My Leadership Clear Contract

One of my resolutions for this year is to keep improving my leadership and management practices. And the first thing I am going to set is my clear contract. If you are not familiar with the term, check the article from the great Fred de Villamil: Defining your Leadership Style.

In short, it is a written statement that you share with your coworkers that lists:

• Things you will do,

• Things you won’t do,

• Things that you expect your coworkers to do with you,

• Things that your coworkers should not do with you.

Fred's article in a few lines (summary added in 2026, in case the link moves again): Fred learned the clear contract from Pierre Landy, a lawyer who later became General Counsel at Ledger. He used it in 2018 when he joined Ledger to lead a team whose long-standing habits had to change quickly: the first contact mattered, so he explained how he would work with them while learning how they worked. Writing it down, he says, makes you step back and see the difference between the leader you believe you are and the leader you are. He published his own contract and ends with an invitation: write yours, ask your team to do the same, and see how it matches reality. (Archived copy)

Following the example from Fred, I will be transparent and share my clear contract with you.

I will

• Commit some of my time weekly to be available for you.

• Ask for your feedback to improve myself.

• Enjoy sharing a meal or coffee with you from time to time (if possible).

• Share my knowledge, experience, and advice, but up to you to take it.

• Try new things, change process/workflow, and ask you to participate.

• Promote your achievements.

I won't

• Have useless meetings with you.

• Tolerate violence / unprofessional behaviour / racism / management by fear.

• Overload you with work.

• Take myself too seriously.

Do

• Talk in public channels and collaborate with your teammates as much as you can.

• Come to me, in preference on Slack, when things are specific, confidential, or personal.

• Discuss your problems with me after you give it at least a try and a Google search.

• Acknowledge you received my messages whenever you cannot reply to me right away and give a reasonable estimation on when you will be able to reply.

• Raise issues or things that seem weird to you.

• Bear with me, when I can be overloaded and slow sometimes.

• Poke or remind me when you need things urgent from me.

Don't

• Assume anything.

• Wait for work whenever you cleared your tasks.

• Be afraid of me.

• Overpromise if you cannot estimate a task.

• Forget to double-check your code before asking me to review it.

• Expect me to always choose your side in conflicts, I try to be impartial, and I want to get things moving.

• Take my feedback personally. Your work is not your person. It is normal to have bugs and miss things.

I invite you to try this exercise also. Let's all try to improve our leadership and communication in general!

2026 update

Others call this kind of document a manager README or a user manual. The clear contract goes both ways: it lists what I will and won't do, but also what I expect from the people I work with, and it invites them to write their own.

I shared this article with a few people. I haven't started using it at EXP. yet, but I think I will.