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 but set the emotional climate for an entire organization. Their optimism, resilience, and authenticity spread through a company, and so does their stress.

Laurie Sewell, President of the Board of Directors for ISSA, the Association for Cleaning and Facility Solutions, moderated the panel, “The Sunshine Effect: How Radiant Leadership Transforms Culture, Retention, and Enterprise Value,” which included Kim Althoff, Executive Director of ISSA; Jill Davie, industry advisor at WorkWave; and Michelle Audas, CEO of Swept Janitorial Software.

“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 opened with a deliberately humbling query: Describe a moment when you led badly and what it taught you.

Althoff shared that 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 offered a story about a senior leader she hired into her executive 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 said 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 to the CEO rather than fighting for the worker. The employee quit. Davie said she would never forget the look on the employee’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.

Leading through the hardest seasons

Sewell next asked the panelists 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 echoed that the heart of leadership 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, she said.

Audas, who has led technology organizations for 15 years, pointed to a different kind of hard season: an acquisition and pandemic-era employee cuts. Those decisions can break trust, she said, and they demand equal care for the people leaving and the people staying. She added leaders must take care of themselves, too, because hard decisions take a toll and a leader must be in a good state of mind to make them with humanity.

For Sewell’s company, the test was the COVID-19 pandemic. 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 admitted she winces at the phrase self-care, joking that her version runs more toward chocolate than the spa. The panel quickly reframed the idea as self-awareness and resourcing.

Audas said 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 must 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, so although she walks into a meeting feeling drained, she usually walks out rejuvenated.

Sewell built 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, through reading and quiet moments. Knowledge of what recharges her and recognition of her own breaking point warns her when to step back before her filter wears thin.

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, the example 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 described a “culture code” created at WorkWave. 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, and the team hit them, he didn’t back down on his promise. The investment in culture, she said, paid off in results.

Audas pointed 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. The coaching turned out to be a worthwhile investment that Audas said she would make every time.

Reading the best and worst days

Asked what culture looks like on the worst day of the year and the best, the panel kept 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 described 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 added 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 offered 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 pointed 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 offered 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.

Don’t miss the next ISSA Altus Summit.

The newest federal holiday, Juneteenth National Independence Day on June 19, celebrates the end of slavery in the U.S. At least 33 states and the District of Columbia will mark Juneteenth with a paid day off for most state government workers this year, according to the Pew Research Center.

In most of these states (30 plus D.C.), Juneteenth is a permanent holiday by law and commemorated annually, according to records compiled by the Congressional Research Service. In three other states, Juneteenth is not a permanent legal holiday but will still be a paid day off for most state workers. It could become a permanent holiday in these states if their legislators pass a bill to make it so.

Most states that have made Juneteenth a permanent legal holiday did so in 2020 or later. Texas is the exception, where the holiday originated and is also known as Emancipation Day. Juneteenth has been celebrated locally in Texas since the 1860s and became a permanent holiday there in 1980.

All 50 states officially recognize Juneteenth as either a legal holiday or an observance—that is, a day of public awareness that isn’t accompanied by a paid day off.

Juneteenth is one of 11 annual federal holidays, on which federal workers get a paid day off, and there’s no mail delivery. As a result, most federal offices are closed on these holidays.