Leadership principles

Objective

Through principles, you as leader set a moral compass for your organisation and your colleagues – you chart your and your team’s course by a guiding set of ethics that inform the way you relate to colleagues, partners and customers. These principles inform everything – from the organisation’s strategy to your basic day-to-day interactions with colleagues.

The guiding philosophy here is that an organisation that is clearly and deeply rooted in a binding set of values will attract the best staff and best partners – and in the end forge superior relationships with customers.

Principles are key to growing market share. Either directly – or through your brand – they express who and what you are.

Context

Any leader is a role model – this comes with the turf. Rather like a parent bringing up a child, sustained leadership actions are progressively embedded in a team or organisation. This rarely occurs immediately and is usually progressive and extended over a long period of time. But however subtle it may be, the cultural impact of leadership action is huge, because it is leaders who set out the standards of acceptable behaviour. The circumstances in many banks in the so-called ‘credit crunch’ gave a perfect example – boards of directors leading through the example that significantly lowering risk thresholds is an acceptable (and indeed required) business behaviour.

Challenge

A likely response to charting a course based on principles is that, in the rough and tumble of running teams and organisations, sheer force of circumstance demands a more pragmatic approach. I would disagree – the leader’s greatest single asset is integrity, which comes from being seen both to have and to exercise principles. You undermine it at your peril. Once devalued, once traded for easy options, it is a currency hard to restore; and if you are seen to be lacking integrity, you lose authority and credibility – and your team starts to follow through lip service and the demands of hierarchy, rather than through motivation.

Success

• Honesty – leaders tell people how they see things without spin or distortion. This can be painful for all in the short term, as perhaps you deliver messages that are less than wholly positive or are different from prevailing expectations. The benefit is that over time your judgement is trusted as a fair reflection of circumstances. This will in turn encourage others to appreciate the value of your straightforwardness. By contrast, a culture in which people say what they think others want to hear sows the seeds of its own failure.
• Respect – you are seen at all times to respect others for who they are and what they say. You display an open-mindedness which aims to get the best from others by always assuming that everyone has a positive contribution to make irrespective of their role, background or character. The benefit you gain is to enable colleagues to flourish because they realise they matter.
• Fairness – you are seen to make decisions based on evidence and not on prejudice or assumption. You take all issues as they come without applying set or predetermined solutions, and are prepared to change your mind when evidence suggests you should. By demonstrating that challenges are evaluated on a fair basis, you will encourage colleagues to be open about problems and to have the confidence that these will be discussed in a constructive manner.
• Clarity – you say what you mean and mean what you say. You ensure that everyone in your team is clear about your vision, strategy, goals, issues and actions; and that where there is ambiguity, this is because you are dealing with the ambiguous and are not using it as a means of avoiding decision-making or tough choices.
• Openness – along with being clear, you are sure (within any constraints you feel may reasonably apply) to tell your team the full picture as you see it. You want to avoid making colleagues feel that agendas are running from which they are excluded. Such openness on your part will be returned by a matching openness – creating a mutual trust that is the bedrock of teamwork.
• Collegiality – the effective leader doesn’t sit in an ivory tower dispensing instructions and making decisions at a distance. You not only involve others in key decision-making, but also your whole team, where this is feasible within a framework of sensible time management. This will further engender mutual respect and help to avoid different parts of a team developing silo mentalities.
• Decisiveness – involving others in decision-making is not avoiding decision-making. To the contrary, it should facilitate it and it is vital that your team sees the benefit of decisiveness – not decisions made for their own sake (though sometimes any decision is better than none!) but in order to confront issues, analyse, decide and act.
• Humility – leaders don’t have all the answers, they facilitate finding them. You make your team feel that they are all equally valuable, and that your leadership role is not about superior knowledge but superior facilitation. You remember to praise where praise is due, and never to take the credit for others’ ideas or successes.
• Diversity – you see the value of variety in your team and don’t recruit in your own image or against stereotypes. You work with your HR team to understand the competencies demanded by your team’s business environment – and also the mix of styles and experience that will give your team a competitive edge.
• Bravery – perhaps the most important quality of all. You are sure, throughout your leadership tenure, that your team knows you are fully prepared to make decisions that court unpopularity or carry a substantial commercial risk. Such difficult decisions will seem all the more credible if made in the context of the other principles already discussed. They will inspire your team with the confidence that comes from doing the right things.

Pitfalls

Principles require determination, modesty and resilience, all of which are easily sacrificed.

• Determination – principles will always be challenged, especially by those colleagues susceptible to easy ways out and ‘quick wins’. Don’t give in when you believe in what you stand for.
• Modesty – principles are not to be trumpeted. Effective leaders do not stand up and tell their colleagues that their actions are based on principles – their actions speak for themselves, and their integrity is clear from their deeds and not their words.
• Resilience – leaders can sometimes feel very isolated because through their actions they are under constant observation. This isolation can sometimes make the commitment to principles a stressful burden. So don’t allow isolation to creep in – cultivate a network of peers you can consult and from whom you can draw support.

The moral for leaders is clear – don’t give in to pressures to bend on principles.

Leaders’ checklist

• Be aware – as I observe elsewhere – that, like it or not, your colleagues and peers watch your every move, especially the actions and words through which you set the tone of the business. You are the moral compass – you have to know that as you lead, so others follow.
• Know what your bottom lines are – know where and on what you would not compromise.
• Remember not to parade principles but to lead by example.
• Aim to have colleagues or, if possible, a mentor you can sound out on issues that are troubling you.
• Learn to recognise the stress signs where your principles are under threat and when you are struggling to resolve the conflict.