Truly great leaders create an environment where the employees feel that the CEO cares more about the employees than she cares about herself. In this … - Ben Horowitz

Minimizing politics often feels totally unnatural. It’s counter to excellent management practices such as being open-minded and encouraging employee development.

A good culture is like the old RIP routing protocol: Bad news travels fast; good news travels slow. If you investigate companies that have failed, you will find that many employees knew about the fatal issues long before those issues killed the company. If the employees knew about the deadly problems, why didn’t they say something? Too often the answer is that the company culture discouraged the spread of bad news, so the knowledge lay dormant until it was too late to act. A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them. A company that covers up its problems frustrates everyone involved. The resulting action item for CEOs: Build a culture that rewards — not punishes — people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved.

It helps to have founded and run a company if you're going to help somebody run a company who is a founder.