Below, Aiko Bethea shares five key insights from her new book, Anchored, Aligned, Accountable: A Framework for Transcending Bullsh*t and Transforming Our Lives and Work.
Aiko has held executive roles in government, philanthropic, nonprofit, and private sectors, including the City of Atlanta and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Bethea is the founder of RARE Coaching & Consulting, which provides leadership development to Fortune 100 leaders and global nonprofits. She holds a law degree from UNC-Chapel Hill and a bachelor’s from Smith College.
What’s the big idea?
Anchored, Aligned, Accountable offers a sharp, unsparing look at why so many leaders and organizations struggle to build real trust, connection, and change—even when everyone claims to value openness and inclusion. Bethea argues that the problem is not a lack of leadership frameworks or good intentions, but rather what she calls “the bullshit”: defensiveness, ego, perfectionism, people-pleasing, scarcity thinking, and the misuse of power that quietly distort how we communicate and lead.
Drawing on her experience advising Fortune 100 executives and global nonprofits, she offers a practical framework for cutting through those patterns by grounding ourselves in our values, being more honest about our impact, and being more accountable for how we affect others. The result is a leadership model that asks for more than performative vulnerability or polished mission statements—it demands self-awareness, courage, and the willingness to confront uncomfortable truths before pressure and conflict expose them.
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1. Psychological safety alone won’t change a workplace.
Leaders have to be equipped to recognize and address power so that those who lean into hard conversations are not set up for punitive treatment. Many organizations say they want people to speak up and lean into difficult conversations, yet employees remain quiet because they know all too well the consequences of speaking up. The concept of psychological safety, while valuable, often stops at inviting people to talk rather than requiring leaders to examine how power shapes who gets heard and who does not. Power exists in every system. We make decisions based on its impact on us and our perception of who does and doesn’t have it. For better or worse, we operationalize power through relationships, processes, and policies. Yet often we won’t name it. We pretend it doesn’t exist. We don’t name when we have it or when we don’t, and we don’t create space or permission for others to name it either.
Transformational leadership requires a deeper shift. Leaders must recognize how systems operationalize power dynamics that limit psychological safety. They must also exercise an even more challenging skill: recognizing and naming how they themselves hold power. They cannot mitigate their potential harmful impacts when they are unaware of their power, no matter how generous their intentions are. Throughout the book, I describe several scenarios and always identify the dynamics of power, including the identities of the different parties as well as their titles, tenure, or roles. I don’t always spell out why these factors are important, but I invite the reader to consider them as factors that influence how people operate and engage.
2. Many leaders derail because of the “bullshit.”
Many leaders derail not because they lack skills and abilities, but because of the bullshit. I define the bullshit as a combination of behaviors, assumptions, narratives, and responses that lead to breakdowns in communication and connection. It distorts how we see ourselves, interpret situations, and how we respond to others.
The BS that I specifically name in the book are:
- Ego
- Defensiveness
- Misuse of power
- Scarcity mindset and catastrophizing
- Perfectionism
- People-pleasing
- False sense of duty
- One foot in
- And sense of false urgency
The BS drives narratives that distort how we interpret situations. A leader operating from defensiveness may hear feedback as criticism. A leader driven by scarcity may hoard opportunities instead of developing others. A leader caught in false urgency may push themselves and their teams toward exhaustion and unwarranted hypervigilance.
Before we can even begin identifying our values, we have to start looking for the BS—the stories, roles, and noise we’ve inherited and adopted. Without seeing the BS, we will misidentify our values and anchor ourselves in old behaviors and narratives that no longer serve us. Transformative leadership is learning to identify the forces within ourselves that shape how we lead. This requires reflection, naming, and owning some uncomfortable stuff. The work of identifying and naming BS requires self-awareness and emotional agility skills that many of us may not have, but all of us can develop.
3. Anchored—Know your values before the pressure hits.
Often, the test of leadership happens in moments of pressure, when expectations collide, stakes are high, and the right decision isn’t obvious. This is when your values provide the greatest clarity and deliver the highest value. Being anchored means identifying the values that ground you before those moments arise and maintaining fidelity to them. Without that clarity, it becomes easy to drift into external agendas, what others expect, what the system rewards, or what feels less risky and more comfortable in the moment.
I’ll give you an example. One of my values is loyalty, and the way that shows up is I expect people to tell me the truth, no matter how hard or uncomfortable it is, and I want them to always expect that I’m going to tell them the truth, too. For me, even when it becomes extremely hard to tell someone I care about something that is hard and uncomfortable and may even result in tears from them, I brace myself to do it. As much as I want to avoid the hurt they may experience, in that very moment when I want to cave, I know my values well enough to power through and share the hard truth with them, with as much care and generosity as possible.
“Being anchored means identifying the values that ground you before those moments arise and maintaining fidelity to them.”
Many people have done some sort of values exercise almost as a throwaway action, and without pulling back the layers of what these values tell us about who we are and who we do not want to be. If attended to with intentionality and with awareness of BS, our values are powerful for increasing our impact, being fulfilled, and creating space for rest and spaciousness. Our values will identify our boundaries for ourselves and for others, increase our efficiency by allowing us to make quicker, more accurate, and better-aligned decisions, and inform how we can be inspired or demoralized.
4. Aligned—Your leadership is measured by impact, not intention.
Being aligned means examining whether our actions actually reflect the values we claim to hold. It requires moving beyond good intentions and asking harder questions about our behavior and its consequences. Alignment requires leaders to examine how their actions affect others rather than perpetually existing in our own optimism bubble and presuming that our intentions always win the day.
For example, a leader who is anchored by the value of compassion, yet often hears feedback from their team that they are terse and harsh, must ask the question: “Where is the disconnect between my intention of being compassionate with my team’s experience of me being terse and harsh?”
“Alignment demands humility.”
As you can see, alignment demands humility. It requires us to accept that the story we tell ourselves about our actions may not match how others experience them. When we close that gap—when our values, decisions, and impact reinforce each other—we begin to lead with integrity rather than performance.
5. Accountable—Growth and connection happen when we stay present with our mistakes.
To be accountable, we can’t withdraw, avoid, or cave. We have to proactively invite and seek critical feedback. We have to create an enabling environment where people can be courageous and vulnerable. This means we must show up as self-regulated, curious, and appreciative.
We must also continue to sit in the seat of the observer to determine whether our impact aligns with our values and intentions. We cannot sit and presume that all is well because no one has said anything to the contrary. Our growth happens in the moments when we stay critically curious about our impact and remain open to owning it, no matter how challenging that might be.
This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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