Loyalty in business isn’t just top-down. Learn how reciprocal loyalty builds trust in business leadership—even during difficult decisions.

Loyalty is a virtue, and loyalty has a long history.

From medieval kings to modern politicians, everybody expects loyalty from their subjects or subordinates.

Parents are expected to be loyal to their kids even when their kids are doing stupid things at school.

In business, employees are expected to be loyal to their companies and represent the company’s interests.

Let’s take a closer look at loyalty in a business setting.

Top-Down Loyalty

This is the standard view of loyalty: The company’s leadership makes a decision, and the team is expected to represent that decision. Even if it means telling a customer that he won’t get what he wants or that prices will go up.

The same is true for internal decisions: Team A will lead the new app project, not Team B. We will phase out Slack and migrate to Microsoft Teams, even though everyone loved Slack. We’re going with Architecture A instead of Architecture B for the new SDK. We have to save money, so everybody has to contribute to the cost savings.

On all these decisions, leaders expect employees to be loyal. Leaders expect them to spend their time implementing those decisions rather than gossiping about the decisions.

Bottom-Up Loyalty

But have you ever thought about loyalty from the other perspective? At Yonder, the B2B SaaS company I co-founded, we have a long history of being loyal to our employees. That doesn’t mean that we never fired an employee, or that we accept any behavior. I even had to fire a co-founder.

Let’s look into an example.

Recently, we had to make a change in leadership. We felt it would be better for the company if a long-serving team member of the affected team would take over the leadership role.

As a first step, I spoke to the outgoing team leader and asked for a plan to remedy certain leadership deficiencies. Being loyal to the team leader, I didn’t mention yet that I intended to make a change in leadership. I wanted to give the team leader a fair opportunity to tell me how to correct the deficiencies.

The team leader decided to talk about the deficiencies I mentioned with a team member — and not surprisingly, the one team member that we had envisaged to become the new team leader.

That wasn’t how I had intended the conversation. Now I was in a dilemma. On one hand, I wanted to be loyal to my outgoing team leader. On the other hand, I wanted to be loyal to the team member who would become the new team leader but didn’t know yet.

I decided to speak to the team member who would become the new team leader and disclosed my plans. Then, I spoke to the outgoing team leader to make sure that all three of us had the same level of information.

The conversations followed a different sequence than I’d originally intended. But nevertheless, I could credibly demonstrate my loyalty to both persons.

Conclusion

When you demand loyalty from your team, the least you can do is give back loyalty to the team. That’s easy to do when everything runs smoothly, but much less so when you have to make difficult decisions.