Culture starts at the top. Most leaders have heard the phrase. A recent panel discussion at the ISSA Altus Summit pushed the idea further: leaders do not simply shape culture, they set the emotional climate for an entire organization. Their optimism, resilience, and authenticity spread through a company, and so does their stress.

That is the premise behind a session titled “The Sunshine Effect: How Radiant Leadership Transforms Culture, Retention, and Enterprise Value,” which brings four leaders together to talk honestly about what radiant leadership looks like in practice. Laurie Sewell, president of ISSA, moderates and joins the conversation alongside Kim Althoff, executive director of ISSA; Jill Davie, senior vice president and general manager of WorkWave; and Michelle Audas, CEO of Swept Janitorial Software.

A people-first premise

Sewell opens by reframing a familiar idea. “People first isn’t soft,” she said. It is, she argued, one of the most powerful strategies a leader can use, one that drives engagement, retention, performance, customer experience, and ultimately the value of the business. Her own leadership identity grew out of a moment of frustration. Asked once to define her personal brand, she landed on a single word for how she shows up: sunshine. The point behind it, she said, is that “kindness and accountability can live in the same space.” Warmth and high standards are not opposites; holding both is just harder, and it takes intention.

When leaders lead badly

The panel opens with a deliberately humbling query: Describe a moment when you led badly and what it taught you.

Althoff goes first. Early in a career, she said, leaders often feel they need every answer. The harder truth is that leadership is a partnership. Moving too fast, pushing a personal vision too hard, can shut a team out. Her takeaway became a refrain for the session: slow down, listen more, and make the team part of the decision.

Audas picks up the thread with a story about a senior leader she hired into her leadership group. The new hire kept turning in weak results, she said, and she let it go too long. When she finally pressed for a plan, she heard blame and finger-pointing, and caught herself joining in. The moment forced a reckoning: she had never clearly conveyed the organization’s values to him. She slowed down and made it plain that blame is not how the company holds people accountable. Course-correcting was the job, she said, even when moving fast made it hard to see.

Davie adds a story that has stayed with her. As a vice president, she had a leader on her team she believed in, a hard worker who had built something strong and had asked for more responsibility and pay she had earned. Her CEO at the time disagreed, and Davie deferred rather than fighting for her. The employee quit. Davie said she will never forget the look on the woman’s face when she could not explain a decision that was not her own. The lesson stuck: Disagree and commit, but speak your mind, even when someone outranks you. Staying quiet cost the team, the culture, and the business.

Sewell ties the thread together with a reminder she borrows from author Brené Brown, that clarity is a form of kindness. Withholding the truth, or softening it past the point of meaning, is not actually kind.

Leading through the hardest seasons

The next question goes deeper: What was the hardest season you led through, and what did your people surprisingly need from you?

For Davie, the hardest stretch of her career was a cybersecurity attack a couple of years ago. What her team needed most, she said, was not reassurance but honesty. She told them plainly that the next two weeks would be brutal, laid out what was coming, and promised they would get through it together. The candor let people stop bracing and start solving, and the bonds formed in the trenches strengthened the culture for good.

Althoff echoes that the heart of it is honesty, transparency, and communication. Leaders forget how valuable plain, honest conversation is, she said, especially when times are tough or someone is underperforming. Telling the truth is how you make a person better, and trust is what holds a team together when things get hard.

Audas, who has led technology organizations for 15 years, points to a different kind of hard season: an acquisition, and pandemic-era headcount cuts. Those decisions can break trust, she said, and they demand equal care for the people leaving and the people staying. She added a point leaders often miss. You have to resource yourself, too, because hard decisions take a toll, and a leader has to be cared for in order to make them with humanity.

For Sewell’s company, the test was COVID. Client sites stayed open, so her teams had to show up in person. To prove leadership was in it with them, she said, her leadership team personally delivered masks to those locations rather than directing the work from home.

Keeping the leader’s tank full

Sewell admits she winces at the phrase self-care, joking that her version runs more toward chocolate than the spa. The panel quickly reframes the idea as self-awareness and resourcing.

A leader who cannot care for herself cannot care for a team, one panelist said. You can train skills and develop people, but you cannot hire attitude, so the leader has to protect the passion that fuels everyone, starting with her own.

For Audas, it comes down to self-awareness. Because she works remotely and draws energy from connection, she said, she is intentional about surrounding herself with advisors and friends before hard decisions, so she is not isolated when she has to bring her best to a difficult moment. Self-care, for her, is less about spa days and more about resourcing herself.

Davie gets her energy from her team. Showing up with a smile and a little humor, even in hard times, is simply who she is, she said, and she often walks into a meeting drained and walks out lifted.

Sewell builds on the self-awareness theme, recalling that personality frameworks define introversion and extroversion by where a person draws energy. She comes across as an extrovert, she said, yet recharges alone, reading and quiet. Knowing that, and knowing her own breaking point when her filter wears thin, tells her when to step back. Caring for herself, she added, is really caring for the business.

The business case for people

Called out for the idea that people-first leadership is soft, the panel turns to examples where investing in people moved the numbers.

For Althoff, it is the team itself. ISSA’s Emerging Leaders program selects rising leaders each year for development, coaching, and mentoring, she said, because they are the future and they learn from one another. Surrounding yourself with great people makes the whole organization stronger.

Davie describes a “culture code.” A cross-department group of employees built a living manifesto of who the company is and why it does what it does, distilling it to three simple core values that ended up on t-shirts and painted on the wall. Employees defined what they valued, she said, and leadership brought it to life and held one another accountable to it. Engagement soared. When a sales director promised to wear a unicorn suit if the team hit a set of lofty goals, the team hit them, and he wore it. The investment in culture, she said, paid off in results.

Michelle points to one member of her team, who has been with the company about eight years. Brilliant but hard to communicate with early on, he wanted to lead, so the company paired him with an executive coach who had both engineering and people experience. Over roughly two years, the payoff showed up in concrete ways. When defects spiked after a release, he put his entire development team on front-line support, tickets and calls, so they would feel the customer’s experience. The bugs got cleaned up, the defect rate dropped, and the developers grew far more engaged with customers. He also traced a productivity problem to a personality conflict and fixed it with a structural change that lifted the whole team’s output. That coaching investment, she said, she would make every time.

Sewell turns to the room and asks, “How many people in here have ever had a coach?” She was impressed with the positive response. “That’s why you are here. That’s why you have succeeded.” Coaching, she said, is among the best investments a company can make in its people, especially in high performers, who often resist it. Investing in top people signals that you care about their growth, and that is what keeps them.

Reading the best and worst days

Asked what culture looks like on the worst day of the year and the best, the panel keeps returning to the same signals.

For Audas, the worst day is blame, and when she sees it, she takes it as a sign that something is fundamentally wrong. It can creep in quietly from a single person and turn pervasive, she said, and left alone it will kill an organization. The best day is the opposite: a team that is connected and celebrating, often celebrating a customer’s win and the small part the team played in it. Her company opens meetings by sharing good news, personal and business, and she gauges its health by how many of those stories are about connection.

Davie describes the worst day in similar terms, silos and “hot potato,” problems kicked to someone else with no one accountable for seeing them through. The best day, she said, keeps the customer at the heart of everything.

Althoff adds that the worst day is finger-pointing instead of problem-solving, teams that are misaligned, transactional, and siloed rather than pulling on the rope together, a risk that grows when everyone works remotely. The better path is to own the problem, build energy around it, and find the solution as a team.

Audas offers a practice her organization uses to keep that from setting in: “brutal truths.” Leaders are expected to raise the hard things no one wants to discuss, she said, and when no one brings a brutal truth to the table, something is wrong. The framing depersonalizes hard conversations and makes them safe, and she urged leaders to create space for it, because people often try to shield the leader from bad news.

Sewell points to a similar point: brutal truths require a safe environment. She and her COO model candor openly, she said. They will disagree in a meeting, then go to lunch—because trust is what makes it work.

She also offers a note for the building service contractors in the room. The same silos show up on the front lines, she said, in the age-old friction between the day crew and the night crew. The goal is to operate as one company, not warring shifts.

What they hope to leave behind

The final question looks ahead: 10 years from now, what do you hope the people who worked for you will say?

Althoff hopes they will say she led with trust, empowered and educated them, and cared for them as people, their lives, their families, who they are. She wants the people who worked with her, she said, not merely for her, to feel she made their careers and their lives better.

Davie hopes they will say she brought out their best and leveraged their strengths, that they learned something valuable, achieved things together they are proud of, and had fun in a safe environment along the way.

Audas hopes they will say she cared about people as much as results, and that they grew, whether with her or beyond her. Some of her most rewarding conversations, she said, are with former team members who found the confidence to take their next step.

Losing a great teammate to growth is, in a way, a compliment, the panel agreed, and sometimes those people come back. It is worth asking the forward-looking question often, one panelist added, because the answer evolves as a leader seasons. Build it into your planning and share it with your team.

Questions from the audience

Supporting an employee through hardship

An attendee described how much he cares about long-tenured, hardworking employees, and a request that had come in that morning from an employee facing surgeries and a financial setback, complicated by ownership, a private equity group, that resists such accommodations. How do you balance genuine care with business constraints?

As a company grows, the panel noted, one-off help gets harder, so the better move is to systematize it. Build programs everyone can reach, such as earned-wage access that lets employees draw pay they have already earned without fees. Map the needs people commonly face and create a fair, repeatable way to meet them.

Give people the time off they need when they need it, the panel agreed, even when direct financial help is not possible.

Consider paying out a capped amount of vacation once a year. There can be a sound business case: in a union environment where time accrues at the current pay rate, an employee who waits to use it is paid out later at a higher rate, a genuine win-win.

Let culture do what policy cannot. Teams have organized silent auctions for a colleague’s family, set up meal trains, and even taken turns mowing the lawn of a coworker who was ill. The panel suggested simply asking the team what would help.

Ask the benefits provider what is possible. One panelist discovered, just by asking, that options existed she had never known about, which let her build something tailored to one individual. Because it is hard to write policy around every exception, the panel said, know the tools in your toolkit.

Lean on HR partners to align employees with formal programs, so the organization can keep living out its values without resorting to personal loans. Above all, the panel agreed, caring this much and actually listening is the foundation. The creative solutions follow from there.

Why leaders hide their real selves

Another attendee observed that leaders often perform one way at work while suppressing a more natural, intrinsic side, even when the moment calls for it. Why does that happen?

Often it is baggage, the panel said. People arrive from environments where they could not be authentic and assume that is simply how it has to be. The culture does not help, either, because social media trains everyone to compare themselves and feel judged, so leaders armor up.

But authenticity compounds. The more openly a leader shares, including failures and the hard things, the stronger the relationships become. Vulnerability is the unlock.

The best leaders, the panel agreed, are the most authentic. One panelist recalled a CEO telling her she was too soft and needed to toughen up; she refused to pretend to be someone she was not. Later, someone who had witnessed the exchange told her that softness was her superpower, and that affirmation freed her to lead as herself.

Don’t miss the next ISSA Altus Summit.