It's corporate mythos. Something that worked for someone long long ago was so successful that it became the corporate form of a folk song.

When we down near the bottom hear "lead by example", it's facile to find the nearly useless obvious veneer to it, but if we could attach the original odyssey that led that engineer to tell their story ... we might agree with the lesson. But retellings upon retellings compress, simplify and gloss the original story into a cliche.

Each thing in this list sounds obvious, but if one can picture the opposite of the advice to be false, that reflection might actually lead an individual to growth.