someone who assumes he has power over others without the responsibility for them. This is insane, because without responsibility, there can be no power, not truly. Sure, a boss can threaten or bribe people for their reluctant subservience, but this isn’t leadership; it is a cold transaction without any elements of inspiration, loyalty, respect, faithfulness, or sense of duty. Leaders, on the other hand, understand that they are not powerful; quite the opposite. Leaders are vulnerable, more vulnerable than their team members, since leaders are exposed to accountability, while team members transfer their responsibility to the leader. **Team members are only accountable to their leader**, but still, a leader cannot blame them for anything. Before a leader blames a team member, he should first blame himself tenfold. A leader accusing his team members is like a mother accusing her children; she is basically accusing (and embarrassing) herself for blaming others for things that are directly her fault (because they was 100% under her control — **a parent has full control over how their children turn out**). https://sotiris.substack.com/p/what-you-owe-your-children Leaders are simply burdened with responsibility for others, which grants them the moral right to expect specific deliverables from the people in their supervision; provided that the latter agree to do so voluntarily. There is no power or authority here. ***Leadership is the transferring of responsibility from followers to the leader.*** A position of responsibility grants you certain expectations because you are expected to be responsible for those under your supervision. They aren’t under you; they simply have a different role to play. **Why bosses keep getting away with it** This misunderstanding that you are somehow more powerful, and therefore, more deserving when you find yourself supervising a team is delusional at best. You cannot be a boss and expect anyone to take you seriously. Sure, in the labour market, employees are more desperate than employers, which puts the latter at an unfair advantage. But this is only due to an unnatural oversupply of labour whose sole cause is **government interventionism, which directly benefits the biggest lobbying corporations**. How? **Taxes** cause a lag in the economic cycle, delaying the recirculation of money, which is then translated in a lack of demand compared to the potential of the economy. This is the definition of unemployment: a lowered aggregate demand compared to potential demand of the economy. Other reasons is economic suppression through regulatory favouritism by lobbied governments, which kills smaller competitors and gives rise to big-corpo oligopolies and monopolies. This is not to mention welfare abuse and wasteful spending, plus the need for tax-evading money laundering, which further slows down the economy. I digress, but it’s important to know why employees have a negotiating disadvantage compared to employers, which allows the latter to exploit and mistreat the former: it’s the government’s fault. Always has been. Without tempering in the economy, unemployment is impossible (except for temporary friction unemployment), and the free market regulated and equates all based on relentless free-market competition forces. There is no greater and fairer regulator than competition. Competition is what drives companies to innovate to be able to drop prices while improving quality. Where corporations don’t do that, you can bet they have lobbied government to pass favourable regulations to kill their competition. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/you-are-a-slave https://sotiris.substack.com/p/why-pay-taxes-if-they-can-print-all Regardless, the boss mentality is fed by statism, the delusion that some people are magically imbued with perceived and arbitrary “**authority**” just because of a title and an arbitrarily created position. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/authority-is-a-bluff As a leader, you have no authority. Your power comes from holding yourself accountable for your team members. **Key takeaway** If you take the fall for your team members’ mistakes, they will adore you. If you hold yourself responsible for their mistakes, if you understand truly that their mistakes are always yours to predict, prevent, and mitigate, and thus always your responsibility, then your people will feel safe next to you. They will appreciate you, respect you, and admire you for your noble and bold self-sacrifice to protect them. **Take the heat for your team’s mistakes, but never take the credit**. Their mistakes are yours, but your credit is theirs. Safeguard them more than you safeguard yourself. Treat them better than you treat yourself. This is the burden of great leadership. But the rewards are loyalty, reverence, devotion, and admiration; rare and priceless assets. Be a great leader at work, in your community, in your family, in your relationships. More about how to be a great leader here: **The Truth About Leadership** https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-leadership