Defining your principles
In this five part mini series we’re going to take a look at how you can become an inclusive leader. We’re going to go deeper into each of the topics covered in my talk at Product Tank London. Each article in this mini series will contain self coaching exercises that you can use to understand and develop your own style of leadership.
What topics are we covering in this mini series?
Becoming an inclusive leader
Understanding your values
Beliefs and cognitive biases
Defining your principles (this article)
Privilege and power
If you would like to watch my talk that was the inspiration for this mini series, it’s available now on YouTube.
Introduction
In this fourth article in the mini series, we’re going to dive into defining your principles.
This article contains the following sections:
What are principles?
Navigating ethical challenges using principles
Real world example: Stripe’s Operating Principles for Leaders
Self coaching exercise: defining your principles
By the end of this article you will understand what principles are, how they can guide you through ethical dilemmas, and have defined what your own principles are.
“Principles are like lighthouses. They govern human growth and happiness.” - Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
Let’s dive in!
What are principles?
Principles are fundamental truths that guide behaviour, decision making, and how you make sense of things. When considered together, they provide a framework for making moral, ethical and logical choices. Good principles are universally applicable and stand the test of time. Principles can also be defined for different entities: you, your team, your company, your strategy. They come into their own where you need consistency across people, time and space.
Defining your personal principles is a key activity for inclusive leaders. They work with your values and beliefs to shape how you perform as a leader: your values are what you hold as most important in life, whilst your principles are your values in action. To illustrate this, we can take the value of ‘truth’ and operationalise it as the principle of ‘honesty is the best policy’.
Once you have identified your principles they become mantras that you live by. A classic example of a principle is ‘live in the moment’. You can use this as a reminder to be mindful and present in everything you do - from listening to a team member sharing an issue, to seizing a career-enhancing opportunity, to choosing what to do on holiday.
Navigating ethical challenges using principles
As a leader you may be faced with ethical dilemmas - complex situations where there are conflicting moral principles at play, making it challenging to make a morally acceptable decision. This is where an understanding of your personal principles can help, especially if you understand the nuance of the principle.
To give an example, we can look at a tech company that is in financial difficulty and needs to eliminate positions. The CEO values transparency and open communication, so the question is how much information do you share with the team? On the one hand the CEO wants to be honest and keep employees informed about the company's situation. On the other hand, premature disclosure of this sensitive information could create fear and uncertainty among employees, affecting morale and productivity.
Where ‘truth’ is the value, and ‘honesty is the best policy’ is the principle - how can you apply these to this situation?
You may consider the following as part of your approach:
Creating a careful communications strategy, to talk about the general challenges the company faces, without revealing specifics until decisions are finalised
Regular updates about overall progress without disclosing confidential financial data
Foster an environment where your team can talk to you about their concerns, and be open about what you can and cannot share
Consultation with legal and HR experts to navigate complex employment laws
This is a non-exhaustive list, and there are other approaches you may choose depending on how you interpret and apply the principle.
In practice, you may feel something is right, and it’s important to listen to your gut instinct. If an action is taken that feels wrong, it’s usually because it’s against one of your principles: recognise when this happens and explore what that is telling you.
Real world example: Stripe’s Operating Principles for Leaders
Let’s look now at an example of how a company could articulate its principles. In Scaling People, Claire Hughes Johnson, former COO of Stripe, shares the company’s operating principles for leaders. They are:
Obsess over talent
Elevate ambitions
Set the pace and energy
Make decisions; be accountable
Lead with clarity and context
Solve problems
Taken together, they paint a picture of the behaviours and qualities that great leaders at Stripe are expected to meet.
Let’s look closer at one of these principles: Lead with clarity and context. From this we can see that Stripe values clarity and meaning. If we dive into the definition they provide alongside this we can understand how they expect to see this principle play out in practice:
Translate chaos into a clear, compelling plan. Be deeply informed about what’s happening across Stripe and create your team’s plans in reference to the broader work.
These standards could be considered subjective - after all, who is measuring what constitutes ‘clear’ and ‘compelling’? - but good leaders would be in the practice of asking reflective questions to challenge themselves on these points:
Is this plan clear and compelling?
Am I deeply informed about what’s happening?
How do my team’s plans link back to the broader work?
In asking these questions, good leaders will be seeking out feedback from teams, peers and their own manager on how they’re doing against these standards. If a team member comes to them and says ‘I really don’t understand the product strategy and my role in it’, the leader knows they have not met their own standards for clear and compelling, and there is more work to do.
Self coaching exercise: defining your principles
I recommend completing this self coaching exercise when you have 30-60 minutes to yourself, free from distractions. Grab a notebook and a pen, and your drink of choice, and spend some time journalling your answers to these prompts:
What are your values?
What existing principles or maxims are important to you?
How do you want your behaviour to be judged by others?
What standards do you uphold for yours and others’ behaviour?
How have you made decisions in the past?
When you have had a difficult decision to make, what criteria took precedence over others?
Who do you admire? (prompt: can be someone you know in real life, or a famous person)
What is it that you admire about this person / these people?
When you have this list, you have the starting point for defining your principles. Next, you can identify the patterns emerging from your answers. Challenge yourself to write out your principles in simple sentences using positive language. I recommend no more than 3 to 7 principles in total.
Next, you can try test these out for a week. As decisions arise in every day life, see how your principles come into action. Are they relevant? Do they help or hinder decision making? Adapt your principles until you feel they ‘fit’ you.
A further exercise can be testing these out against various ethical dilemmas. How do your principles guide you to a decision in these challenging scenarios?
Wrap up
And that draws our exploration of principles to a close. At this stage in the mini series you have an understanding of your values, beliefs, cognitive biases and principles. You are gaining an appreciation for how these shape you as a leader, but also how these can be different for others based on their lived experience. In next week’s Substack we will cover a very important but often challenging topic that we have been building towards: privilege and power. If you have missed any of the articles in the series so far I strongly recommend you jump back and work through them before we move on. Otherwise, I shall see you next week!
