My Leadership Principles

I have recently experienced positive career events that led to several transitions in a short amount of time. Change is hard even if it is positive. Through it all, I evaluated all my decisions with outside counsel and a deliberate return to my touchstone of personal ideas. One fresh, new thought that came to me is the idea of sharing. Until these career events transpired, I thought I was an avid sharer and a keen learner from such sharing. However, when I see others who share ideas openly to the world, I feel puny in comparison. I felt a solid urge to expand my circle of listeners and advisors and to include those whom I have never met. Today, I want to share a few people-facing leadership principles that helped me through these positive career events. I would love to hear how you navigate people-facing leadership. By being open, by sharing, I want to improve my own thoughts on this topic.

1. Servant Leadership

Help others succeed so they may help you succeed.

I have found that serving other people’s needs makes them successful and leaves lasting positive memory of the experience. The key is to truly serve and avoid the temptations to take early credit for other people’s success. One having served others, one does deserve credit in due time, but true service is to let others succeed and bask in the glory that is theirs for that moment. In a recent engagement, I have had several interactions where my peers and my superiors were confused about who has the leadership of a certain long-term problem that we were trying to solve. I was not a favored leader and, in some cases, not even a favored contributor. I persevered and assisted other people to succeed. All of them succeeded and finally shared credit with me. In this way, I was able to emerge as a leader instead of asking to own and direct a bunch of people who already did not favor me. This is just one experience of several. There are books and essays written on this topic and by no means is this one experience a distillation of those great works.

2. Build guardrails and let go

Define the boundaries, define the expected outcomes, and then let people do and learn.

Humans grow up in a social structure made of boundaries and finish lines. Why should it be any different at work? As a leader, I like to think deeply about failure metrics and how to discourage people from getting there. I have found that the best way to present these metrics to people is in terms of guardrails. When one hits a guardrail, it hurts a little and one forms a long-term memory of it and develops a method to avoid it. When one is not hitting the guardrail, one should feel free to go fast. I once worked with a team member who performed well and had great relationships all around. Their only problem was that even their best ideas and solutions were only being replaced with others very fast. This was causing them to spend time and money on cycling through products in their portfolio. I worked with them to develop a two-way communication plan to go along with their business proposals. This allowed them to build thresholds on partner acceptability and pivot sooner when it was lacking.

3. Insist on high standards

Co-develop a vision of best outcomes, set extremely high standards. Do not budge downwards, always move upwards.

There are few people who actively accept that they have low standards, but very many of them know privately that they can always improve. Find that nerve, find that button on them and press it. Work with their baselines of status and ask them what could be better. Build an idea, a vision of an improved future that is acceptable to all. Then, relentlessly repeat. This is awfully hard to do in large groups. I recently worked with a group of peers who were about to build a new product that would follow the same process as several other products and teams use. Many of us feared that using the same process as others, we would end up having the same flaws or simply underachieve on our goals. I worked with this group to instead, take a step back and write our “constitution” or “founding principles” for this new product. When I look back on those, I see that those are quite simple truths – but it was important to state them and adopt them as our standard. When making commitments at such a time, most people aim high and eventually are energized to achieve those lofty goals.

4. Mentor and guide, but don’t micro-manage

When others are in doubt, guide them on what could be the decision framework for them, but don’t tell them exactly what to do.

In other words, teach them to fish, don’t hold their fishing rod. Most people want to achieve great results and many are willing to learn how to do it. These people need an example to follow, a leader to look up to and emulate. A good leader must be able to mentor and guide as the North Star did for humans before cartography. In relation to your current position, the North Star, and other stars around it provided a framework for navigators to navigate. Similarly, a good leader should make their positions known to others and should provide a decision-making framework so that followers can always do the right thing. This is of even greater importance when there are ambiguous good decision options and no clear winner. I find that this particular principle presents itself several times and very frequently at the smallest of opportunities. I feel that more people than not, have an emotional and professional need to have a method and a guide in their life and career.

5. Decision Frameworks

Build tools, manuals and automation that help everyone make same or similar decisions when one is needed.

It is tiring to take decisions and eventually, the quality of decisions diminishes with the number and enormity of decisions. A leader must find ways to take this burden out of their team’s heads and minds. A leader must commission extremely simple tools that visualize, evaluate decisions and possibly even predict outcomes so that people don’t have to. Leaders should invest time and money to build high quality manuals or just build a high-quality communications infrastructure that allows people to inform their decisions and work in lockstep with partners and customers. I have had the opportunity do exactly this recently where I helped build a wiki site and promote the use of writing style guides (Chicago Manual of Style). Using a style guide to communicate marketing material was very orthogonal to this team, they were used to relying on a dedicated communications team to do such things. However, the outcome of creating this wiki was that customers and partners started making decisions much faster and with better results. Unwittingly, writing a clear wiki proved to be a great decision-making framework.

6. Bias for Action

Make decisions, do the work. Then, evaluate and rectify for the next time.

Most of you know the term “Analyses Paralysis”. Bias for action is the opposite of that. Analyze less, do more, evaluate objectively and rectify often – this is bias for action. Bias for action promotes fast movement; somewhat akin to “Move Fast and Break Things”. A leader must show that they are willing to trust whatever little analysis is possible at the given moment and take risks. They should promote faster, smaller actions that may result in smaller wins and smaller losses. The key is to learn from the losses and make long term improvements to win more often. Bias for action also demands boldness on the leader’s part. At first, ambiguity breeds the desire to clarify, to analyze and interpret, but, leaders should embrace ambiguity and teach others to deal with ambiguity through a bias for action.

7. Learn Constantly

Make learning a pre-requisite at work. Evaluate the impact of learning by measuring the “impact of doing after learning” as opposed to the “impact of doing without learning”.

Here, learning is immersion into academia, into peer to peer learning and expert services around education. The best example that comes to my mind is a vicarious one. When Reed Hastings was expanding Netflix outside of the US for the first time, he leaned on Erin Meyer – a Professor at INSEAD – to learn how to manage business outcomes when working across international boundaries. That collaboration resulted in a book called “No Rules Rules”. Reed Hastings’ Netflix was (and is) based on an incredibly open culture where salaries, bonuses are open for all to see, there is no vacation approval, no expense approvals (anyone can spend anything they feel the need for). This radical openness would not necessarily work in a country like Brazil or India. To decide how to expand away from home and at the same time preserve the Netflix culture, Reed Hastings leaned into academia. I personally spend a few hours every week learning new things even if not all are related to my career. A learning mindset is a curious mindset; a curious mindset is the one that will eventually find what they want and that is the essence of all success.

What are your leadership principles? How do you deal with teamwork? What is hard? What is easy for you?