Why Integrity is the Pillar Holding Up the Roof

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Listen to this week’s podcast episode, Ep.191: Made Not Born: The 6 Pillars of Effective Leadership, with Jim Carlough, using the player below, or click here.

From Autocrat to Coach: The Evolution of the Modern Leader

Every leader remembers their first team. The awkward starts, the assumptions, the urge to prove you know everything. Jim Carlough certainly does. In fact, as he tells me in this week’s episode, he sometimes wishes he could track down all the members of his first team and apologise. Not because he broke any rules, or laws, but because, as he puts it, “leadership was still somewhat authoritarian back then,” and he has since learned that people, and leadership itself, evolve.

With more than 30 years’ experience in healthcare and technology, Jim has seen that evolution firsthand. From managing teams straight out of college to serving as chief sales officer for a company that touches one in three Americans, he has lived through the transformation of leadership from command-and-control to collaborative coaching. And through it all, he’s kept one lesson in mind: great leaders are made, not born.

That idea became the foundation of his book, The Six Pillars of Effective Leadership: A Roadmap to Success. In it, he distills decades of leadership, mistakes, and mentoring into six clear principles; anchored, he insists, by one non-negotiable pillar: integrity. So he definitely joined the right podcast this week!

The Six Pillars and the Story Behind Them

Jim’s six pillars emerged from a career spent leading, learning, and mentoring others (often informally), long before he thought to monetise or publish his insights. While planning his own post-retirement “encore career,” he realised he wanted to reach more people than one-to-one mentoring allowed. He began listing every trait he’d tried to cultivate in those he coached, then refined them into six essentials any leader could remember, apply, and measure.

His book’s structure mirrors his communication style: concise, direct, story-driven.

Two of the pillars, empathy and compassion, are among the hardest to master. There’s no book that really tells you how to handle compassion and empathy, he notes. A lot of it is trial and error, and learning over time.

His own learning curve was steep. Early on, Jim admits, he believed leaders had to have all the answers. Experience taught him otherwise. “I don’t have all the answers,” he says, “but I can commit to working to find the right answer.”

That humility (another of the six pillars) lies at the heart of his framework: leadership built not on authority but on trust, respect, and adaptability.

Integrity: The Non-Negotiable Pillar

When we speak about integrity on Leading With Integrity, it’s easy for the word to become abstract. But for Jim, it’s the most tangible of all traits. He learned this not in a boardroom but in city government at the age of 23, when a senior administrator gave him advice that still shapes him decades later:

Jim has asked himself that question every night since.

That single discipline, he says, became the centre pillar of his leadership; the one that holds up the roof. Without it, he explains, everything else crumbles.

Integrity creates the trust that allows empathy to be real, compassion to be believed, and teams to follow a leader’s vision. Lose it, and every other pillar collapses.

Humour, Humanity, and the Open Door

Leadership, however, isn’t all solemn reflection. For Jim, humour is another essential, when used wisely. He uses humour strategically to defuse conflict or redirect tense discussions.

But he’s quick to acknowledge the cultural shift that has made humour trickier to navigate. “Society today is hypersensitive,” he says. The humour you used twenty years ago doesn’t apply today, you could easily offend someone. So, his approach is mostly self-deprecating: stories of his own foibles that make others comfortable.

What matters, he insists, is that people see him as approachable. “The last thing I want is to be the leader whose door is closed all the time.”

Empathy in Action

Perhaps the most compelling example of Jim’s philosophy came when he faced the challenge of closing a department earlier in his career. His team’s technology was being retired, and he had to deliver the news that everyone would eventually lose their jobs.

Instead of avoiding the issue, he made three promises:

1. Each person would get at least six months’ notice before their role ended.

2. Anyone who wanted to stay with the company would be trained, on company time, for a new position.

3. For those who chose to move on, he would personally help them find jobs elsewhere.

The result surprised everyone, including HR. Productivity stayed high, morale held firm, and years later, a few still email him every National Bosses Day to say thank you.

That story captures why empathy and compassion, hard as they are to practice, matter so much. They’re not just ‘soft skills.’ They’re what make people want to follow you even when times are tough.

Closing Thoughts on The Weight-Bearing Pillar

If you imagine Jim’s six pillars as a structure, integrity stands at the centre, bearing the heaviest load. Empathy, compassion, transparency, humility, and humour each provide support, but without that central beam, the roof collapses.

That architectural metaphor feels apt for a leader who builds rather than commands, who coaches rather than controls. Jim’s experiences remind us, leadership isn’t static, you have to adapt as people evolve.

And that’s what Leading with Integrity is really about too: the kind of leadership that grows with its people supportive, contextual, flexible, and built to last.

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Huge thank you again to Jim for sharing some brilliant stories and examples of leadership this week, we barely touched on his insights here, so do go and listen to the whole conversation now, on your preferred podcast platform. You’ll find the links here (or search “Leading with Integrity” wherever you get your podcasts: https://smartlink.ausha.co/leading-with-integrity/ep-191-made-not-born-the-6-pillars-of-effective-leadership-with-jim-carlough-leadership-podcasts

You can also watch the conversation on YouTube: https://youtu.be/TqN0aGtu0vk

I hope to see you again next week, when I’ll be chatting about the science of trust, loyalty, betrayal, human nature & psychology, and responsibility (plus leadership) with guest Clay Moffat, author of The Trust Trap, Coach to high performers, and Australian Navy veteran.

Until next time: Be a Leader, Not a Boss!

- David

In case you don’t know me that well, I’m David Hatch and I’m here to help new managers and first-time founders with their leadership skills, so they can become leaders not bosses, lead with integrity, and build happier, higher performing teams, more effective organisations, and, ultimately: successful businesses.

Be more Tau’ri, be less Goa’uld. Become the leader you wish you’d had, and come join my online leadership community. If you have a healthy love of sci-fi and want to learn more about leadership, then this is the community for you. Solopreneurs also welcome. 😉

Here’s the link: Integrity Leaders: Community membership and learning, for new leaders or first-time founders.